The Truth Behind Gang Violence
The final episode of “Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa” w/Matt Thornton
Young men are overwhelmingly responsible for gun violence in the United States. The perpetrators and victims are disproportionately black. In Episode 7 of “Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa,” Matt Thornton discusses one well-documented risk factor for violence that has recently become too controversial to discuss.
Matt Thornton has taught functional martial arts for more than 30 years. He holds a 5th-degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and is the founder of Straight Blast Gym International, training champion MMA fighters and world-class law enforcement instructors. His latest book is The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World.
You need to have (and it needs to begin with) public safety. The sidewalks need to be safe to walk down. The store needs to be safe to go to. People need to understand that they're not going to be shot when they're at the red light. Their kid’s not going to be killed in the baby seat while they're driving through an intersection. So until you get that under control, nothing else is going to happen.
So again, the average black American between the ages of 12 to 24 is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a white American. Ninety percent of these shootings are done by the same demographic: young, 15 to 24-year-old primarily African-American fatherless children killing other young African-American fatherless children over issues related to status. Understand that that’s what’s going on.
People who say pointing that out is just a racist act…to me that's not even a logical statement because you're pointing out a fact. If there's true racism within the system, then we need to identify it. Let's find out where it is so we can remove it. I'm 100% on board with that goal. Unless someone else has another solution, the only way I know that we can do that is to look at the data and to control for different possible scenarios that would explain that.
The fact of the matter is you can control for education. You can control for household income. You can control for unemployment. You can control for all this and still see large discrepancies in the numbers between different racial groups in the United States as far as crime. The only statistic that I've seen that actually matches, and when you control for it, makes sense as it relates to the violence we're seeing not just in the black community, but everywhere, all over the world, and especially in the United States, is out-of-wedlock birth rates. The moment you start controlling for that, then you're going to start to see those numbers correlate with the areas where all the violence is occurring.
In the black community, out-of-wedlock birth rate is over 70%. When we get into the neighborhoods in Chicago and Baltimore, it's closer to 95%. These are young black women having young kids. Those kids grow to the dangerous age of 12 to 19 where we all like to get in trouble. There's no male mentors or fathers around. They form gangs and they shoot each other over petty disputes related to status.
This isn't happening because of hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. This is happening because somebody stepped on somebody else's shoe, or something like that, and the next thing you know there's going to be a drive-by shooting.
The only thing that's going to stop that short-term is putting more police in those neighborhoods to save lives. That's the only thing that's going to stop that.
Long-term, we have to be thinking about how we can disincentivize young people from having kids when they're not married, when they're still in high school. When they're 12 to 18. That's the problem that needs to be addressed. It's also something that nobody wants to talk about in the United States. There's a lot of lying, and a lot of obfuscation around it, but the numbers are very clear. Again, I encourage everybody to go and take a look at it themselves.
When you talk about the reasons why the out-of-wedlock birth rate is so much higher, that's something I think we as a society and people much smarter than me need to sit down and really assess and try and figure out what led to that. But what I can tell you is it wasn't always that way. The out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community was actually almost the same and in some cases a little bit higher than white Americans up until about 1963. Something happened around 1963 where they started to diverge. The out-of-wedlock birth rate rose across the board in the white community, but especially in the black community. If you go back prior to 1963, you don't see these kind of numbers and you also don't see this kind of violence and this kind of crime. Once we go past 1963, that's when it skyrockets.
What happened in 1963 that explains this? I'm sure it's a complicated problem. It's probably going to admit to more than one answer, but it is something that we need to look at. And one of the things I think we need to look at is whatever economic incentives, that might have been well-intentioned, were put in place which caused this problem to happen. If we don't look at that and we repeat that same mistake once again, there's going to be a lot more violence and a lot more innocent victims shot and dead.
This is the final episode of “Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa” with Matt Thornton. Watch previous episodes here:
Episode 2: Why don’t police “shoot them in the leg”?
Episode 3: Disparities in Outcomes: Proof of Racism?
Episode 4: Can Words Be Violence?
Excellent discussion - finally the main questions are addressed in a direct, sincere, and approachable manner. Thanks!
well, the most common reason I’ve heard is the Welfare state. once mothers were incentivized not to have a father in the house, the results were predictable.
I’ve never done any in-depth research, and I feel bad just typing this, but what is a better answer, respectively..?