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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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No. I found Handwaving Freakoutery's (also known as /u/beej67) analysis very persuasive. TL;DR: the US's high murder rate can't be caused by guns alone, as murder rates by county don't track guns per capita by county and black Americans commit far more murders than white Americans despite owning far fewer guns. It can't be just HBD, because black Americans commit murders at almost double the rate of sub-Saharan African countries. Rather, the true underlying factor is "rate of single motherhood". Reintegrate the black American family unit at scale, and the murder rate will plummet accordingly.

I was talking about this exact topic with my girlfriend the other day, and she was curious as to how it came to pass that black Americans have such a high rate of single motherhood compared to other ethnic groups. I admit I don't have a great answer to this, but I find the "slavery separated mothers from their children" explanations unconvincing and ahistorical, given that high rates of black single motherhood only appear to date back to the sexual revolution and were similar to white rates prior were vastly lower in the 1970s than today (29.5% of black children in 1970 vs. 45.6% in 2022) despite the 1970s being fifty years closer chronologically to slavery than 2022.