Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.
People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
> You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program
This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make anything safer.
Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.
Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss
>Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target
Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.
Here's more stats for perspective:
- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.
- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.
That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one statistic. The point here is not simply that the office is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.
I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't exactly articulate why I think that.
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
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There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.
These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.
Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation.
(Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)
This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.
If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.
>Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions
Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s
Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.
To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.
To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.
To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.
They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.
Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.
It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.
Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.
Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.
The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
Note: “not that dangerous” means you will be confined in extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely. situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd will leave physically unscathed
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
> You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>". Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are suicides both in cities and out of cities.
Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject and the commentaries audience really overlap.
SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.
> These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.
But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].
This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.
But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..
I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.
Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
> I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.
This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.
As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.
Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.
Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a place like that. It is weird to read people trying to downplay it as if it is nothing.
Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another makes about as much sense statistically as being scared because there was a car accident outside the office. Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than violent criminals.
