Linked List: March 27, 2021

Saturday, 27 March 2021

The Racial Breakdown of U.S. Mass Shooters ★

Molly Osberg, writing for Jezebel:

Today Hemal Jhaveri, a USA Today employee with almost eight years at the paper, published a blog on Medium saying she’d recently been fired from her position as the “race and inclusion” editor of For the Win, the publication’s sports vertical, over an offending tweet. In other words: Facing manufactured pressure from a bad-faith right-wing ecosystem hellbent on false equivalencies, USA Today took the bait.

On Monday night, in the immediate aftermath of news of the Boulder, Colorado shooting at a grocery store, Jhaveri wrote in a reply to another reporter that “It’s always an angry white man. always.” The comment was perhaps unwise given the notoriously mercurial nature of breaking news in the early hours of a mass shooting event. But given the overwhelmingly white and male profile of mass shooters it is, in the moment, a sensible assumption.

I followed that second link with interest, because I’d been following the controversy regarding Jhaveri’s firing, and idly wondering about the racial breakdown of U.S. mass shooters. Was it a wrong assumption? It’s a Statista report published just this week:

Between 1982 and March 2021, 66 out of the 121 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 21 mass shootings, and Latino in 10. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent and 8 percent respectively.

Race of Mass Shooters Reflects the U.S. Population

Broadly speaking, the racial distribution of mass shootings mirrors the racial distribution of the U.S. population as a whole. While a superficial comparison of the statistics seems to suggest African American shooters are over-represented and Latino shooters underrepresented, the fact that the shooter’s race is unclear in around five percent of cases, along with the different time frames over which these statistics are calculated means no such conclusions should be drawn. Conversely, looking at the mass shootings in the United States by gender clearly demonstrates that the majority of mass shootings are carried out by men.

Another day, another head-scratcher. I don’t understand how Osberg could link to this report to support the idea that “it’s always a white man” was a “sensible assumption”, when the report concludes, right at the top in a subhead, that the “race of mass shooters reflects the U.S. population”. It’s not buried in a footnote, or something the reader must parse from a table of data — it’s the lede of the report.

By gender, the tally was striking but unsurprising: 116 male, 3 female, 1 “male and female” (a Mickey and Mallory situation, I presume), and 1 “unknown/not released”. So there is a broad generalization one can rush to when our next mass shooting occurs: the perpetrator will almost certainly be a man. But the United States’s shameful decades-long epidemic of mass shootings has been perpetrated by disturbed men who span the racial divide.

(To be clear, other than for something truly egregious, I don’t think anyone should be fired for a bad tweet. I’m a fan of mercy and tolerance, and believe more apologies should be accepted. But one gets the feeling that Jhaveri’s rift with USA Today was longstanding, that her idea of “race and inclusion” is wholly different and incompatible with the publication’s, and that this was just the breaking point.)

Update: A bunch of readers point out that the one “male and female” shooting is probably the 2015 incident in San Bernardino, which became a controversy for Apple when the FBI asked them to create a version of iOS to install on a phone from one of the shooters that would give the FBI access to the contents of the device.

Gurman: Apple Considering Rugged Apple Watch Model for Sports ★

Mark Gurman, with another scoop:

Apple Inc. is considering launching an Apple Watch with a rugged casing aimed at athletes, hikers and others who use the device in more extreme environments, according to people familiar with the matter. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant has internally discussed introducing such a Watch variation later in 2021 or 2022 at the earliest, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. […]

If Apple goes ahead this time, the rugged version would be an additional model similar to how Apple offers a lower-cost option called the Apple Watch SE and special editions co-branded with Nike Inc. and Hermes International. Sometimes dubbed the “Explorer Edition” inside Apple, the product would have the same functionality as a standard Apple Watch but with extra impact-resistance and protection in the vein of Casio’s G-Shock watches.

Apple should definitely do this. It’s kind of surprising they haven’t done it already. This isn’t about something like sapphire vs. ionized glass for the displays. Sapphire (used in the stainless steel and Edition models) is far more scratch resistant than the glass displays used on the aluminum models, but it’s not really more impact resistant.

G-Shocks are incredibly popular watches, and they are meant to take a genuine beating. Remember the original commercial from 1983? That’s the sort of thing this “Explorer” model would be, and I guarantee it would sell like hotcakes. You’ll see them everywhere if Apple ships this. Many people will buy them with no intention to do anything particularly active while wearing them — they’ll just buy the one that looks (and is) rugged because if they’re going to spend hundreds of dollars on a watch they want to be protected. Think about the people you know who don’t just put their phones in cases, but put them in really thick protective cases. This would be the Apple Watch for them.

I would suggest bringing back the “Sport” name — that’s what Apple called the base-model watches in the first generation. In Apple’s original 2015 naming scheme, they called the aluminum base models “Apple Watch Sport”, the more expensive stainless steel models were just plain “Apple Watch”, and the solid gold ones were “Apple Watch High as a Kite”. There was nothing more sporty about those original Sports models though,^* yet the branding led some people to wrongly believe that “ionized glass” was stronger or more suited to activity than sapphire. Bring back the “Apple Watch Sport” brand, I say, and this time make it sporty as hell.

* The aluminum models are noticeably lighter weight than the steel models, which arguably makes them better suited to athletic activity.