“What the findings essentially tell you is that the people who are most at risk of becoming a victim are sort of surrounded by victims within a few handshakes,” Papachristos says. “These are young men who are actively engaged in the behaviors that got them in this network.“…

The network in question consists of more than 3,700 high-risk individuals – young, African-American males from a poor neighborhood – who were clustered into a network by instances of co-offending, meaning each person in the group had been arrested with another person.

Overall, the community’s five-year homicide rate was 39.7 per 100,000 people, which was still much higher than the averages of other areas of Chicago (14.7 per 100,000). But being a part of that network of co-offenders, essentially just being arrested, raised the rate to by nearly 50 percent, to 55.2 per 100,000. What’s more, being in a network with a homicide victim increased the homicide rate by 900 percent, to 554.1 per 100,000……. “It’s the behavior of sharing needles that puts you at risk for contracting HIV, not simply being poor and black and living in a certain neighborhood,” Papachristos says. “The same is true with violence. It’s who you hang around with that gets you in trouble.”

via Gun Violence Significantly Increased by Social Interactions – US News and World Report.

Hang around Stupid People. Do Stupid Things. Win Stupid Prizes. How many times have we heard this? How many times much nicer versions of the above were told to us by our parents? But apparently for some in the Intelligentsia, it was not true until somebody from an “accredited” house of parchment actually made a study.

I am expecting that the Bradys and others would use the study to tell parents to steer kids away from all people with guns because, you know, all those killings happening in the Scholastic Shooting Sports.