Ilya Somin: Political Violence is Rare, and the Right Perpetrates it More

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   A lot of the stuff out there is by leftist organization (SPLC, ADL), and they cheat hard--e.g. by counting prison violence by white supremacist (actual white supremacist) groups against the right, but they don't count e.g. the BLM riots against the left.

   But, even if all that's corrected for, it still seems that the right perpetrates more killings--a lot more. (I'm still not convinced that it commits more violence...especially given the activity of Antifa over the past five years; but that's just a hunch, pretty likely to be wrong. And I'd be easy to convince on this point.)

  But anyway, as I've said before, this actually doesn't surprise me all that much, even if true. The right has a lot of gun nuts and "militias" just looking for an excuse to cut loose. And when they do, they tend to kill a lot of people. The extremist left seems to me to do more harm to the country--over the past decade, anyway--but by taking over institutions. But that's a different matter.

   Anyway, this is exactly the kind of issue that brings out tribal allegiances. Righties want the left to be (or at least to have been...) more violent: lefties want the opposite. The question's more difficult to answer than it initially might seem to be--but it is answerable. And this is just (or mostly at least) an empirical matter. So the facts have to be allowed to have their say, and to decide the matter.