Drive-By Shootings: Texas Is Second Only To California

By Craig Malisow Thu., Jul. 22 2010 at 12:21 PM

Categories: Crime

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Better than New York, for sure

For those of you who always get bummed when Texas gets the lowest spots on national rankings for mental health care, children's insurance, and other benchmarks of civilized society, here's a study that puts us at an impressive Number Two: Drive-by shootings.

The gun-control communists at the Washington, D.C.-based Violence Policy Center have just issued a study, "Drive-By America", that shows how prevalent the titular crime was in each state. While California blew the competition away with 148 drive-bys (40 dead; 129 injured), the Lone Star state came in second with a respectable 60 (6 dead; 52 injured). For those of you keeping track, that means California drive-by practitioners killed their targets 27 percent of the time, while Texas thugs had only a ten-percent kill rate.

Thanks to all the weird calculations the study's authors made, it is now possible to understand how to lower your risk of being the victim of a drive-by: Basically, if you ride a bicycle in Wyoming between 7 a.m.-noon during the colder months, in an area that has no street corners, parking lots, bus stops, basketball courts, vacant lots, or fast food restaurants, you will never be the victim of a drive-by. Don't say Hair Balls didn't warn you.

According to the Center's press release, "The study, the most comprehensive analysis of its type, tallied news stories from the 50 states and the District of Columbia from July through December 2008, to identify data and trends associated with drive-by shootings..."

So why do Texas and California rank so high? The study doesn't say. How many of those killed or injured were the intended targets? The study's mum on that as well. What can we learn from this study? Pretty much nothing, the study says.

"Little is known about the scope and prevalence of drive-by shootings," the study's conclusion states. "....The overarching conclusion from this analysis is that additional research on the national level, collecting and analyzing data on drive-by shootings is necessary to identify prevention strategies."

Thank God we have a study to tell us we need another study. In the meantime, if you're planning a drive-by, please let us know, so we can be there to write about it, thus helping to push Texas to the head of the class.

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