Wow. I wonder if the high rates of lead poisoning in Chicago have anything to do with that stat.
Based on those figures, more than 10 percent of young children tested in the city had troublesome lead levels that year — about four times the national average.
Chicago uses ShotSpotter, a system that uses microphones to triangulate gun shots. They claim to be able to differentiate between fireworks and gun fire, but I wonder if the sheer volume of fireworks on the 4th makes it the ideal time for a shooting spree.
I've lived in rural states all my life. Almost all my family and friends have guns. (Hunting is a big hobby.)
I have never known anyone that shot a person. I've never had a relative or friend get shot (except one cousin who unfortunately purposefully shot himself.)
In other words, the number of guns don't cause crime.
Why take away cars from everybody because some people drive drunk? No? Why take away guns from people who use them responsibly?
As far as I'm aware, you can't buy a gun from an FFL (a gun store, or anyone whose business involves selling guns) in a neighboring state without presenting an Illinois Firearms Owner Identification card. And most (all?) gun stores will refuse to sell you a gun that they know would be illegal in Illinois if you live there.
Most of the guns used in crimes in Chicago are illegally owned handguns, acquired through straw purchases and theft. Handguns that are legal to own in Illinois, even.
I'm not sure precisely what you're trying to say here - but my intuition is that you're saying "people will illicitly manufacture guns in Illinois and people will patronize them rather than drive over to another state to purchase guns."
If that is what you're saying (and please, clarify if it's not!) - it's worth knowing that both Wisconsin and Indiana are a 90 minute drive from Chicago city limits, so any illicit manufacturing has to compete with the ease of a relatively short drive to purchase in another state.
I think sometimes people forget just how close Chicago is to other states.
An Illinois resident cannot legally buy a gun in another state without shipping it to a FFL in Illinois and getting a background check done there before taking possession.
So the argument that Chicago residents can skirt gun control laws by crossing state lines is false.
No. "The only reason people aren't manufacturing guns illicitly in Illinois right now is because it's easier to drive to the next state" is a little closer.
I'm convinced Chicago is unfixable. The south side has been so poor for so long it's basically a third world country.
The best solution is a planned dismantlement of the irredeemable parts of the city. And relocate those people somewhere they stand a chance of finding a job.
When rust belt manufacturing died Chicago had no jobs for a million people. And in 60 years the situation hasn't changed much
I enjoy the nickname Chiraq (as in Ch-Iraq). I've had French acquintances perplexed by this term, because there's been a French president called
Jacques Chirac (pronounced the same way).
The rest of the world has no clue what's going on with you guys. Seems like you have no clue either. Canadians (an many other nations) have guns, but no gun problems like the US.
The vast majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada in fact, while having a huge number of guns.
Last year Chicago's so called top cop said the city has over 117,000 gang members that are part of 55 known gangs. That's merely one example, a few dozen other cities are similarly buried in homicides and gangs.
If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).
"After dropping to a low point of 1.44 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013, Canada's homicide rate has been rising again.[6] In 2015 the rate rose to 1.68 per 100,000 people, up from 1.47 the previous year.[7] According to Statistics Canada data from 2016, police reported 611 homicides across Canada in 2016, a rate of 1.68 per 100,000 people.[8] Canada's national homicide rate 2017 was the highest it's been in a decade, Statistics Canada says, because of a spike in gang-related violence and shootings. The agency said there were 660 reported homicides in Canada last year. Not only was that an increase of nearly eight per cent from 2016, it also pushed up the homicide rate to 1.8 victims for every 100,000 people, the highest since 2009"
I'm not excluding. There's no point in attempting to do that here on HN, I seriously doubt anybody here fails to at least vaguely understand the condition of US inner cities: they're war zones.
The point is obvious: highly elevated rates of murder in the US are particularly hyper concentrated to a small number of urban zones, to a very abnormal degree. The high US murder rate isn't a comprehensive problem spanning all national population centers. You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though, they shout you down and or run away from it.
You want proof of that? Normalize the murder rate for cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis, etc. to that of NYC or San Diego or Seattle or Austin TX circa 2019. Watch how the US murder rate dramatically plunges overall.
St Louis had a 65 per 100k murder rate in 2019. Baltimore was 58. Birmingham was 50. Detroit was 41. Those are war zones. Kansas City and Memphis were 29.
A city like eg Pittsburgh also has serious problems, but it's at least down at 12 (still high by any sane standard). If you reduce the high US murder cities down to just that (ridiculous) ceiling, you'd drop the US murder rate by a lot. Again, concentration is the obvious point, and it's very easy to prove. The obvious question is: what's being done to improve those high murder concentration areas? Not much is the answer.
You can also see this concentration fact in action easily by comparing sections of Chicago or Baltimore, to the overall city murder rates, or the overall state murder rates (for IL or MD). It's not subtle, it's an extreme variance, far beyond what you see in eg Amsterdam vs the Netherlands or Toronto vs Ontario or Canada. It's not normal at all.
The way people try to live in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago or Baltimore, is by entirely avoiding the extraordinarily dangerous areas. If it can be avoided people simply never go to those neighborhoods, they don't drive through there. They're de facto war zones, occupied territory owned by gangs, and everybody knows it (including the police).
And this is the point that absolutely nobody at a high political level in the US wants to discuss, even though to fix the US murder problem you have to start talking about it. How to fix the US inner cities, which are in terrifying condition. You only ultimately fix the inner cities in the US through dramatic concentrated economic improvement, and looking back over the past several decades, neither party has done much of anything about it (the results of that are right there staring at us every day).
> I seriously doubt anybody here fails to at least vaguely understand the condition of US inner cities: they're war zones.
> St Louis had a 65 per 100k murder rate in 2019. Baltimore was 58. Birmingham was 50. Detroit was 41. Those are war zones.
> They're de facto war zones
I won't for a moment pretend that there isn't a huge problem to talk about - there is a very big problem - but I don't feel that this kind of hyperbole is helpful. Not only is it inaccurate, it also serves to demonize the people who live in these places and can be used to justify unhelpful policing tactics.
There are no bombings; there are no troops on the street; it is not occupied territory. We can and should discuss problems in our society without falling into this rhetorical trap.
Out of curiosity, what makes you say "You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though, they shout you down and or run away from it"? Has that been your experience among your friends and family, or on certain web platforms?
You write "absolutely nobody at a high political level in the US wants to discuss." But the pinned tweet on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's Twitter account (https://twitter.com/chicagosmayor) lays out resources and tactics targeted toward specific high-need areas of Chicago to make the city safer (and links to the city's violence reduction strategy which goes into an impressive amount of detail: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/public-safety-and-viol...)
A quick Google search convinced me that this fact has been intensely covered in mainstream news sources, all of which focus on the same problematic cities that you mention, and explores the many contributing factors that make these cities hotspots of violent crime.
Just three examples from the first page of Google results for the unquoted query `homicide rate us cities`:
The reality I'm seeing is that lots of people are talking about urban violent crime hotspots, and that at least some local governments and communities are demonstrably working to address it.
> Out of curiosity, what makes you say "You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though
Turn on showdead and read the things that you can't get anybody to talk about.
The content of the dead comments are the core issues here and how and why that came to be and what to do about it is what this discussion should be about, but until those issues can be discussed openly they can never be addressed productively.
I turned on that setting but legitimately can't find what you might be referring to. Maybe I'm daft, but can you link to "dead" comments? If so, could you link to an example of what you mean?
> If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).
2021 so far 6 months in: 378 Homicides, 1727 wounded, 2082 shot
Until the gang problem gets solved, nothing will change. And politicians are too busy disarming the law abiding citizens and cutting police budgets instead of focusing on the illegal gang problem.
Texas gets an “F” from Gifford Law Center, yet Houston and Dallas have murder rates that are half of that in Chicago. The rates in Austin and El Paso are tiny when compared to Chicago. All this despite Texas having neighbours with cartels south of border.
2. The age for purchasing handguns (pistols and revolvers) in Illinois is 21 years old. Vast majority of the gang violence and shootings happen using handguns.
3. The state requires gun owners to obtain licenses and face background checks as well as imposing waiting periods on firearms purchases. They also have red flag laws.
> Bonus points of you can do it while blaming mental health AND justify our decreased spending on mental health. The mic is yours.
This along with rest of your snide comment indicates to me that you have some pre-conceived incorrect assumptions about me and therefore I am not entertaining you.
You expressed a rather simplistic view of a much larger issue, stating a single problem as the core. I didn't judge your opinion untill you provided it, therefore it can't be preconceived.
As a gun owner, I'm fully aware of the complexity of the issue. Pointing at socioeconomics as the root is naive. It ignores the vast majority of incidents to focus very narrowly on one factor. The reality is if you only look at the one instance and ignore the whole, you cannot address the actual problems. Socioeconomics have nothing to do with almost all of our mass shootings because most of them aren't gang related. It doesn't account for most homicides by gun because they're individual issues.
We country divided politically, racially and sexually (gender, not intercourse) and pretty free access to firearms. Wanna guess what happens when people don't like each other or have heated arguments and have guns? Hint: shooting.
So sure, try and solve for the one thing and ignore all the rest. You can't solve for it because you're dealing with historically unrepresented populations of people that we've shoved into a corner together and we basically ignore. You wanna actually solve for all the killing we do? Make access to firearms require more than just a pulse.
It's not both. The root cause of most of these killings is honor culture, which existed in plenty of societies before guns and led to just as many killings.
Well certainly that's one required aspect of many.
I've yet to see a single serious national proposal for hoovering up the vast number of illegal guns from the inner cities however. The 117,000 gang members in Chicago do not care about gun permits or background checks.
The gun control measures being proposed - exclusively by the Democrats - won't do anything to stem the near-genocide rate of murder in US inner cities.
The actual big target is: opportunity, jobs, wealth. If you don't fix that in the US inner cities, you won't stem the murder, gang participation and rate of violence. There also isn't much being done about that equation in the US inner cities.
Visiting/exchange doctors come here to pick up skills for combat zones because so many ER trauma shifts are going to have gun shot wounds. And if it's the work of the untouchable assault rifle, well, you are going to be learnin', boy!
In large parts of the US you can get away with things that any other country would call murder or manslaughter, just by claiming that you were frightened or fearing for your life.
Outside these gangs, what is the murder rate like though? Surely still many times higher than Canada or Europe with all the rednecks and white supremacists and school shooters.
Canada has their own issues, their government effectively lost its mind last year.
Maybe forcing everyone to take planes to enter the country will make the northern shore prime real estate though. Maybe they're behaving rationally and just have a very long term goal.
The raw data actually paints another picture entirely. As other posts here have hinted at, the incidence of gun violence in America is not evenly close to being evenly distributed geographically across the country. If you were to compare (legal) gun ownership and gun crime statistics between America's urban areas versus everywhere else you'd see the opposite picture emerge. It's not people in backwater towns with a shed full of guns responsible for America's gun crime problem. It's gang members in the large cities.
Huh? The data here isn’t for one day, it’s for three days. Further, population differences will massively inflate absolute numbers. You’re making it seem like US is ~1,600x UK when in fact per capita it’s ~61x [1]. Yes, this is still a lot and terrible, but you’re making it seem two orders of magnitude worse.
I was hoping for this reply. The presentation of the facts were intentional.
These threads devolve into statistical analysis and reduction of values when the only fact that matters is >1 is terrible. Meta discussion should be about the tragic necessity for people to shoot each other not the absolute quantity of deaths.
Canada has extremely low population density in all cities and population of 1/10th of US. US also has the third-highest population in the world. Look at the population density of the 10 highest dense municipalities in Canada (highest is 5,492.6 people per square kilometre in Vancouver, B.C.):
Now compare it to USA. Top 50 cities amongst them all are ALL signifiantly higher than the Canadian numbers. New York City alone is 10,431.1 people per square kilometre, San Francisco is 6,658.9, Boston is 5,143.4):
Why should the whole country be compared to anywhere though? The idea (implicitly) is that it gives you a sense of what it's like to live in the US. But no one lives in the whole country. People live in a particular area, usually one state (out of 50). Even then, most people's lives are largely limited to one or two counties. The reason that most Americans are not concerned with this kind of thing is that the vast majority of them are not exposed to this violence at all. For most Americans, life is extremely safe and peaceful.
You're getting downvotes because you are posting facts. That's a pattern on HN. People don't like your facts, so they downvote to try and get it to disappear.
The one part of the gun debate I don't understand is that the 2nd amendment was only added to prevent the government of overreaching as it gives the citizens the right to form armed militias to combat that. But realistically speaking, in a time where police forces are using military equipment, is it even possible to fight against them when/if push come to shove?
The actual military couldn’t make a dent in Afghanistan after twenty years. What makes you think they will be any more effective against local Americans who are more familiar with the terrain, have access to better tech, and often are of the same socioeconomic background of the soldiers themselves?
IEDs are the more commonly used weapons, and they aren’t hard to make. I also have zero doubts that if the military actually started fighting the civilian populace, more powerful weapons would get introduced (possibly by other states, as with in Afghanistan.)
Yup. And the heavier the equipment used against civilians, the greater the anti government resistance. The military will run out of Apaches and Abrams long before the people run out of ideology/anger.
... and, just like in Afghanistan (especially during the Soviet invasion in the 80's), rebels will ambush convoys/advanced bases and steal weaponry and associated material.
Is it actually a deterrent in the USA though? Do you see signs of a heavily armed populace actually deterring lethal shootings and paramilitary action by the police in the US?
If anything it seems to me that what is happening in the US is a cycle of increasing armed escalation. Mass shootings lead to people getting guns for home defence and personal carry. An increasingly armed populace leads police officers to be more prepared for gun violence and more willing to shoot where there is a perceived threat or risk. Increasing police shootings lead to violent protests and 'reprisal' attacks against police. More guns generally means unstable personalities are more likely to have access to powerful weapons, so more mass shootings. And so it goes on.
It isn't a deterrent against local abuses, however well-armed civilians are a deterrent against massive and nationwide attempts (a pure tyranny trying to establish itself, or some foreign invading force).
The societal problem created by unstable personalities is due to... unstable personalities, and unstable personalities tend to boost other's instabilities, a retro-action quickly escalates the problem into major ordeals: the society (armed or not) progressively becomes something else and crumbles.
Someone wanting to destroy/maim/kill will do so (armed or not), and civilians weapons rarely are the best tool for it (check, for example, the Oklahoma City bombing '1995). Arson as a weapon substitute is common, especially in no-weapon zones.
Solving the main causes of tensions (dumb dispositions addicting many citizen to very dangerous drugs, race-related hate, extreme poverty, education and economic conditions letting youngsters leading nowhere...) would reduce the will to destroy/maim/kill.
I don't really think the evidence tells us that armed civilians deter tyranny, in fact tyranny can be extremely effective at suppressing an armed populace. There are plenty of examples of this in the world right now and recent history. Chechnya, Syria (in which Assad is still very much in control), Iraq under Saddam, now Myanmar which is rapidly growing an armed resistance that's laudable, but almost certainly completely futile. There are plenty more. India in Kashmir, Pakistan in Baluchistan. More guns? Easy, just pile on more repression. It works. The only way out of that is a full on militarised civil war with armies and everything, but armed civilians on their own just aren't enough.
Chechnya, on the contrary, clearly showed that armed civilians can deter even a hugely disproportionately powerful invader. During the first war (1994-1996) the Chechen had plenty of good weapons, and kicked the Russian army to the point of winning (they re-took Grozny!). Then the Russians took measures in order cut logistic lines and re-attacked in 1999, focusing on further barring civilians from obtaining weapons and any related material, with a great success (the Chechens had to build inefficient homemade weapons). This is documented, see for example https://reaperfeed.com/5-homemade-weapons-from-the-chechen-w...
The ongoing civilian war in Syria isn't pertinent, as it isn't "civilian vs. regular army" but many tribal factions and armies fighting each other and volatile alliances.
Iraq under Saddam also shows that armed civilians (the Kurds) can resist to a tyrannic government. Others were not well-armed and were indeed crushed.
The rebels during the 1991 uprising could not grab weapons. "U.S. troops that were deployed in southern Iraq defended arsenals or blew up them altogether to prevent the rebels from arming themselves, blocked the rebels from advancing onto Baghdad and even actively disarmed some rebel forces" (sourced at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq ), in practice killing the rebellion by discouraging it.
Kashmiri separatists are notoriously badly armed, their main approach is a sort of Intifada (throwing rocks)! As far as I know Pakistan gives very few weapons to some subgroups read as not too dangerous for them, and India yells about it but after years and years fails to show serious evidence, probably because there are too few weapons.
> Pakistan in Baluchistan.
Baloch separatists are losing not because they cannot resist, but because their cause is dying as the majority of the population (especially Pashtuns) doesn't adopt it and as the central government concedes more and mode towards decentralization/autonomy.
> More guns? Easy, just pile on more repression. It works.
I doubt so.
> Personally I'd rather put my trust in democracy.
There is no mutual exclusion between weapons and democracy. Switzerland, one of the (or rather, at least IMHO, _the_) more advanced democracy, is shock-full of weapons and has a solid weapon culture.
> Personally I'd rather put my trust in democracy.
That's simply naive. You don't think powerful elites do and will try everything to gain and maintain power over the peasants? Personally I'd rather put my trust in having some way to fight back when the inevitable happens instead of being powerless.
> India in Kashmir
Not sure why you think Kashmir is tyrannical? Your other examples are also flawed. The fights happening in lets say Syria are tribal infighting - similar to gang fighting on a larger scale. Similar to Chicago gangs on a larger scale.
Despite all the flaws of Assad, most Syrians like him. It's the same thing as what happened in Libya or Iraq. Regime change wars is what destroyed those countries thanks to which there's slavery back in Libya.
This has happened several times in history. People get disarmed, then their rights get taken away. The most recent example is Venezuela.
The classic argument stating that tyrants try as early and hard as possible to confiscate weapons from civilians is another cue.
An army pretty much knows the truism stating that occupying is more easy if the zone is gun-free.
There is an often-neglected complement: by the same principle an army fighting against another which occupies a nation usually try to deliver weapons to civilians rebelling against the invader, even if manufacturing and delivering them dissipates very precious resources. It was quite patent during WW2, for example in France where the OSS and SOE parachuted a huge amount of weapons to the Résistance and Maquis movements. In the same vein the German army, during the invasion, quickly confiscated civilian weapons (they were registered) and was then very reluctant to deliver weapons to their local sympathizers (at first and for an extended period they bluntly refused).
Any kind of armed conflict, including war, is a tool of politics. While theoretically speaking, no armed militia will ever be able to beat the US Army, that's not the question. The question is, will an armed resistance change the politics of the conflict enough to not engage in it.
For example, let's say you want to send the army or police to (let's say) take control over some city and implement a curfew. If the populace is armed and decides to oppose you, your calculus now includes whether it's worth killing many people to get your aims. That might make it politically impossible to do, either because it's now no longer worth it, or because the army itself might resist you.
Obviously those are extreme scenarios. You can see many, many cases where a small armed populace managed to "win" against a much larger army, because unlike what some people think, war is very rarely an all-out "get your way at any cost" affair.
That argument has been raised many times many times "oh your guns won't stand a chance against military bombers and tanks" but that is logically flawed for two reasons:
1. If that were the case, then what's even the point of freedom of speech or any individual liberty either since the government can always trample them without a problem? You could use that reasoning to argue against literally anything that the government would oppose.
2. That's actually not the case as has been proven several times in history - including recently in Afghanistan as of this moment. The ground troops of Taliban haven't been able to be defeated - neither by USA (for 20 years) nor by the Soviets few decades ago.
Another example would be USA losing to Vietnam.
In a war scenario where the guns are used, both sides do not simply line up & start shooting and whoever has the biggest guns wins. Guerrillas can beat massive armies and ammo. If inferior forces couldn't defeat bigger stronger ones, then the Arabs and British would still be ruling everywhere.
As someone mentioned this in another post: "The argument is generally that a well-armed civilian populace is ungovernable without their consent. Could a modern army nuke them or firebomb them into oblivion? Sure. But then they'd be "governing" a burnt-out husk of a country and likely have become an international pariah to boot. Occupying a hostile territory while keeping the population alive and productive involves having a relatively small number of soldiers on the ground managing things and keeping people in line, and that system rapidly becomes infeasible if the locals are far more numerous and armed with semi-automatic weapons. Of course the odds of a situation like that happening are extremely low, but then again my grandparents never imagined the possibility of their country being occupied during WW2 either, so who knows what the future can bring."
I'll remember to keep this in mind while my house rep repeatedly gaslights us on rising violent crime statistics and calls our concerns about violent crime a "hysteria" while doubling down on her defund the police rhetoric.
The moronic behavior of our elected officials in NYC has driven me to leave and sadly I will be gone long before they will.
This might be controversial, but as I see it there's a pretty unproductive view in US (moronic, if you will), that social problems are police problems. Police is literally the last line of defence, and not very effective at that.
It's nice of you to say that from San Francisco Bay, but there isn't a social program for every problem.
As someone who grew up in the bad neighborhoods and has been face to face with criminality on the daily for most of my life, I'll let you in on a little secret.
A lot of stickup boys do it because they like to.
I know y'all folks are plenty smart, but stick to your lane. These places would make your head explode.
Addressing your laughable claim that crime will go away if you throw money at social programs.
Like I said, some people do it for fun. Some do it to follow their idols. Sure you can stop some of it, but arresting and incarcerating people _is_ an effective solution.
You can see the signs in airports...
The Phillippines also used to be on this list officially, but now drug traffickers are killed extrajudicially there with the urging and support of Duterte.
It's more than half the countries that stillhave capital punishment.
> A 2015 article by The Economist says 32 countries have the death penalty for drug smuggling. Only in six countries China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore are drug offenders known to be routinely executed.
As I understood it they're on the list because their laws permit capital punishment for drug crimes. The article is saying that only 6 of them routinely exercise that possibility. I read through the notes next to the countries, but didn't find anything interesting.
The NYPD costs $10 billion per year and yet crime is still rampant in NYC. Are we supposed to pretend that spending more money on them is going to fix the problem? If they can’t do the job with billions of dollars in hand, the next $20 billion won’t make it work.
It’s about time we stop wasting taxpayer dollars on a bandaid for crime and start preventing it by alleviating the problems that cause crime- poverty, healthcare, etc.
It’s pretty evident it has little to do with the actions of public officials, considering the rise in gun violence is nationwide.
Also, some have tried to pin the rise in violent crime (overall crime is down) to cuts in budgets, but this doesn’t make sense considering that for all
The talk the NYPD’s budget wasn’t only not cut, but in fact increased over this period of time.
The rise in violent crime across the country, which is still a rise only relative to the historic lows it had reached in the years before the pandemic, likely has a lot more to do with the overall damage to the societal mental health and damages to communities due to the loss and grief experienced by so many over the past year or so. Also, the massive increase in guns over the past couple of years in itself would have led to a predictable rise in gun violence.
The NYPD’s budget was “cut” to levels from 2 years ago to pre pandemic levels.
The “cut” is also chimeric because the money to the NYPD was funneled through other avenues (for example, through the MTA, where Cuomo increased funding to the NYPD by getting the MTA to pay for NYPD presence in the subway funneling money to the NYPD without making it obvious at a time it wasn’t politically viable to increase police funding). That’s why headcount and the operational budget remained the same despite the “cut” and the fact that the NYPD officers received more overtime last year than probably every before.
And the NYPD continues to remain the highest funded police force both on an absolute and a per capita basis by a favor of at least 2.
Finally, next years budget already includes a further increase in the NYPD’s top line budget and neither of the possible remaining mayoral candidates (Adams or Garcia) have proposed reducing the budget.
The idea that decisions about the NYPD have contributed to the increase in violent crime (which once again is nationwide) is not borne out by the actual changes that have been made.
According to this wiki article[0], 2018 (last year for which data is available) had around 14k non-suicide gun deaths. Looking at other figures suggests that this is close to the yearly average. So that's just under 40 non-suicide gun deaths per day in US.
The UK regulates and bans guns in ways that would be unacceptable even to US gun control advocates. (Actually, maybe especially amongst US gun control advocates. All the big, left-leaning pro-gun-control celebrities would lose their armed guards that they absolutely insist the restrictions shouldn't apply to - that's not a legitimate reason for owning or carrying a gun in the UK. US gun control activists think that regulating hand guns more strictly than rifles is absurd and wrong, whereas the UK completely banned handguns. Also, the UK issues gun licenses to people as young as 14, and this is a fundamental to our approach to guns: the idea is to treat guns as a tool that they can be allowed to use if they show they're responsible enough, rather than something glamorous and forbidden. All of this actually aligns surprisingly well with what pro-gun Americans think gun control supporters get wrong, from what I can tell.)
This is about normal for the US, but quite high for anywhere else in the developed world. This long weekend had more gun deaths in the US than most developed countries have in a year.
Yet other cities have tons of guns, no gun control, and don’t have the same levels of crime. It’s almost like the issue is social and economic in nature...
"Chicago saw 1,916 shootings through the first six months of the year, according to city records, an increase of almost 12 percent compared with 2020 and an increase of 55 percent over 2019."
What I'd like to hear from Second Amendment advocates, is what their solution is to the frequency of gun violence in the USA. Is it actually a problem you think needs tackling, or is the current situation acceptable to you? If it's not acceptable, what's the path to improve things and what remedies would you support?
I understand that you value this right, and yes it is in your constitution. Is that the end of the discussion though? After all, the constitution has been amended many times. It's not an absolute.
IANAA (I Am Not An American), but the extreme variation in geography of American violence cries for local remedies. And I am not sure whether the mere existence of weapons there is a reason to have a crime hotspot. Madmen aside, people generally kill other people for some reasons. These reasons are closer to the root causes that need attention.
Unfortunately the discussion is poisoned by political orthodoxy. The left will cry "poverty and cops" and the right will cry "drugs and immigration", with little space in between to explore further.
While we're at it, if you support the 1st amendment, what solution do you have in store for threats, incitement, defamation etc? What about the 4th amendment - presumably you have a solution to people hiding evidence of crimes right? And what's your solution to criminals refusing to consent to interviews with the police? Are you prepared to relinquish these rights if we don't find your solutions adequate?
Those are of course serious issues that any society has to work out. However the existence of those issues don't in any way detract from the existence and seriousness of this one, or provide any reason to neglect it.
I'm not suggesting that these things justify neglecting it. What I'm responding to is your comment treating Second Amendment advocates as a class with respect to crime. Why should they, as a group, have any particular solution or perspective on this problem, more than anyone else?
Maybe this isn't your attitude, and I'm not trying to misrepresent you here, but it's very common for people to expect a level of justification from 2A advocates that would seem absurd and unfair when applied to any other personal right (hence my examples). The implication is that the violence is somehow derived from right to own guns, and therefore people who fight to retain that right have a responsibility to come up with a solution.
Well, from my perspective rights come with responsibilities. If you want to have a right, then there's an obligation there to justify any cost that might have to society.
I believe in free speech, including the right of others to say things that I find offensive. I think I can provide arguments that justify that right. I can also give a good account of the reasonable limits that there should be on free speech such as slander, incitement to violence, criminal deception and so on. Unrestrained 'free speech' could be weaponised for malicious ends, so it's really important to get the reasonable constraints and limitations right.
If you want to have a right to bear arms, I think the same applies to firearms ownership and use. Personally I think that the current levels of gun violence in the US indicate that it is not under reasonable constraints of that kind. What do you think, is the current level of gun violence in the US acceptable to you, and if not what do you think from the perspective of a 2nd amendment advocate, is the best way to address it?
I don't think I can answer your question because as I explained, I don't agree with the premise.
> Well, from my perspective rights come with responsibilities
It's never quite clear to me what people mean by this. We have responsibilities, certainly. And we have rights. But I don't understand in what sense they are supposed to be linked, as though they were two sides of the same coin. For example, in the UK they don't have anything equivalent to the US 1st Amendment. What responsibilities are they absolved of as a consequence of that?
> If you want to have a right, then there's an obligation there to justify any cost that might have to society.
Justification is a separate question from responsibility. But why must I justify the exercise of the right first? Why shouldn't you justify your right to restrain me first? It's an important question because we could argue forever about what the costs may or may not be and never reach an agreement. Therefore the status quo has enormous weight. In many places, it's not clear where the burden of justification lies for a given right. The point of the US Bill of Rights was to make this crystal clear for certain issues.
I think we disagree on multiple levels here. Firstly, there's the question of what causes the extreme levels of violent crime in a tiny minority of US neighborhoods. You obviously think there's some kind of causal link with the 2nd Amendment. I don't. But secondly, there's the question of what should happen when we don't agree on something like this. You naturally want the system to default to your side. In many countries, on many issues, that's exactly how it is - freedom has to be justified. This is what makes the US different: restraint has to be justified, at least on the short list of issues that were lucky enough to make the cut into the Bill of Rights.
There might be some nuances of interpretation, but people in the UK have every right granted under the first amendment. We have an established religion yes, but we still have freedom of religion. That’s really the only significant caveat I can think of.
Every persons right is another person’s responsibility. If you have the right to free speech, I have the responsibility to tolerate you exercising it. If I have the right to drive a car, you have to tolerate the noise and pollution. We all bear the costs of paying for government and services such as the police and judiciary that protect and guarantee our rights.
There are clear well exercised mechanisms for amending the US constitution. Just saying it’s your right and you feel no obligation to justify it, is no good argument for others to continue granting it if they feel the cost is too high.
> There might be some nuances of interpretation, but people in the UK have every right granted under the first amendment. We have an established religion yes, but we still have freedom of religion. That’s really the only significant caveat I can think of.
Well it's clear from this that you don't understand the US first amendment. Firstly, people in the UK are regularly investigated by the police and often convicted in criminal court for saying or publishing "grossly offensive" things. This kind of thing is absolutely impossible in the US. Secondly, and more subtly, no rights are granted by the first amendment. It just sets the limits of what the government can do.
> Every persons right is another person’s responsibility. If you have the right to free speech, I have the responsibility to tolerate you exercising it
OK, if that's all you meant by saying that rights come with responsibilities, fine. That is just restating a right as a responsibility. So if I have the right to own a gun, then I have the responsibility to tolerate you owning a gun. OK. But I'm not sure how this helps your argument at all.
> Just saying it’s your right and you feel no obligation to justify it, is no good argument for others to continue granting it if they feel the cost is too high.
But I'm not asking anyone to grant me anything. You're still taking the position that the default situation is that I need permission. What I've been trying to explain to you is that that's only how it works everywhere else. In the US, it works the other way around. If you really can't get past the idea of people "granting" rights, then maybe you can think of it like this: Americas gun owners haven't granted anyone the right to interfere with their guns. You think they should? Then you justify it.
I don't own a gun nor consider myself much of a "2A advocate", but I do think the complexity of the problem is under-appreciated. First off, we had decades of declining gun violence while total guns in circulation were dramatically increasing [0].
Gun violence up-ticked somewhat around 2015 and then stabilized, and then starting in late May last year began a dramatic rise[1] that has not yet subsided, a rise as far as I know was not seen in any other developed country during the pandemic. Many people also seem to not understand that the vast majority of murders are committed with (usually illegal) handguns[1], so the common focus on "assault weapons" like the AR-15 seems illogical given how few murders they account for annually.
I would be very supportive of stronger laws/regulations against carrying guns in public and significant penalties for anyone violating those rules. If someone wants to legally carry in public they should clear a very high bar. The problem is that any serious attempt to get illegal guns off the streets is going to run into 4A and other constitutional challenges and political backlash (and not simply from gun rights advocates). The police in general have become incredibly controversial over the past year, much less heavy-handed preventative policing and gun violence task forces which have run into criticism and defunding over tactics and targets. Violent and especially repeat offenders in general also need to be kept off the street - even among violent criminals a small minority commit the vast amount of violent crime.
The reality is "gun control" advocates have the luxury of hand-waving away the incredibly difficult to intractable implementation questions, when on the ground we had more actual real-world "gun control" in 2019 than once the nationwide protests and anti-police sentiment took hold in 2020. Anyone who tried to point out back when this was gaining steam that the likely consequence would be increased violence was shouted down with ad hominems, and now that the violence has shown up statistically we're back to the hand-waving about "gun control". Is there any actual proposed gun control law you're endorsing and some evidence to back up why it would be likely to make a significant dent, and how many people would you predict the police will need to arrest to enforce the law?
The primary pragmatic step in gun control is taking violent / illegal-gun carrying criminals off the streets, and the decline in political appetite for actually doing so coincidentally coincided with the dramatic rise in violence we now see.
> I would be very supportive of stronger laws/regulations against carrying guns in public and significant penalties for anyone violating those rules. If someone wants to legally carry in public they should clear a very high bar.
Just curious, why do you think this? Is it your impression that people who carry guns after passing only a fairly low/medium legal bar are contributing to murder rates?
I am not American, and I think the rest of world has become somewhat immune to the gun violence in the US. A mass shooting here, a mass shooting there, pretty much every few days. I will even give a thumbs up to the right to bear arms, seems reasonable.
But reading the context of that report is quite shocking, mass shootings (as per the definition of CNN), innocent bystanders, children, children with guns shooting other children, 18 people killed within 6 hours. The right to bear arms to fight an oppressive government, seems to be now the right to go out for a picnic with your kids and get shot. What a horrible cancerous situation.
Happy to see a multitude of poignant responses to comments here. It should be clear that “gun control” is very similar to the “war on drugs”. I guess a better corollary is the prohibition of cannabis. Folks (law abiding gun owners) helping their loved ones with debilitating diseases and what not are not able to do so, in the spirit of preventing bad outcomes for the general populace. We don’t need to control guns. We need to “control” the urge to commit violence. Politics obscure the target every time.
We're supposed to say "oh gosh we need gun control", and let's say that would probably have some effect. Few ever mention the disdain for human life required (and thus maintained by the war media) in order for a nominally democratic country to stay in multiple unjustified and disastrous wars on the other side of the planet for multiple decades. Our news channels, and other aspects of the capitalist popular media, constantly tell us to fear and preemptively murder brown and black people. So, we do. "We" in this case is white Americans, but it's also brown and black Americans.
It's not as though this is a new thing. Fear and murderous intent for the natives of the continent was the real meaning of the bland phrase "manifest destiny". No sooner had we completed that genocide at the turn of the last century than we set our sights on more in Philippines and in various parts of Latin America. Since then only Europe has largely been spared our predations.
The chickens have come home to roost, but this isn't some sort of wispy karmic phenomena. The causal chain is quite direct. In order for certain aspects of our capitalist model to function, we must destroy other nations at a regular rate. In order for the general population to abide such evil, we must be convinced to fear and hate other humans for their skin color. After we've been convinced of that, we fear and hate our neighbors just as much as we do the "intended" subjects of our fear and hate.
This doesn't have to continue. However, in order for it to change, we've got to stop fighting so many stupid wars. That includes every war overseas, and every war against abstract concepts like the "Drug War".
Article repeatedly says that "gun violence is rising", which may be true, but it cites exactly 2 comparative statistics:
1. Gun violence is down in NYC.
2. Gun violence is down in Chicago.
> In New York, where gun violence has been rising to levels not seen in years, there were 26 victims from 21 shootings from Friday to Sunday, a DECREASE from the same period last year when 30 people were shot in 25 shootings.
1. Gun violence is down in NYC.
> In New York, where gun violence has been rising to levels not seen in years, there were 26 victims from 21 shootings from Friday to Sunday, a DECREASE from the same period last year when 30 people were shot in 25 shootings.
For the month of May, shootings were up 73% over last year.
Robberies up 46.7% and felony assaults 20.5%.
I'm glad that NYC's politburo was able to cherry pick a single weekend of statistics to frame in the positive but if you want to say gun violence is down, I'm gonna have to say "my ass".
The Chicago MSA is just under 3% of the US population, and about 25% of the shootings.
[0] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-inde...