60 people shot in Chicago over the weekend
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Maybe we could just decriminalize a lot of the drug trade and starve the gangs of the money to fund these gang wars.
To quote Hamilton (the play): "Make it impossible to justify the cause of the fight"
And of course Chicago is a major cartel nexus, so there's plenty of illicit money sloshing around.
But you have a bit of a point, too. If you have tons of time and no money, there are a fair number of ways you can earn some money outside the law. Drugs are the most profitable currently, but if they were made legal, the action would probably move to other kinds of illegal activity.
Let me be clear that I think the drug war is a terrible idea for a million reasons and should be ended tomorrow, or like, yesterday. But I don't think its end would be the end of gangs in places like Chicago, where the supply of young men is abundant and has no other alternative. Gangs will just find some other criminal activity, as the cartels themselves have started to do.
[0] http://abc7chicago.com/66-shot-12-fatally-in-chicago-weekend...
This may be why the level of violence in that particular town is of interest to many social and political commentators.
From what I can gather [1], they're not. Some semi-automatic firearms, considered as assault weapons, are illegal in Chicago.
The point is, and has always been, and will always be, to reduce the number of guns available. Fewer guns === fewer shootings. Axiomatic.
Of course, it's substantially easier said than done. But the mechanism by which gun control reduces gun crimes really doesn't require any criminal to spontaneously follow the law for some reason. It's a public-health measure, like vaccinating kids.
That's not an axiom.
Left as an exercise: find a subset of guns such that, if they were destroyed, is likely to increase the number of shootings.
Since basically all of the evidence we have available to us suggests that fewer guns lead to fewer shootings, and more guns lead to more shootings; since the only real objections to that logic are rather contrived "find the subset of guns such that removing them leads to more shootings" logical toys with little if any foundation in the real world; and since it's, I mean, just clearly correct - I'm curious why you think such a proposition is not obviously true.
Clearly there is a debate about the effectiveness of gun control in America, the one country on the planet that has yet to make up its mind about this. However, I would suggest that such a debate is not being carried out in good faith.
If only it was so simple:
> Switzerland hasn't had a mass shooting since 2001, when a man stormed the local parliament in Zug, killing 14 people and then himself.
> The country has about 2 million privately owned guns in a nation of 8.3 million people. In 2016, the country had 47 homicides with firearms. The country's overall murder rate is near zero.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/switzerlan...
So: Switzerland vs "the United States and across high-income countries"; Switzerland vs "data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s"; Switzerland vs "across 50 states over a ten-year period (1988-1997)"; Switzerland vs "across states, 2001-2003"; Switzerland vs "In high gun states, LEOs are 3 times more likely to be murdered than LEOs working in low-gun states."
So. It is pretty simple: Switzerland, as in basically every other aspect of its existence, is an outlier.
Social science is not the same thing as mathematical theory, I grant you, and so what is axiomatic in the world is not necessarily as tidy as what is axiomatic in the middle of proving a theorem.
Nevertheless: the evidence is clear that more guns lead to more shootings. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear on this common-sense point, and there's no particularly compelling counterexample since, again, Switzerland is quite unlike the United States in many ways.
So: it is an axiom that more guns lead to more shootings. Except, perhaps, for the Swiss.
"More cars === more global warming" is mostly true, but might lead to really bad policies if taken too strictly. For instance, someone might make new cars illegal, which would prevent us from taking advantage of more efficient or more electric cars thta actually help the situation.
However, I would argue that we're not particularly oversimplifying here. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an... sums up the overwhelming amount of literature demonstrating the obvious point I'm making quite nicely.
Social science is not the same thing as a pure mathematical theorem, so in that sense, an axiom in the social sciences is not as tidy as an axiom in a mathematical context.
Nevertheless, I think the weight of evidence makes pretty clear that more guns === more shootings. I'm willing to compromise and say that it is not technically an axiom, but instead a well-established fact, if that makes you feel any better.
But I think the far greater danger we face is people obfuscating simple truths because their political agendas require it. Rather than just letting "more guns === more shootings" slide, we're getting into an extended back and forth here, that kiiiinda obscures the fact that the overwhelming amount of evidence is on my side.
And the consequences of this, as opposed to your odd hypothetical where we take gun control TOO seriously in the US, are clear: more people will die. I'm sorry to be blunt, but, there you have it.
Done in one.
No way is that axiomatic: What room would you rather be in:
100 people in a room, each with a gun. One person is Hitler.
100 people in a room, only one person has a gun and it's Hitler.
What your theory is missing is that often the intent of the person with a gun matters much more than the gun itself.
B) No. It's been tried, pretty consistently, with (at best) mixed results. Under Rahm, at one point (may still be true), CPD was paying boatloads of money in overtime to saturate violent neighborhoods.
C) That said, the book Ghettoside makes the really convincing argument that neighborhoods like the ones under discussion in Chicago simultaneously suffer from under- and over-policing. There's a massive police presence in much of the south side, kinda, and a lot of people get arrested for a lot of stuff. At the same time, the murder clearance rate (the number of murders "solved" by the police) was ~17% in 2017 (https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/murder-clearance-rate-in-c...) but over 60% in the (rather more violent) 1990s. So a lot of people have a lot of negative interactions with police, but the most serious crimes - murder especially - rarely get solved. Lots of people in the neighborhood know (or suspect) who did it, but that person never goes to jail (for that crime), resentments build up, it becomes harder for police to cultivate good sources/relationships, retaliations occur, etc etc you can imagine how things go.
D) There have been pretty successful interventions; CeaseFire comes to mind (https://chicagodefender.com/2018/01/10/the-return-of-ceasefi...). But it's suffered from lack of money and infighting at the state level between Rs and Ds. The basic idea, though - intervene in violent situations with people who are from those neighborhoods and used to be in gangs - seems to work quite well. It just needs money.
E) Crime is still actually down when compared to the 70s/80s/90s. Not that that's much comfort to someone living in one of the affected neighborhoods. But the country as a whole has become both more peaceful and more media-saturated, so aberrations like this get much more attention and the problem seems worse than it is - though again, that doesn't mean much to someone who just had a loved one get shot.