150 people fatally shot in more than 400 shootings over the 4th of July weekend
cnn.com
cnn.com
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...
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.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-lead-poison...
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'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?
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.
So the argument that Chicago residents can skirt gun control laws by crossing state lines is false.
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.
https://www.shotspotter.com/news/how-does-shotspotter-differ...
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).
Edit: changed from 23 times to 3 times.
---
False.
Canada has a murder rate typically 1.5 to 2 per year (per 100k).
The US murder rate is typically closer to 5.
In 2019 there were an estimated 16,000 murders in the US (~4.8 per 100,000).
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada
"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"
23 times is the absolute number, which is easy to explany with the differences of population.
Gun control, you mean?
ME: Chicago has strict gun control but high gun violence.
THEM: They get guns from states with loose gun control.
ME: But those states don't have the same gun violence
THEM: Places in Chicago are poor & neglected so there's more violence.
ME: BINGO, it's a socioeconomic issue not a gun issue!
This site tracks Chicago specifically:
2020: 456 Homicides, 1,902 Wounded
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.
It could be both.
1. Even the hyper liberal anti-gun Gifford Law Center gives their second highest score of A- to Illinois and A to New Jersey.
https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/scorecard/
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.
* Not gang related
* Never (almost never?) happened at an "inter city" school
* Not in places with strict gun control 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.
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.
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.
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).
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...)
And going a bit further back and higher up in level of government, didn't Trump delight in blaming democrats for murdery inner cities, specifically calling out Chicago and Detroit? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trump-kee...
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`:
1. April 3, 2021. "The US saw significant crime rise across major cities in 2020. And it's not letting up" https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/03/us/us-crime-rate-rise-2020/in...
2. April 19, 2021. "Murder map: Deadliest U.S. cities" https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...
3. June 1, 2021. "With Homicides Rising, Cities Brace for a Violent Summer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/shootings-in-us.html
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.
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.
> 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.
Per 100k
---
Total
US 12.21, UK: 0.23
53 times higher.
---
Homicides
US 4.46, UK: 0.06
74 times higher.
---
Suicides
US 7.32, UK: 0.15
49 times higher.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
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.):
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170208/t001a...
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):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Canada also doesn't share borders with cartels nor do they have a gang problem like places like Chicago, Baltimore etc do.
Considering these factors, the 420+ million guns in US are pretty safe for vast majority.
As someone pointed out "The Chicago MSA is just under 3% of the US population, and about 25% of the shootings."
EDIT: Why the downvotes? Do people really think comparing 2 countries with completely different population density and borders is a valid comparison?
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 military has a lot of conservative pro-gun people.
An armed (and determined) populace is quite a good deterrent.
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.
An armed society is a polite society? Really?
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.
Weapons don't do anything by themselves.
Personally I'd rather put my trust in democracy.
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.
In Myanmar civilians aren't really armed, and even decades-old ethnic guerilla groups aren't (they even lack cartridges). Read https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-06-02/souring-peace-marches...
> India in Kashmir
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.
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.
2012: "Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-18288430
2017: Venezuela: Video Shows Armored Vehicle Rolling Over Protesters
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-video-shows-ar...
2019: "MSNBC Admits: Because Venezuelans Were Disarmed, They Have No Power Against the Government"
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/05/01/msnbc-...
I have friends in Hong Kong who literally prayed that USA doesn't give away their guns.
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).
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.
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."
--Florida Report
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/12/us/austin-texas-shooting-down...
The moronic behavior of our elected officials in NYC has driven me to leave and sadly I will be gone long before they will.
(And when are they going to finish counting those votes?)
My rep that I mentioned earlier is nationally the press' darling.
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.
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.
Edit: wow, you've made some pretty bold edits.
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.
If the shoe fits and all. I'd love to get lectured about how crime works by somebody in an area with a $2695 median rent.
Would you like me to tell you what it's like to be a child growing up in a neighborhood dying of crack addiction and AIDS?
And while I'm being extroadinarily harsh, this is how tonedeaf big-city liberals come off telling us how they're gonna fix our neighborhoods.
Yes.
Crime problems are police problems literally eveywhere.
The mistake is conflating all crime with being a problem in need of a social solution.
Care to back that up?
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.
Most of those entries are even explained with a link.
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.
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.
The only countries that have US-levels of gun violence are unstable Latin American nations and war-torn countries in Northern Africa: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/11/09/6662094...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
Click "Past Years" for historical data going back to 2014:
It turns out that America is a really big place and broad criticisms from abroad are almost always wrong and misleading.
It is?
"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."
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/7/2/22560417/4-kille...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/chicago.suntimes.com/platform/a...
For a real perspective on the violent hoods, CharlieBo313 visits them all and does interviews. Guns are pointed at him in many of them.
Here's his latest Chicago video: https://youtu.be/UOeEykKtobs
... in the middle of larger area with very lax gun control.
> Seven states receive higher grades than Illinois in the latest Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ratings.
So it's the 8th strictest out of 50, by their standards.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22137087/h...
[2] https://thetrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/homicides-fi...
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?
Feels like the country is only a few years away from having balaclava-covered paramilitaries roam the streets in Toyota Hiluxes à la Afghanistan.
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.
*edited because I’ve had beers.
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.
2020: 456 Homicides, 1,902 Wounded
2021 so far 6 months in: 378 Homicides, 1727 wounded, 2082 shot
The year we were all in lockdowns and quarantining?
You don't think that'll skew things?
Trends occur over many years, not just two.
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.
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".