How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities

[TK421]

Places like Chicago being ineffective at reducing gun violence isn’t very hard: if you’re a dot on a map surrounded by a nation of lax gun laws, then restrictive guns laws will be minimally effective if effective at all.

Taking guns out of society by default takes guns out of the hands of most criminals. Criminals will not do whatever it takes to have a gun if having a gun is impractical or just a risk to ending up in more trouble. People in England can theoretically get a gun if they try hard enough, but for the most part it is just stupid. You get into more trouble for having it and it isnt particularly useful if you want to steal or take advantage of somebody. So they seldomly have them.

Many gun advocates operate under this mythical idea that most criminals are psychopaths, which is just that: a myth.

 

[otjm]

Actually, the logic is not baffling. England has essentially banned most firearms, and the murder and assault rate has gone up dramatically using knives.

 

[TK421]

The rates are not equivocal or close to it.

 

[otjm]

Please show me the lax gun laws which are allowing a criminal to go into a gun store outside of the city limits and purchase a gun. Time, place, circumstances, not “I heard about”.

 

[TK421]

It is easy to acquire a gun illicitly and there is a motive to do so if there is significant risk that other people will have guns.

Which is why, sadly, legal gun owners are what contribute to America’s high homicide rate, at least indirectly.

 

[Theo520]

Places like Chicago being ineffective at reducing gun violence isn’t very hard: if you’re a dot on a map surrounded by a nation of lax gun laws, then restrictive guns laws will be minimally effective if effective at all.

You haven’t read the OP link yet, have you.
Gun laws have zilch to do with reducing homicide rates.

 

[LilyM]

Actually, the logic is not baffling. England has essentially banned most firearms, and the murder and assault rate has gone up dramatically using knives.

And yet Britain still has an extremely low murder rate. Not British, so I’m unsure if there was any sudden crackdown on guns preceding this rise in violent crime. From what I saw when I was there last year, I dare say it has been more sparked by factors such as economic (and political) uncertainty and dissatisfaction over Brexit and immigration.

As I have said several times, and will repeat, if wide spread gun ownership is so effective a deterrent to violent crime, and lack of gun ownership so likely to have terrible consequences crime wise, then it seems to me that America should have among the lowest rates of violent crime in the world. And places like Britain and Australia among the highest. Instead the reverse is the case.

 

[Theo520]

you have serious flaws in your correlation logic.

First, the murder rate is much higher in cities where legal gun ownership is low.
Second, gun ownership and availability has increased much in past decades, while our murder rate has dropped. The data when analyzed actually doesn’t show the correlations you think would be there. Nor does the data show that states with high gun ownership have lower murder rates.

It’s all inconclusive, so you are barking up the wrong tree to tie murder rates with gun availability.

I suspect income inequality has a better correlation. But the OP article articulates that is a problem that can be overcome with just community action.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/crime-income-inequality/

Here are eight stubborn facts to keep in mind about gun violence in America:

1. Violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades.
2. The principal public safety concerns with respect to guns are suicides and illegally owned handguns, not mass shootings.
3. A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.
4. Gun-related murders are carried out by a predictable pool of people.
5. Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
6. There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
7. Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.
8. Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.

 

[LilyM]

you have serious flaws in your correlation logic.

First, the murder rate is much higher in cities where legal gun ownership is low.
Second, gun ownership and availability has increased much in past decades, while our murder rate has dropped. The data when analyzed actually doesn’t show the correlations you think would be there. Nor does the data show that states with high gun ownership have lower murder rates.

It’s all inconclusive, so you are barking up the wrong tree to tie murder rates with gun availability.

I suspect income inequality has a better correlation. But the OP article articulates that is a problem that can be overcome with just community action.
New FBI Data Correlates City Crime to Income Inequality – Zippia

Here are eight stubborn facts to keep in mind about gun violence in America:

1. Violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades.
2. The principal public safety concerns with respect to guns are suicides and illegally owned handguns, not mass shootings.
3. A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.
4. Gun-related murders are carried out by a predictable pool of people.
5. Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
6. There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
7. Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.
8. Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.

I’m actually not the one claiming that there is any particular correlation, positive or negative, between gun ownership and violent crime. I haven’t claimed, for example, that lower gun ownership necessarily means lower violent crime or any such. Or called for any restriction of gun ownership.

It is (often) gun advocates who are claiming that wider availability of guns means safer people - the old “good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun” motif. And people like otjm, to whom I am responding, who appear to be trying to make links between firearms bans (not that I am aware of any such recently in the UK) and increases in use of other weapons as if the former were the cause of the latter.

As you rightly point out, the factors in all violent crime, not just gun crime, are far more complex than either side of the gun debate tries to make them out to be.

 

[otjm]

Handguns were effectively outlawed in 1996, with the exception of Northern Ireland. As it was about 23 years ago, that may be why you are not aware of it.

From the Home Office; "There were 39,818 knife crime offences in the 12 months ending September 2018.

This is a two-thirds increase from the low-point in the year ending March 2014, when there were 23,945 offences, and is the highest number since comparable data was compiled.

These statistics do not include those from Greater Manchester Police because of data recording issues.

Out of the 44 police forces, 42 recorded a rise in knife crime since 2011."

That is in a population of 66.04 million (2017), which is about the equivalent of the two most populous states in the US: California and Texas (67,840,000+).

 

[Theo520]

It is (often) gun advocates who are claiming that wider availability of guns means safer people

Yes, it isn’t supported by statistics, just anecdotally. I have stories in my family where being armed has prevented a crime from occurring to a relative. But anecdotes are available for all sides.

 

[Odilon]

The confiscation of guns from society.

And such a thing will do nothing. Some enterprising criminal will set up a shop somewhere and make some guns to sell on the street. Or they will continue to come in from outside and sold on the black market.

 

[Odilon]

And acid attacks are widespread.

 

[otjm]

A 2013 study by the University of San Diego and the Igarape Institute in Brazil — and [a follow-up] to that report published in 2014 — estimated that, on average, 212,887 firearms were bought in the US every year between 2010 and 2012, by purchasers who intended to traffic them.

Those are not being brought in by tourists from the US visiting Central America and returning with weapons. We don’t need lax laws to blame; they re being supplied to criminals here by criminals smuggling them in.

 

[LilyM]

Handguns were effectively outlawed in 1996, with the exception of Northern Ireland. As it was about 23 years ago, that may be why you are not aware of it.

From the Home Office; "There were 39,818 knife crime offences in the 12 months ending September 2018.

This is a two-thirds increase from the low-point in the year ending March 2014, when there were 23,945 offences, and is the highest number since comparable data was compiled.

These statistics do not include those from Greater Manchester Police because of data recording issues.

Out of the 44 police forces, 42 recorded a rise in knife crime since 2011."

That is in a population of 66.04 million (2017), which is about the equivalent of the two most populous states in the US: California and Texas (67,840,000+).

In other words knife attacks overall went DOWN during the eighteen years between the ban on guns in 1996 and 2014 (given that 2014 was the low point). Then sharply back up for reasons undisclosed.

Your statistics seem not to be terribly relevant if you’re not making a claim that the gun ban contributed to the increase in knife attacks. And if you ARE making such a claim, they don’t come close to showing any connection between the two.

 

[John10]

America has an issue with guns, unless something is done about that, I do not think much will change.

 

[graciew]

Weapons go out of the US as well into Mexico and Central America .
There are local assistants.Bought legally and then weapons are dissembled and trafficked .
There are brokers who bring the parties together to negóciate…
It is more complex than that , but they come out of US into other conflicts as well. Brokers can sell to both sides of the same conflict sometimes…
Last case I read they were caught in France, local assistant in US. A few hundred weapons, to be reassembled.
It isn t only what gets into our countries but what leaves our countries and we are responsible for.
Weapons is the second most profitable business after drugs.

“As for the geographical distribution, according to the Small Arms Survey - an independent research project located at Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland -, more than one-third of the global supply of small arms is located in the United States. (Small Arms Survey, 2015) The same Survey shows that well over 200 million small arms are owned by US citizens - nearly one gun per person - and far more than any other single country or world region. Some of these guns are bought legally in the United States and then smuggled abroad to Mexico and other countries, aggravating problems of violence there.“

UN Organized crime markets/ firearms trafficking

 

[TK421]

That is all well and good for the most part and I am also happy that our national violent crime has been dropping over the years even though it is still comparatively high for the USA’s economic level of development, however:

There is internationally a pretty clear relationship between firearm restrictions and lower homicide. It gets wacky in dramatically less developed places with a weak rule of law but otherwise the obvious holds true that people owning and carrying portable death machines is not helpful or necessary.

It doesnt matter if legally owned firearms are being used for lawful purposes most of the time. If a highway has a 98% safety rate, nobody in their right mind would travel on it. If the numbers are not holding at an outrageously high level of safety, like what we all expect from any other enterprise or industry, then something is seriously wrong.

 

[Theo520]

There is internationally a pretty clear relationship between firearm restrictions and lower homicide.

No there isn’t, that is a figment of your imagination.
No research supports this fantasy.

 

[otjm]

The implication has been that if we get rid of guns, violence will stop (and that has been said publicly by many of the gun banners). the point is, people who wish to either kill or seriously injure others will do so even when pistols and revolvers are removed from society.

Perhaps the point was too subtle; but I have been listening to altogether too much blather in the form of gun laws designed to take away the rights of non-criminal citizens, all the while the laws on the books are not used effectively against criminals who use guns to commit crimes - Chicago being the prime example, but far from being an isolated case.

We have a significant part of the population which is afraid of guns, and wants to see all of them banned. Given that will not stop criminals from using them (major cities as the prime examples), it becomes more than just frustrating. I am tired of the two-faced hypocritical media and entertainment group who continue to mouth off how we have to eliminate guns, while traveling to and fro with their armed escorts/guards/security people. I do not resent their protection; but I seriously resent being treated as a fool.

I will repeat: the Center For Disease Control did a study/survey and estimated private citizens use a firearm to defend themselves approximately 2,000,000 times a year,. And the CFDC is by no means whatsoever a conservative organization. And that includes such use of a firearm as my brother reaching for his when threatened (he never drew - see above).