NYT
...Chicago, a city with no civilian gun ranges and bans on both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, finds itself laboring to stem a flood of gun violence that contributed to more than 500 homicides last year and at least 40 killings already in 2013, including a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday.
To gun rights advocates, the city provides stark evidence that even some of the toughest restrictions fail to make places safer. “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey,” said Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. To gun control proponents, the struggles here underscore the opposite — a need for strict, uniform national gun laws to eliminate the current patchwork of state and local rules that allow guns to flow into this city from outside.
The essence of the whole gun control discussion here: If you see bans as bad and promoting more crime - there's plenty of evidence.
if you want to say the laws aren't nearly as far-reaching because some people elsewhere have guns, then you have evidence.
It's basically one's perspective mixed with vitriol, paranoia, unrealistic expectations and a good deal of bullshit on both sides of the discourse extremes.
My main concern is neither banning guns nor encouraging people to arm everybody with at least 1 functioning finger.
Lately, the police say they are discovering far more guns on the streets of Chicago than in the nation’s two more populous cities, Los Angeles and New York. They seized 7,400 guns here in crimes or unpermitted uses last year (compared with 3,285 in New York City), and have confiscated 574 guns just since Jan. 1 — 124 of them last week alone.
More than a quarter of the firearms seized on the streets here by the Chicago Police Department over the past five years were bought just outside city limits in Cook County suburbs, according to an analysis by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Others came from stores around Illinois and from other states, like Indiana, less than an hour’s drive away. Since 2008, more than 1,300 of the confiscated guns, the analysis showed, were bought from just one store, Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale, Ill., within a few miles of Chicago’s city limits.
This excerpt holds 3 issues that I believe bolster my concerns in all this: that the stricter a ban on guns is, the more illegal activity you will find; that illegal activity will be more and more illicit gun trafficking; and that we have well-known serious problem manufacturers and retailers that are unmolested while police elsewhere are raiding medical marijuana clinics and sentencing medical growers to huge obscene sentences and they hurt nobody.
Why is that gun store still open? Why does it still have a firearms dealer license?
Why is it far far far more important to focus on hurting and ruining marijuana smokers - particularly sick people with legal recommendations but a gunstore so deeply linked to violent crime is still open?
What the fuck?
As people set about to shore up this country's unarguably ineffective gun regulations they will need to talk about realistic action and they will have to make an effort to be aware of Unintended Consequences, such as the development of black market trafficking.
Some who are fervently anti-gun want to wholly ignore the black market dynamics, as if they are simply beside the point.
The information from the Chicago police clearly show that they are having more illicit gun traffic than other similar cities and the increased strictness of gun laws is the main variant.
it is just totally and exactly like 'drugs'. Marijuana has been banned in America for 80 years. No science supports it. You are not one whit safer with 850000 people needlessly arrested and legally ruined each year. Your kids are more exposed to illegal marijuana than they would be in a properly controlled situation.
Has the $20 billion a year spent on suppressing marijuana for the last 40 years made marijuana less available? um......err.......umm........ no.
Look at the violence in Mexico which is directly related to the MONEY to be made from TRAFFICKING (smuggling). Want that here?
As we try to stem the tide of violence we absolutely have to have eyes open and our heads out of the clouds (and elsewhere) if we will accomplish anything effective.
I will argue the last thing we'd want to do is implement a bunch of feel-good laws not connected to reality and find nothing changed, or the situation exacerbated.