Louisiana's homicide rate would be low if it wasn't for New Orleans,
Illinois would too if not for Chicago,
Michigan if not for Detroit,
and on down the line...
We have a cities problem, not a gun problem.
You have a cities problem because we have an open market for guns in this country.
Is the 'open market for guns' available to other parts of the country besides cities?
(That's a rhetorical question, BTW)
Why then does the carnage seem to be concentrated in the cities?
If it were the availability of guns from this 'open market', wouldn't the death toll be a little more widespread?
Is the world just a great mystery to you? NYC has a population about the size of VA, in fact, it's a little bigger than VA, so the proper comparison is a city to a whole state. Gun deaths are best evaluated by population and not location. It is obvious that cities have some unique problems, because they are cities. The biggest problem with our large cities is many are surrounded by areas where it's very easy to get firearms. Our large cities have economic, drug and street gang problems. Guns and street gangs just do not mix and guns make it easy to kill. If the area surrounding our major cities have tough gun control laws, the cops will get the guns off the streets and there will be less homicide by guns. If the area around a major city is an open market for guns, there will be plenty of homicides by guns in that city. With the same per capita police protection, the cops in a city can reduce per capita crime more than in a state of equal population. The reason is the people are more concentrated and that allows the resources of the police to be more focused on crime.
The carnage is concentrated in the cities, because people are concentrated in the cities and we have a bunch of rural rednecks, who won't make common sense solutions to crime. What is the big deal about universal background checks to purchase weapons? What is wrong with waiting (or cooling off) periods to buy firearms? What is wrong with having controls at gun shows so criminals can't easily get firearms? If rednecks want to have their gun shows and shoot themselves, go ahead, but you don't have to supply criminals and the Mexican Drug Cartels with weapons in the process! Are you just too dumb to figure out a better system and realize you are creating the violence that you buy guns to protect yourselves against.
The gun nuts are just going to have to grow up and understand that their only right involving arms is the populace can't be disarmed and the individual has no right to possess weapons that are a public safety issue, meaning a severe public safety issue. A government can't lawfully say the populace can't have pistols, rifles or shotguns, but it can put all kinds of regulations on what qualifies for one of those weapons. The government can and has made laws prohibiting the populace from possessing certain weapons or accessories, like exploding bullets, silencers or a pistol that can shoot a shotgun shell. The rationale is there is no good reason for the populace to possess those things, so they make it a crime, unless the registration of these weapons are transferred in a very specific manner.
Consider for a moment the most obvious statistic involving gun violence! Around 60% of total homicides and 90% of homicides by firearms are done using handguns. Handguns are an obvious choice, because they can be easily concealed. Now let's compare this very common weapon to a less common, but much more dangerous one:
Political scientist Earl R. Kruschke states, regarding the fully automatic firearms owned by private citizens in the United States, that "approximately 175,000 automatic firearms have been licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (the federal agency responsible for administration of the law) and evidence suggests that none of these weapons has ever been used to commit a violent crime, with the exception of two, which were used by law enforcement officers."[129]
Source:
Gun politics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Now that isn't many weapons and is on the order of a thousandth of the amount of handguns in America, but the track record of preventing automatic weapons being used to commit violent crime in America is very impressive, except for cops who thought they could get away with it.
Automatic weapons are legal in most states, but they are controlled not by the tax, but the supply. If the supply was more and the price wasn't so expensive, there would be more automatic weapons in America. There are some controls on automatic weapons that could be useful to prevent handgun or other gun violence. Automatic weapons are registered and can only have that registration transferred at specific locations. The person purchasing an automatic weapon is given a thorough background check and fingerprinted. Considering the violent history of automatic weapons in American history, are there lessons that can be learned from the National Firearms Act of 1934 and applied to present day gun violence? It should be obvious that this gun control law did stop gun violence.
Restricting the supply wouldn't work for handguns and other normal weapons like rifles and shotguns. The country has too many of those weapons to ever jack up the price from a restricted supply. Background checks, registration and restrictions on transferring that registration would help by making a background check required to purchase the weapon from another person. Fingerprinting would help, particularly with handguns, which contribute to about 60% of the homicides and about 90% of the homicides by guns in America.
Even if we required universal registration of firearms, we are going to have some people believe they can game the system and get away with it. There will always be drug addicts and others who can pass a background check, but will behave recklessly and they know the odds of connecting them to illegally transferring a weapon are slim. They will claim the weapon was stolen, if it's ever discovered in the wrong hands. To prevent that from happening, that's why I suggested requiring a renewable registration, where the person has to prove they still have the weapon in their possession each year. To discourage ever using a rifled firearm in a crime, I suggested periodic ballistics testing that is sent to the FBI and kept on file. That takes the easy to kill and get away with it right out of having that gun. If that gun is used in a crime, it's now a witness against the person who used it. To prevent people owning unregistered firearms, I suggest severe penalties, like possession of an unregistered handgun or various unregistered "assault" type weapons is a felony and let's not play games, these weapons are what the laws in a country, state, or city say they are. Once convicted of that felony, the person has lost their gun rights for even registered weapons.
I think this kind of gun control would drastically decrease gun violence in America and it could be scheduled so the person could bring all their firearms in to be checked and renewed at the same time each year. Any inconvenience or expense would be minor and would be offset by the peace of mind that living in a safer country would bring. The NRA should be pushing this agenda for public safety and not pushing policies to sell more guns to criminals and the law abiding citizen for self-defense. The NRA should be encouraging trigger locks to prevent accidental shootings and dogs to warn against home intrusion, alerting the home owner. Trying to maximize gun sales and encouraging deadlier weapons will not make this country safer.
