Yeah, but my gun is just as effective as yours. There is a disconnect with you in that you are skilled with weapons. The overwhelming majority doesn't know how to handle guns properly and more importantly don't realize mortality.
You are/were LEO, right? I can't imagine you guys want to walk up on a vehicle that you have stopped and the odds are better that they have a gun.
The proliferation of guns makes us more unsafe. It's a fact. If you live in a household with a firearm you are much more likely to die by a firearm, and don't get me started on the suicide rate.
I get it, and I realize that there is no easy answer, but we are dying. Americans are dying. Cigarettes were a problem back in the day, right? Why aren't gun manufacturers held to that same standard? As someone was saying here, if Mexico got cut off from the gun supply then the big gun companies would go bankrupt.
They deal in death, and business is fantastic. There is never a shortage of gangsters doing gangster shit. Strawman purchases to let the cartels keep killing each other while on the other hand we vilify the people using those guns. We are giving them the means to do it and we are getting a steady supply of coke, brown, and fenty. This world is so fucked.
Ok. Where to start. Yeah, I am a retired LEO. I never had a problem doing a traffic stop with a legal firearm owner in the car. I simply told them if I don’t see yours, you won’t see mine. It always got a laugh and a “oh god no.”
Firearms manufacturers should not be held to the same standard as tobacco companies because the guns are doing exactly what they were designed to do and if they do that, then the product works. It’s not the gun manufacturing companies’ fault that someone chose to use their weapons in a criminal manner. Cigarette companies hid the dangers of smoking for decades. It’s not the same.
And let’s say we outlawed guns tomorrow and everyone turned their guns in. The criminals would not and now they know that no homeowners have guns, so they would have no fear breaking into homes and robbing people or worse. I am not giving up my guns. Period. Point. Blank. I don’t have a lot, but I like the thought of knowing I can protect my family if things ever go down. Not really an issue in my nice ass neighborhood. I don’t carry anymore. I spent way too much time with a gun on my hip. But I would like to be able to exercise my second amendment constitutional rights if I choose to.
And yes, people ar dying, and it’s awful, but all the shitheads with firearms that are felons or underage need to held responsible with long sentences.
It’s juveniles and felons with firearms that are your most likely shooters. Age groups 18-24, 17-30, and 18-20 are the groups most likely to commit gun crime. 17-30 covers the most shootings with only a few outliers outside of that age group. 18-24 is where most of your shootings occur. And people aged 18-20 are three times more likely to commit gun crime than other groups, however, juveniles under 17 are the fastest rising group with 14 and 15 year olds becoming increasingly involved in gun crimes.
Out of an average of 20,000 murders every year, 54% of victims are black with 89% of the offenders being black. So that’s over 10,000 black murders/year with almost all the shooters being black. Of the less than 10k white murders, 79% of the murderers are white. This proves two things. 1. We tend to murder within our own race. And 2. Black shootings and shooters are ridiculously and overwhelmingly punching above their weight class and over represented in all gun categories. and when we break it down even further, into percentages, black males are far more likely to be shooters than women, which means that 6% of the population are responsible for 54% of murders or just over 10k murders/year.
White mass shooters/school shooters get All The attention, but there are 100 people murdered per day by firearms which is about 7-10 school shootings worth of victims/day. And almost all of those firearms murders are handguns.
And this doesn’t even touch the approximately 100k non fatal shootings/year. I can’t find the stats on that, but I read that once. And again, even more disproportionately, it’s black suspects and black victims. And these numbers don’t count the number of firearm related crimes where no one is shot for example, armed car jackings or robberies on the streets.
You know whose not doing these shootings? Legal gun owners. So you want to punish and suspend the constitutional rights of law abiding Americans based on the actions of shitheads with guns?
I have a solution and two stories. First, the story. My first felony arrest was serving a warrant on a guy that shot someone else. His name was Michael but everyone called him “diddy”. He was on parole and showed up at his probation officers office for a visit and we were waiting to serve the warrant on him. We arrested him without incident and he ended up getting convicted of that crime. He was already a felon and he got the absolute lowest sentence for a felony that he could get. We called them 1+1 crimes where they serve exactly 1 year (mandatory minimum for felony) and 1 day. The day he got out, he went right after the guy he shot before he was locked up and tried to shoot him again and they got into a shootout in the streets. Now this time, he got a little bit more than a 1+1, but not much.
The second story involves a guy I had been arresting since he was a juvenile. He was caught with guns while he was a juvenile and little was done. His name was Chuckie (street name, “blackie”)He was a drug dealer and some crack whore stole his drugs. He tracked her down to a house, knocked on the door and then fired 8 shots through the door before kicking in the door and dragging the girl outside. He then held the gun to her head and pulled the trigger but the gun misfired and by then, he heard the sirens and ran. He was later caught and convicted and served a 1+1. The very night that he got out, he went to a club and there was a shooting where some dude named “spoon” got shot in the gut. We heard the shots and were only a block away. We pulled up and jumped out of the car seeing spoon lying on the ground across the street. I start approaching him when I see some guy take a shooter’s stance and started ahooting at us. I heard bullets whizzing above my head. We took cover and he took off running.
We gave out his description and he was picked up running a block away(more on that in a minute). After he ran away, I went up to spoon and put my hand over his wound u til fire department could get there. While I had my hand on his wound, his shitbag friends blamed the police for their friend getting shot because we couldn’t control the Cleveland thugs that shot him. They then start spitting on the back of my bald head. FD arrives and takes him and then a very large riot breaks out. There are six of us, 8 if you count the two with the shooter. The riot is so bad that the Lt orders the other unit to release the shooting suspect and respond to our scene. He had no gun on him because he threw it on the roof of a business and it was found later that year. The only way to tie him to the shooting was to do a gun shot residue on his hands and arms, but the tests were at HQ. So he is released and the two officers come to the scene of the riot and we eventually get things under control.(the riot is a hell of a story by itself).
Guess who the shooter was….Chuckie/blackie out fresh from his 1+1 and he got away with shooting at me because the prosecutor said “no gun, no gsr, no charges” even though I saw him shooting at me.
So, I tell you these two stories because they both involve shootings, and felons with firearms and a juvenile with firearms. As you can see, the justice system doesn’t do its job in locking away offenders when they are caught. Murder and shooting rates have a pathetic clearance rate in most big cities.
Almost all of our murders have been guys from Cleveland, your hometown, and why I hate your hometown (not because of you, I like you-but because of your criminals in my town) I have done hundreds upon hundreds of Triple I’s on suspects from Cleveland. A triple I is an FBI report of every time a suspect has ever been fingerprinted. All arrest data when a suspect is fingerprinted is sent to the FBI. It includes convictions as well as arrests with no convictions. Every single triple I that I have run on someone from Cleveland has been pages upon pages of arrests. Every single one had felonies and convictions on them. Most had “malicious wounding with a firearm” and “robbery with firearm specification” and I would look at the time served and they would say six months, or 18 months, or 24 months. All very short sentences for the gun crimes being committed. In Philly, the DA larry krasner (lowercase letters because I don’t respect him) refuses to charge juveniles as adults or prosecute felons with firearms. Why? Because he said in a news conference I used to post but can’t find it right now, that he refuses to prosecute these cases because they ALL involve black or brown suspects and there are already too many of those locked up. So he refuses to prosecute these cases two biggest groups of offenders of guns crimes-juveniles and felons for carrying guns. Meanwhile, his streets are running red with blood. He does, however, blame the NRA for promoting a culture of violence and blames other states for their lax gun laws which he says are flooding his streets with guns.
My solution is simple. If you are a juvenile caught with a gun, you get locked up for at least two years, possibly until the age of 21. If you are a felon with a firearm, you get an automatic 5 years. If you commit a gun crime where no one is shot, ten years in prison. If you are involved in a shooting, you get a min of fifteen years if it is non fatal. If you’re a felon with a firearm and you shoot someone, 20 years. If you murder someone with a firearm, 30-life depending on criminal history.
You don’t need to punish law abiding citizens with super restrictive gun laws, you simply need to harshly punish the gun offenders. And you need to focus on the most likely groups to shoot people. We need better education and need to focus more resources in poverty stricken areas, since that is where the most shootings take place.
Edit: I thought I was responding to
@WklySportsMemes eho is from Cleveland. Sorry to both.
https://ammo.com/research/gun-violence-among-black-americans
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a9.htm
https://thegunzone.com/what-age-group-commits-the-most-gun-violence/
