Nice map. See that spot in northwest Georgia, the dark red? Not the mild pink, bordering on Tennessee. Atlanta. That's where I live and work. I listen to the news, and am quite aware of what the statistics are around here,
I knew where you lived, you've mentioned it before here.
Your awareness of the statistics doesn't change the
reason for the murder rate being so high.
We’ve seen this sort of pattern before in this country starting during Prohibition. The first major attempts at gun control were ostensibly enacted in response to the rising wave of mob related violence presented to the public eye by the news media of the time.
Trying to ban something that people want creates a black market, black markets comes to be dominated by criminal organizations who have the ability to smuggle and distribute said thing on a large scale, said criminal organization uses violence to develop and maintain their market share while also increasing corruption of public officials and employees, followed by said criminal organization deciding to diversify and expand into other criminal enterprises.
"The Mob" and what started out as a relatively small group of criminals pre- Prohabition grew into something that remained a major problem for well over 50 years and which still exists to some extent this very day.
The War on Drugs has repeated the pattern, with the unsurprising spread of violence into other ancillary endeavors and criminal enterprises.
And now you and others on the left are suggesting doing the same with firearms but incrementally, obviously in the belief that we won't catch on much like the apocryphal instructions for making frog soup*.
Those early gun control measures failed miserably at curbing the Maffia’s penchant for killing whenever it suited their business interest. What it did succeed in doing was making criminals of otherwise law abiding citizens and through prohibitive and punitive levels of taxation effectively turn the
complete exercise of a Constitutionally protected Right into a
privilege. Something the modern left is trying to do currently with our Right to Freedom of Speech, as protected by the 1st Amendment; by creating "Free Speech Zones" wherever they believe someone may voice opposition to their philosophies and goals in the public square, and through leftist controlled publicly funded institutions charging exorbitant "security fees" to conservative organizations and speakers when leftist speakers are not so charged. So much for the Left being champions of the individual and freedom of speech.
You might want to take note of the fact that, corrupt as many of them may have been, the members of both the House and the Senate in the era of Prohibition recognized the requirement for an Amendment to the US Constitution if they wished to have authority to make the sale and consumption of alcohol illegal in the United States. That without such an amendment that any laws passed to that end would be null and void from inception.
Just like every single gun control law.
While correlation does not automatically equal causation you may find it enlightening and perhaps suggestive to look at the most common denominators in the handful of high violence neighborhoods within the 65 or so counties, responsible for the majority of violent crime in the US.
-Predominantly within Democrat congressional districts.
-Predominantly within cities run by Democrat Mayors or City Councils.
-Predominately in areas with high levels of illegal drug sales and other crime.
-Predominantly within jurisdictions having very strong “gun control” laws.
-Predominantly within areas with very low levels of legal firearms ownership.
Again, while correlation does not equal causation, If I were a betting man I’d be placing my money on criminals and catastrophic levels of mismanagement of law enforcement and policing at the municipal level in those areas exacerbated by effectively stripping the law abiding residents of their ability to effectively defend themselves through a combination of onerous anti-gun laws and hostile and biased prosecution of those who use firearms in legitimate instances of self defense.
Once again, the problem is in 1/50th of the nations’s counties having these anomalous levels of violence, and in fact the aggregated area is far smaller than that 1/50th implies as even within those counties the violence is predominantly withing a few square blocks of each, roughly an area the size of Rhode Island.
For this the solution you advocate is infringing upon the rights of the law abiding everywhere else?
That’s on par with advocating warrant-less searches without probable cause of every personal computer in the US to catch cyber-criminals or warrant-less searches without probable cause of every single personal residence find to illegal opiates.
Both would be effective, both would reduce crime, both would improve the safety of “society”.
And both would be un-Constitutional and grounds to follow the same course of action as the Founding Fathers for similar reason.
Reduce illegal drug trafficking, either by legalizing that poison and letting people exercise their right to make the choice to use it or not as they will, and if they commit crimes to support their drug habit or while under the influence treat them as any other criminal who committed those acts. If they put themselves out of the gene pool then so be it.
It’s been mentioned that with Rights go Responsibilities & Obligations.
The corollary to that is with choosing Liberty comes choosing Risk & Danger, referred to by Samuel Adams as, “the animating contest of freedom”.
As to Safety, Public or otherwise, here is no “Safety”, just varying levels of risk.
“Safety” is a figment promised to small children by their mothers, exploiting the child’s ignorance of the world’s reality in order to make the children more biddable and obedient to the mother’s will.
* As the tale goes, for those who have not heard it before-
If you drop a frog into a pot of hot water it will jump right out.
But if you put the frog in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature of the water, over the course of many hours, the frog will keep swimming about obliviously until it's been cooked.
The left loves to make frog soup, otherwise known as incrementalism.
