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Existing Gun Control Measures

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Clarissa

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Returning to the subject of gun control, I have to wonder, why don’t the eminently reasonable gun control measures that do exist get enforced?

Take Chicago’s Memorial Weekend massacre. Two of the shooters (three, according to some sources) had recently been arrested on gun violations. And almost immediately released. These are violent felons who aren’t supposed to have guns. They were arrested with guns. Why weren’t they prosecuted?

This has been going on for a long time. Chicago police arrest criminals on gun violations according to the existing gun laws. But the prosecutors refuse to charge. It has gotten so bad that police try to go directly to the feds (which normally police don’t enjoy doing) over the heads of prosecutors because at least this way there’s a possibility of taking the criminals off the streets for a while.

As I keep saying, guns aren’t a subject that I’m interested in. But I am interested in lies. The exact same people who bemoan the lack of gun control measures aggressively refuse to enforce gun control measures in places they control. Why is that? Several of the shootings this past weekend in Chicago could have been prevented if the existing gun control measures were enforced. Why ask for more gun control measures if you don’t use the ones already there?

I have to conclude that something else is going on. Let’s ban AR-15s, they say. OK, let’s. And then what? Is that going to be enforced? Why should we assume it will? Why should we assume it won’t be enforced selectively in a way that won’t reduce gun violence? Because if the goal really were to reduce gun violence. . . see everything I have written before. Violent crime has exploded in several big cities since May of 2020. These are cities with strict gun laws. That, once again, don’t get enforced. You unleash violence, defund the police, and then try to disarm law-abiding people while putting violent criminals back in the streets. Would it be rational to assume that this is truly about preventing gun violence? I can’t see how it would.

13 responses to “Existing Gun Control Measures”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    I remember this coming up not just in Chicago crime, but even in some of the mass shootings. There was a TX church shooting where the loser had purchased firearms illegally– he wasn’t allowed to own them because of a previous DV conviction from his time in the military. Why didn’t that stop him from buying guns? Because the military was backlogged on releasing that information to whatever relevant database was supposed to be checked. And had not released it for years.

    Do let’s try enforcing the laws already on the books, before we add more, yeah?

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I’m concentrating on Chicago because I follow the situation there in great detail but absolutely, this is a wide-spread problem. Last week, I was reading a police procedural set in San Francisco, and the same problem is described there. The novel was published 15 years ago. This looks like a long-standing, deliberate strategy. A strategy that contributes to turning these cities into unlivable hellholes.

      The conversation never moves anywhere because people refuse to see reality. All I see on social media are inane and repetitive rehashings of the “but in Europe” argument. Forget about Europe. What’s up in Chicago? It’s a lot closer, so why not talk about it?

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        …and all it would take to resolve a lot of it, is hiring someone to do the data entry. Why does that fail to happen in so many places? Because the laws didn’t come with funding for it? Because the relevant people don’t actually care? Because there are no penalties for not doing it? Why?

        That’s the gun-control issue we should be talking about, locally and nationally. It doesn’t make for sexy headlines, but it’s important. If you think more laws is the solution to not enforcing current laws…

        I assume what’s going on in Chicago is that the judiciary and elected officials are all owned, in one way or another, by the gangs and drug cartels. That’s a somewhat different problem, but equally important. Has that kind of corruption ever been successfully addressed in another city/state? If so, how was it done? Perhaps something could be learned, there.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          NYC did it in the nineties. Of course, now all that work is being undone but NYC used to be the textbook example of how to turn things around in a crime-ridden big city and make it safe. Police delegations from all over the world would come to NYC to learn how to do it. So it’s not some pipe-dream. It’s recent reality right here in this country. If somebody really cared about reducing violent crime and if black lives really mattered, everybody would be imitating those policies. But the reality is the exact opposite.

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  2. PMan Avatar
    PMan

    Multiple of recent mass shooters should have been stopped by the background check system but the relevant authorities had failed to enter the information into the system.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Exactly. There are a lot of existing measures that aren’t getting any follow-through.

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  3. CRC Avatar
    CRC

    The interesting pattern here is that over the last three decades only about three percent of all homicide in the United States has been committed with a rifle of any sort. That’s between 300 to 500 murders a year in a population of 330 million, that number includes all these graphic mass homicides that grab our attention and incite hysteria. Many of these rifles are not “assault style” semi automatic military grade rifles, which means banning semi automatic rifles would not prevent any appreciable amount of gun crime.

    The vast majority of gun homicide has been committed with handguns, between 50 and 60 percent. These are the weapon of choice, because they are easily transported, illegally trafficked and concealed. Most of these pistols are semi automatics with easily changed magazines, and in the absence of “assault rifles” killers will default to them as their weapon of choice in mass homicides, like they have in places like Chicago with “assault rifle” bans. Note that the issue of regulating magazine size is a moot one, because a trained shooter can carry many magazines and change them quickly while shooting, and large magazines make guns more unwieldy to use and increase the odds of malfunction which is why experienced shooters usually avoid them.

    The true reason that they want to ban semi automatic “assault rifles” is that they are the best tactical infantry weapons. They are exactly the weapons that the 2nd Amendment exists to protect, the precise weapons that a popular “well regulated militia” would need to resist a tyrant.

    That’s exactly why the United States government is currently flooding Ukraine with tens of thousands of the exact same type of carbine used by Salvador Ramos to murder children in Texas this past weekend. “Democratic” tools like Michael McFaul ( https://mtracey.substack.com/p/surprise-the-texas-shooter-and-the ) want to sends millions of them to Ukraine in order to turn it into a beehive of popular resistance to that tyrant Putin. They want to strip Americans of those very same weapons in order to prevent any such popular resistance to tyranny from ever developing here.

    See the pattern? You don’t care about the 2nd Amendment, but they do. Maybe you ought to start caring, too.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. CRC Avatar
      CRC

      Correction: in the first sentence, second paragraph: “The vast majority of overall homicide has been committed with handguns..”

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Responded in a separate post because my comment was getting too long.

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  4. CRC Avatar
    CRC

    Another comment: Another thing that is interesting is the incandescent hypocrisy of the so called Left viz. race in this situation. Every major policy pattern – whether it be regarding guns, drugs, industry and trade, abortion and contraception, education, housing, welfare – has resulted in the infantilization, imprisonment and death of African Americans, and the destruction of the integrity of their families and communities.

    The true problem with gun crime in the United States is black on black hand gun homicide. Two thirds to three quarters of homicide victims are black, well over half the perpetrators. The reason this crime is out of control is that African American males have been largely made irrelevant and hence redundant in our economy. They strip the inner city of jobs and opportunity, then flood it with drugs, guns, Planned Parenthood clinics. Alienated African American males violate the law en masse and end up spending their vital years in prison.

    Listen not to what they say: watch what they do. The overall policy pattern since about say 1963 (the Great Society) amounts in effect to a eugenics and genocidal depopulation regimen.

    Black elites like Lori Lightfoot are complicit in this program. The psyops runs deep, and they are bent on creating as much chaos as possible, and extending this same pattern of anomie and human obsolescence as widely as possible across the plebeian population of all races.

    There is no other explanation for policy making such as this:

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/insanity-california-state-senate-passes-bill-ends-mandatory-reporting-threats-made-students/

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      When I was still on the Left, I tried to bring this up several times. The result is always the same and always confusing. “Ah, black on black crime! It’s a talking point!” people respond. Every time you mention crime rates in St Louis, this is always the response. “Black on black! Pshaw!” Like it’s a magic incantation that will exorcise the problem.

      I don’t care if it’s black on black or green on purple. People are dying twenty miles away from where I sit right now. Let’s talk about this, maybe? But no, their eyes glaze over and they chant, “black on black! Talking point! Scoff, scoff!”

      Always drew me nuts.

      Liked by 1 person

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    2. PMan Avatar
      PMan

      I agree with you mostly, but not per se on the malice part. Don’t always attribute to malice that which can be attributed to ignorance/incompetence/stupidity.

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  5. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    Why would they want to disarm their friends from the BLM riots when there are Trump supporters with guns out there?

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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