Hmmm, Not sure. I guess I overstated this. According to Yelp, there are gun shops in Chicago, but according to most, if not all coverage, there are not.
Not sure how those fit together, unless they are all newer than 2018?
Anyway, I tentatively retract my statement that there are no gun shops in Chicago until I’ve clarified the matter.
No, that will be useless since only 20% of the guns used in Chicago’s crimes come from Ill. Not to mention, it is likely illegal. Ill residents CAN’T buy guns in IN.
No, even tho there may be few gun stores in Chicago, people still can own handguns and those guns can be sold or stolen. The article by no means says that 100% of guns come from outside Chicago.
There is one gun store in Chicago , and several right outside the city limits: Chicago Arms Academy in Chicago, IL – Shooting.org
Here is the gun trace report:
Looks like new ones, opened after the SCOTUS dec.
Indiana has a population of a bit over 6.7 million people. According to the most recent statistics from the Indiana State Police, there were 954,355 people with active licenses to carry handguns (and people with carry licenses are presumably only a subset of gun owners, albeit in Indiana maybe a pretty large subset). In other words, nearly one-seventh of the population of Indiana are gun owners (and that’s the total population, not just adults), and that’s also a low-ball estimate that doesn’t account for people who just own hunting rifles, or shotguns, or keep an old revolver in their sock drawer.
The point being, regardless of any political issues (which there definitely would be), having the cops try to follow gun-owning Indianans around and see what they’re up to is simply a total non-starter on purely practical grounds. Any attempt to curtain smuggling of guns into Chicago will have to be more carefully targeted than that.
Ultimately, it will probably come down to the gangs themselves finally deciding the current level of violence is just bad for business as well as life and limb. This is what happened in LA following the bloody ‘80s between Bloods and Crips. Both sides just became so fatigued that they welcomed the intervention of non-governmental negotiators that included former gang members.
And just to give a little bit more perspective on that “954,355” number: There are fewer than 687,000 police officers in the entire United States of America.
The only way to fix it and make it stick is going to take a lotta time, just like what caused it. A lack of economic opportunity and leaving the poorest, most ignored and most neglected by society people alone (together) in segregated communities was the beginning. Let that fester and compound generation after generation, and try and be surprised by the result. If there must be a single starting point for the undoing, let it be education.
Oh, dammit, the education system relies upon local property taxes. Damn the luck, eh?
A bunch of people own guns, but they are not all shopping for guns, they already have them.
If whoever you have watching sees someone loading an arsenal into their trunk, I would think that it would be prudent to take note of that, and make sure that they are using all those guns for personal legal use.
As DrDeth said, there are other ways of following the paper trail, and I am all for those as well. But I do think that a few examples could be made.
Just as an example from personal experience. I know a bunch of people that are into drugs. Some of them like to grow drugs. There is a shop not far away that sells all sorts of growing materials. There is a rumor (I have no idea how true it is), that they take down license plates and check up on people who buy growing equipment. That has had a chilling effect on people buying equipment for growing stuff. So, just busting a couple people this way, and creating meat to the rumor that the police are watching, may have a similar chilling effect on straw sales.
Holy shit, are you seriously advocating for MORE broken windows policing?
It’s pretty simple.
Federal laws which basically treat guns like cars. You must have a license to own one, you must pass various safety classes and be re-certified periodically to keep them. You must keep insurance on them. You must have titles for them and have strict penalties if losses/thefts are not reported in a timely manner. Title transfers must be managed at the state or government level. Restrictions on sales of guns must be federally mandated to prevent border shopping and illegal transport. Illegal possession of a gun without proper licensing must come with harsh penalties.
That’s all very simple and we can piggy back on the DVM and Secretary of State’s offices to actually implement it. We know exactly how to do this.
What’s hard is the politics of it. 2A nutjobs will lose their shit if they need to insure and register their weapons due to a decades long bullshit boogeyman called the deep state conspiracy.
Second, further legalize drugs and make them easier to purchase legally. The legalization of MJ in Illinois will eventually lead to a marked reduction in violence in Chicago but it will take a bit of time. In the long run it’ll remove a hug amount of money from the gangs’ war chests. Legalizing drugs would make turf will be far less valuable and not worth fighting over. Young men won’t have “gangland drug seller” or “gangland enforcer” as a fast no-education required career choice any more.
More cops and more jails are not the answer. That’s a cure that’s as bad as the sickness.
Eventually you’ll need lots of works projects and incentives to start rebuilding these communities economically but until the gang violence is reduced that’s going to be kind of pointless.
Would violate the Constitution.
However, just so as you know, you dont need a license or a permit or anything to own a car. You need a licences of the car and yourself to drive one on public highways. Just exactly as guns are- you dont need any permit to own one, but you do need a permit to carry one concealed in public.
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Given a broad reading of the 2A, every prohibition on owning weaponry (including military grade weapons) is a violation.
Given a narrow reading, you can restrict the hell out of gun ownership without violation.
I didn’t expect this to turn into a 2d Amend debate.
I favor significant restrictions on guns, but I’m not sure that’s the answer for a couple of reasons. First, with as many guns as are already out there, I wonder if the cat isn’t out of the bag. Even if we stop selling new guns tomorrow, there still are hundreds of millions of guns in the US.
But also, plenty of places have guns, but don’t have the number of shootings as Chicago.
On the issue of police, my personal impression (not researched) is that the police in Chicago became increasingly militarized, first after OK City, and then especially so after 9/11. Cops in riot gear with automatic rifles, the purchase of armored vehicles… My (again unresearched) impression is that many police forces hired military vets, who may have brought training and attitudes that were well suited for fighting an enemy, but perhaps not as well suited for policing a domestic population.
I have not clearly perceived proposals from within the affected communities, as to what should be done. The situation in Chicago is predominantly young men of color shooting other young men of color, with other people of color being collateral damage. Sure, white cops should stop killing people of color. But what practical steps would reduce the small minority of people of color from killing each other?
Legalize all drugs?
Harsher penalties on sellers/users?
Jobs/business investment programs?
Education/childcare investment?
Spur public investment/institutions in affected areas?
Legalize many of them. Some, like MJ, should be treated like alcohol. Some, like cocaine or heroine, should be able to obtained with a doctor’s note that you have been informed as to the side effects, and that you are under health care to ensure that your body can handle the drugs, and have access to healthcare if you need it to deal with an addiction problem.
No penalties on users. Harsh penalties on sellers that sell the nasty stuff. Phentynol and Kronkadil and crap like that.
It shouldn’t be illegal to drink Windex. If someone is drinking Windex, then they need help, they don’t need to be treated as a criminal.
If someone is selling Windex as a sports drink, however, lock that fucker up.
Yes
Yes
Yes
This pretends that spending huge amounts of money to build opportunity has not already been tried. The Great Society and the War on Poverty spent billions in Chicago and crime kept going up for decades.
This is because no one is going to invest in places where their employees are shot, and their stores robbed. When crime goes down, investment and opportunities will go up.
We saw this work in New York which went from a basket case to the safest big city in america and the economy flourished. There is no reason to emulate failure when success can be emulated instead.
We need cops for sure; it’s a question of how to use them and how to support their mission, which are questions we absolutely need to address.
But at the same time, yes, we absolutely need police muscle on the streets. Crime occurs as a result of opportunity. There’s actually a really good article on ProPublica about the ‘dollar’ store franchises and violent crime (with a focus on St. Louis, not Chicago).
Part of the problem is that everyone (for a given value of “everyone”) feels the need to have a gun in certain neighborhoods because everyone else has one - the gangs need guns because the other gangs have guns, and the people not in gangs need guns because all the gangs have guns, and so on. And the more guns you have in this environment of escalation and fear, the more shootings you get.
As noted above with the Bloods/Crips situation, you need a broad willingness to de-escalate by the participants in order to reverse this cycle. And also as noted above, unlike LA you’ve got lots and lots of little gangs rather than a few big players, which makes negotiation much, much harder. The police, the churches, the schools - they are trying, but they’re fighting an uphill battle. If you could improve overall economic conditions to the point that it reduces the deprivation that drives people to join gangs in the first place it would certainly help, but that’s a heavy lift in itself.
Would more police help? Maybe - but only with the right kind of policing. An environment where the police become just another gang would only make things worse.
Then there’s the fact that people don’t really kill over weed. It happens sometimes if there are really big amounts, but that’s just people killing over money. There is far more violence associated with the harder drugs.
Basically, what I see that you are trying to claim here is that virtually no crime is tied to drugs. I reject that conclusion on the basis that it is absolutely ridiculous.