It makes it easier to check for degenerative brain conditions.
(And based on the incidents where the gunman left notes or social media rants, I suspect that understanding primary motivations isn’t that illuminating.)
Yes, but that’s not what happens. What would happen is that, because the police responded so quickly and arrested him before he even fired a shot, the charge would be far less, and he would be back on the street before you know it. Then he would do it again and, having learned from his first experience, would come in with guns blazing. Recidivism among violent criminals is the rule, not the exception.
Ideals are great, but they aren’t working. The rampant out of control crime in this society is proof of that.
Wasn’t the gunman in the Stoneman HS shooting apprehended alive? Has anything emerged about him? I imagine he’ll be the subject of intense analysis for as long as he draws breath.
What makes you say it’s rampant and out of control? Every metric I’ve seen implies that pretty much all crime has gone down in recent decades, and that if we’re not in historic low territory, we’re not all that far off.
As a general rule about recidivism, that may be true. Whether it’s true of this particular crime I don’t think we can say. Everyone who actually carries out a mass shooting ends up either dead or imprisoned for life. Do the ones who attempt to do so but are somehow prevented without getting caught tend to try again? It seems like an important question, but also one nearly impossible to answer, since we can’t identify the ones who don’t get caught.
And although there is obviously more crime than there ought to be, the crime rate has been consistently declining for the last three decades (with a slight uptick during the pandemic), so it seems wrong to describe it as being “out of control”.
Empirical evidence based on what I’m observing in my own urban environment. Mass shootings are daily news. There are common gun fights and outright assassinations on our expressways. Gangs are boldly smashing the windows of stores areas that were previously almost immune and walking away with tens of thousands of dollars in retail.
It is very beneficial for elected officials and the police to convince their constituencies that they are doing a good job and that things are getting better. I also had a 2-week unit in my Probability and Statistics class entitled, “How to Lie with Statistics”. So, with my apologies, color me suspicious.
How much of that is just overexposure due to the 24-hour news cycle? I mean I hear about EVERY mugging at a transit station now, on the online newspaper or online network affiliates. Used to be that stuff wouldn’t even make the newspaper, or if it did, it was buried WAY back somewhere in there.
But now, since they’re scraping for every click and view, it’s big news. And it makes it look like there’s more crime than there used to be, because EVERY incidence gets screen time, while it used to be that only the really crazy stuff made it out of the back pages of the paper.
“Crime is out of control” is also a core GOP narrative, no what the empirical evidence may be. And of course it’s all Democrats’ fault.
In my experience, living in the Chicago area…it’s not just that.
What Jasmine describes seems to be a definite and significant shift in what’s happened in this area in the past 2+ years, based on what I’ve seen.
We now have shootouts at sleepy suburban shopping malls in “nice” neighborhoods, a large number of smash-and-grab robberies in upscale shopping districts (such as the “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue), and shootings on the expressways are now depressingly common.
A friend and colleague of mine used to live in a condo overlooking Millennium Park in downtown Chicago; she was alarmed at just how much crime was suddenly happening just outside of her building; she witnessed several carjackings on the street in front of her condo. She wound up moving to Tennessee earlier this year, mostly because she no longer felt safe living in Chicago.
A few years ago, when I told people from other areas that I worked in Chicago (I live in the suburbs, but my office is in the Loop), they would often ask, “Aren’t you afraid, with all of the violence that goes on there?” My response, back then, was that yes, there is a lot of violence in Chicago, but at that time, it was largely occurring in parts of the city that I rarely went to. That is, from what I see, no longer the case at all.
Personally I haven’t noticed any change in Chicago the last few years, though I rarely go downtown and don’t follow local news super closely. Certainly there are specific crimes like mass shootings and smash-and-grab robberies which seem to be a lot more common than it used to be.
And although I commend your instincts toward skepticism, criminology is a major academic discipline populated by equally skeptical people doing actual research, and I’m not aware of anyone in the field seriously disputing that the crime rate is on a long-term downward trend.
Once upon a time, the newspapers and broadcast news saw themselves as a public service. (Being realistic here, that statement probably belongs with the “things were better in the 50s crap”) As network news became profit-oriented, and as newspaper readership declined, you got the position of “if it bleeds, it leads.” With the 24-hour news cycle, you’re hearing more about things happening. Yeah, in the 70s/80s, we would have heard about school shootings, but we might not have heard about the 31 rectums in the U-Haul in Idaho.
That being said, it’s not just the politicians crowing about the lower crime rate - those same statistics show up in the media. I know all about lies, damned lies, and statistics (thank you, Benjamin Disraeli) - I worked for 20 years as an Actuary, but these are pretty credible.
I’ll grant you that the “smash n grab” is new, but I have a feeling that once effective defenses or investigation/prosecution are developed, you’ll see that go down to nothing.
I was curious, so I found some stats on overall crime in Chicago. Below is a link to a PDF with year-end 2021 crime stats for the city, compared to the past few years. For CY 2021, crime was up 3% versus 2020, but down significantly versus the prior few years. It does vary by type of crime; murder is substantially higher than it was a few years ago, while sexual assault and theft were up a lot in 2021.
I don’t doubt that the long-term trend, nationally, is that crime is going down; what I was noting wasn’t even that crime, overall, is increasing, so much as that there does seem to be a change in where it is happening (and the stats in the link are only for the city itself, not the suburbs). That might be a short-term thing, or a longer term trend; I have no idea.
Or if you did, it was several days later buried somewhere in the “National” section of the newspaper.
So you are of the view that summary execution of gun carriers is, on the balance of probabilities, a sound crime control measure? After all, as you say, why would you want to turn them into drummer boys for their next radicalised cause?
No, but I’m not going to shed even a single tear, either. We have a big problem with recidivism in this society. Violent criminals who are arrested while already wearing an ankle monitoring device from a previous arrest & conviction is a common occurrence. Crime pays and pays big, and the criminals know it. My uncle was parked in a handicapped space in front of the main entrance of a busy Costco’s in the northern suburbs of Dallas, and a van pulled up and stole his catalytic converter in broad daylight in front of God knows how many people. The audacity and boldness of criminals is astounding, but they have good reason to be bold.
If the situation was dire enough to justify killing him on the spot, then it was dire enough to justify a long sentence.
And it’s even easier to lie with anecdotes without statistics. Show us the numbers. And if the numbers disagree with the numbers others are showing, then don’t just tell us that they’re lying with statistics: Show us what’s wrong with their numbers.
“Long sentence”? Violent criminals who are arrested while already wearing ankle monitoring devices from a previous conviction are a daily occurrence in this city. They can’t house all the criminals, so they literally let them go. The “monitoring” is a joke.
Yep, that’s the solution to the US having the worlds highest incarceration rate.
If privatisation via Corecivic or Geo Group can’t build prisons fast enough, just shoot 'em in the street.
So, now we’ve perverted the original OP about the police shooting an armed man at a a summer camp containing 150 helpless and innocent children and turned it into “just shoot 'em on the street”? Really?! REALLY?!
Moderating:
This is a general mod note to remember this is a Breaking News thread, and not one meant for far-ranging, derailing discussions. Please try to stick to the topic at hand.
If you wish to continue discussions about crime statistics, suitable punishments, etc., please start another thread.
Thanks.