Inspired by a [del]rant[/del] comment made in the “South Side of Chicago” thread:
D.C. Chicago. New York. New Orleans. Sure looks like a trend. Here in Minnesota, Ramsey County, which contains the city of Saint Paul, had a gun permit denial rate in 2007 of 14%. Only one other county in the state had a comparable rate, and that was a county that denied one application out of five submitted. St. Paul also has the highest concentration of African-Americans in an otherwise largely white state.
Guns are more likely to be heavily regulated in a city.
That’s because a city has a large number of PEOPLE.
If the same held true in rural areas, you might be on to something, but an urban area tends to regulate guns more heavily because more can go wrong when more people are around.
One of our nation’s unspoken tragedies. If only there were a way to increase the flow of firearms into our poorest, blackest neighborhoods, we’d really see them turn around.
I would be thrilled to death if guns were banned from the hoi polloi EVERYWHERE. Rich, poor, black, white, country, city…those who badly wanted, or needed, a gun, would be scrutinized, made to jump through bureaucratic hoops, and pay a stiff fee, sign legal looking papers, and be fingerprinted.
The history of gun control is the history of racism. The two are intertwined and have been for 250 or so years.
Now it’s harder to see the correlation because the laws apply to everyone, but no one seriously wants to take away the saddle gun of Joseph Smith in eastern Wyoming.
Feel free to mock the cites, because it’s easier than accepting that it’s low income minorities that gun control is and always has been primarily aimed at.
Indeed, Lumpy just rattled off a list of historically liberal cities (and a rather incomplete one at that). Any city the size of New York or Chicago, probably anywhere in the world, is going to have black people in it, just by the law of averages.
When I was in Junior High, I lived in a small city which was the biggest city in 100 miles. We had a rifle range in the basement of the school, and I took hunters safety as part of PE and one day two of the students brought their guns in to show them to us. The teacher brought her compound bow in to show us. She used it for deer hunting. In that junior high school, in the middle of the city, I was closer to hunting grounds than I am now to most of the stores that I shop at, but it was still a city. The percentage then of the town that was black was about 12%. The city as a whole was not freaked out about guns because random shootings were not something that happened there. Sure people occasionally got shot, but usually by people they knew. There was not a whole lot of competition in the local illegal drug market, and disputes were largely settled without gunfire.
I think the reason that big cities are seeking to regulate guns is that so many in the cities have withdrawn from the normal social order and are willing to use firearms to enforce the alternative social order they have chosen, and many who have not forsaken the normal social order get literally caught in the crossfire and so are seeking within the normal social order to remove the guns. It has nothing inherently to do with race. If you look into it, you will find many of those advocating the most vocally for the elimination of hand guns in urban areas are themselves black.
So gun control laws in predominantly black cities are a form of racism? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assumed people in predominantly black cites are predominantly black. Are they discriminating against themselves when they pass a gun control law?
*“The laws of [false utility] are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator?” *
Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 1764, Chapter 40
I live just outside Jackson, MS (#4 on the list above) and, while I cannot find gun permit denial rates, I can tell you guns are not banned or prohibited.
I dunno, Lumpy. I thought the only reason they could deny you a permit in Minnesota is if you had criminal convictions.
Given my own personal experiences with criminal types, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised that so many of them are filing for gun permits under circumstances where any normal person would recognize that they aren’t going to get it. I’m also quit certain that a large percentage of those turned down will blame other reasons (racism, persecution, etc) for not getting the permit rather than their own actions which led to their inelligibility.
Before I’d scream “racism”, I’d like to see a breakdown of the races of those denied permits and the reason for denial.
Big City wise, I think there’s a tendency for large police departments involved with areas of poverty to see more gun crime and therefore want to take sterner measures to eliminate guns. (treating the symptom, not the disease) Unfortunately, this then goes back to the problem of allowing the police to make or create laws, which has a bad tendency to create INjustice.
MN is indeed a shall-issue state. However, according to my source¹ “In 2007 Ramsey County had 643 applicants with 87 denials, equating to a denial rate of 14%. The most common reason for denial? ‘Danger to Self or the public’, which is a Sheriff’s catch-all reason for denial if the applicant can’t be denied for any other reason. <snip> Only 40% of those denied bothered to file an appeal <but> The reversal rate was only 25% for those applicants who appealed their denial.”
In addition, it mentions Washington County, which borders Ramsey County to the east along the MN-WI border: “Washington County’s previous sheriff, Jim Frank, would add the Latin phrase ‘Sub Recuso’ under his signature on permits that he issued. Sub Recuso translates roughly to ‘Under Protest’. The new Sheriff of Washington County, Sheriff William Hutton, mailed letters to all permit holders in his county, apologizing for the defaced permits and offering to replace them free of charge”.
¹"Minnesota Permit to Carry a Firearm Fundamentals", Library of Congress Control Number 2008933390 ISBN 978-1-60702-536-8
Well, if based only on my personal experience with high ranking police and retired police officers; you’re not going to see me defending them too hard and saying that they’re in the right here. My experience shows that they’ll do whatever they think they need to do to enforce their own decisions, right or wrong.
But I’d still like to see some kind of break down on the people denied.