Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: gun control

  • If you believe in gun control…

    …this articleby Nicholas J. Johnson in the Wake Forest Law Review might ruin your day.

    My summary: Stop wasting time trying to take away people’s guns. It won’t work. Deal with it.

    300,000,000 guns is a lot of guns to confiscate, especially from people armed with guns.

    (thanks to D.K. for sending me the article)

    And then as I’m writing this I see this story about another crazy murderer in Belgium (what is it about Belgium? They seem nice enough…). He stabbed a dozen or so babies and infants and three adults. Three dead all together.

    Then he got on his bike and road away (and was soon apprehended).

    While gun lovers will probably point out that this wouldn’t have happened if only the babies had been packing, I can’t help but be happy that this murderous nut didn’t have a gun.

    But liking countries with fewer guns (much fewer) doesn’t suddenly make gun control in this country any more possible.

  • Guns and violence

    I’m too swamped with final papers right now to give this the justice it deserves (But I will give this link to other posts on gun control). I’m sure some of you might have some thoughts on this email I just received. Please comment and discuss.

    I live in VT which has very liberal (ha ha) gun laws. I’m not a gun owner and as a good liberal growing up in Brookline Mass, I was of course pro gun control. Now I have sort of come to the conclusion that the NRA argument, “Guns don’t kill people…”, is to some extent correct.

    One telling statistic I heard (probably wrong but it was on CSPAN) from an author who wrote a book about airline security after 9/11 was that in the first three months in 1973 after the FAA mandated full passenger screening there were 5,000 guns confiscated. Since I had never heard of gunfights on commercial airliners it made me curious about whether how we Americans, have changed. Also in Israel where lots of people carry guns, assault rifles at that (the Mumbai terrorists would have been dead in about 15 minutes if they had tried what they did in Israel), and yet they seem, other than the ongoing conflict, to have relatively low rates of gun violence?

  • Oops

    “Massachusetts Chief Charged Over Event Where Boy Killed Self With Uzi.” The story by Michael Levenson from the Boston Globe. I kind of feel sorry for the Chief. It’s interesting the father wasn’t charged. Not that I think charging him would accomplish anything. It’s just that I can’t imagine the same courtesy going out to somebody from, shall we say, the “inner city.”

  • Lax gun laws? More killings.

    There’s a shocker. The story’s by Cheryl Thompson in the Washington Post.

  • More on guns and Florida crime

    ‘Guns are everywhere,’ Orlando police chief says A surge in murder and gunfire locally since the end of the federal assault-weapons ban in 2004.
    […]
    Florida law makes it easy for any adult without a criminal record to buy a gun. Yet many legally purchased guns end up being used by criminals. The state routinely turns up in law-enforcement surveys as one of the top three sources of firearms that turn up in crimes elsewhere.
    […]
    The 9 mm pistol reigns as the state’s most-popular crime weapon.
    […]
    Drug dealing was the most common crime connected to assault weapons in Orange County.
    […]
    Cops consider assault weapons the deadliest firearms on the street. … One riddled a girlfriend’s car for jilting him. Another robbed a gas station, leaving behind his home address on a receipt for the just-purchased assault weapon. A third, who went shooting near his home, simply described himself as angry.
    […]
    Looking over the data, Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary said that Florida has become much more dangerous — for residents and police officers — since the end of the weapons ban.

    “There should be a huge concern not just here locally but across the nation about the huge increases in the numbers of assault weapons and high-power semiautomatic pistols that our deputies and police officers are coming across,” he said. “This shows that without the ban, the criminal element has definitely taken advantage of the market.”


    Henry Pierson Curtis writes more in the Orlando Sentinel. Read the whole story here. And my previous post on Florida, guns, and crime is here.

  • Florida Guns Increase Crime

    Florida Guns Increase Crime

    OK you gun fans (and I know you’re out there), explain this to me: I read in the paper today that licenses for concealed handguns have almost doubled in Florida since 2005. “Interesting.” I thought. “I wonder what’s happened to crime.” So I checked. Murder, robbery, and burglary are all up.

    Now I know this is a simplistic analysis. But could somebody tell me something else that happened in Florida except another 200,000 people walking around with guns that causes this increase in crime between 2006 and 2007? Criminals can get concealed gun permits, too.

    Let’s say crime went down, wouldn’t gun nuts be shouting about how this proves guns equal safety? Well, now crime is up. Where’s the clamor? (There are some good schools of criminal justice in Florida. I’d bet they’re working on such reports right now.)

    Remember, I’m not a huge fan of gun control (but purely for pragmatic reasons: I don’t think gun control controls guns), but I do think guns equal crime. Florida seems to show this, no?

    You can read the newspaper article (which interestingly does not talk at all about crime rates) and look at the crime stats here (it’s a PDF file).

    update:
    Florida crime trends over time (thanks to DJK). Looks like crime was going down until2005.

  • Guns 1. Criminals 0.

    Robbery try at repair shop leaves man dead, police say

    August 30, 2008
    Baltimore Sun

    The owner of a Northwest Baltimore auto repair shop fatally shot a man during an attempted robbery of his business yesterday evening, city police said.

    Police spokesman Sterling Clifford said this was the second time that Joseph Goldman has shot someone trying to rob his business. Clifford said he did not know when the first incident occurred or whether the person died. Goldman declined to comment through a woman who answered his cell phone last night. In the most recent incident, two men entered Joe’s Garage about 6:30 p.m. and showed a handgun, said Officer Troy Harris, a department spokesman. The owner grabbed his own handgun and fired shots at the men, hitting one. The injured man was taken to Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police did not release his name last night. The second man fled; police were searching for him, Harris said.

  • More guns = More deaths.

    More guns = More deaths.

    I don’t like guns, but I’m not a gun control nut. I think there are a good many reasons that people can and should have guns. If I were a store owner in a dangerous neighborhood, I’d want a gun. If I were a resident in a dangerous neighborhood, I’d want a gun. If I were a hunter, I’d want a gun. If I lived in wilderness, I’d want a gun.

    But guns, equal death, not freedom. At least in a democracy. To me, this is obvious. But maybe it’s not. Here’s a little picture to make the point. For European countries (and America)–what I like to call civilized nations, the kind of countries I want to be compared to–the correlation is strong: the higher the percentage of households with guns, the more people get killed by guns. Duh.

    Of course the US tops the list. Switzerland is the only country listed with more guns, and their firearm death rate is lower than the US, because there’s more going on in American homicides than just guns. We’ve got the war on the drugs. We’re also rare in that we combine lots of guns and lots of poverty. One or the other is usually OK, but not both.
    Sorry the graphic is hard to read. Clicking on it makes it much bigger.

    There is no country with few guns and a lot of murder.

    By the way, my favorite argument for central government and gun control isn’t on the list. That’s Somalia. Land of the free.

  • In Texas School, Teachers Carry Books and Guns

    I don’t see what the problem is. And I’m a liberal who supports gun control. I’m all for a assault riffle and handgun free America. But it’s not going to happen.

    Maybe as a cop I’m not afraid of guns (in the right hands). Maybe as a teacher I want one. But really, I don’t.

    But I do have students in my class with guns. I got no problem with that. And I wouldn’t want guns in all school. But I don’t see the problem here.

    In Texas School, Teachers Carry Books and Guns

    HARROLD, Tex. — Students in this tiny town of grain silos and ranch-style houses spent much of the first couple of days in school this week trying to guess which of their teachers were carrying pistols under their clothes.

    “We made fun of them,” said Eric Howard, a 16-year-old high school junior. “Everybody knows everybody here. We will find out.”

    The school board in this impoverished rural hamlet in North Texas has drawn national attention with its decision to let some teachers carry concealed weapons, a track no other school in the country has followed. The idea is to ward off a massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.

    “Our people just don’t want their children to be fish in a bowl,” said David Thweatt, the schools superintendent and driving force behind the policy. “Country people are take-care-of-yourself people. They are not under the illusion that the police are there to protect them.”

    Really. What’s the problem?

    The whole story in the New York Times is here.

  • Officials Struggle With Rise in Knife Crimes Among Britain’s Youths

    Knife crimes? If only we could be so lucky! The story is here.

    For all the panic about rising knife violence in London, let’s keep in mind that London has 7.3 million people and about 160 murders a year. That’s fewer than New York City. Hell, it’s even fewer than Baltimore (population: 650,000)! And it’s not that London has a low crime rate. It just has less lethal violence.

    London does have strong and effective gun control. Sure, you cankill somebody with a knife, but it’s a lot messier.