So you are suggesting that the police allow black gangsters to go free when they are caught with guns? Really? Do YOU have some proof of that outrageously ridiculous statement?
Their will always be street crime. But how many gun deaths are there in other gun countries like Switzerland where many own guns but getting one is not easy. Again, I'M NOT ASKING TO MAKE THEM ILLEGAL!!!!!!!!! I'm saying we need to make it harder to get them for the knuckleheads. Why are YOU or ANYONE not a knucklehead against that?
The greatest parable in history is the one that suggests you walk a mile in someone's shoes before making a decision. I think you might consider doing that yourself. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who just lost a child or wife or mother to a lunatic who bought $15,000 worth of ammo and body armor online with no questions asked when a simple instant background check would have flagged them and stopped that sale. You would think differently.
The right wants to stop all screening, and cut funding for mental health care. When you have untreated psychopaths who can go online and buy whatever they want to carry out some crazy fantasy in a public place you have a very bad recipe.
Try hitting "Reply With Quote", so that people know who it is that you are addressing. Thanks.
But I assume this one was directed at me. One clarification though: no where did I specifically single out Black gangsters (unless there are Blacks in the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood). When I listed examples, I believe I pretty well covered most all racial and ethnic/religious groups. I guess I left out the Tongs and the Yakuza. Sorry, I'll get them next time. But anyway, let's not get anything twisted here, OK?
POINT: A piss poor job is being done on the enforcement front
across the board.
Sure, I'm happy to provide data and stats. But it's not as if this is a recent phenomenon. The police, the prosecutor's office, judges and the mayor's office in Chicago have been receiving heavy criticism for
several years over lax enforcement, prosecution and sentencing of firearms violations. The Dept. of Justice (Obama/Holder, very similar to Clinton/Reno in this regard) has also received criticism for an almost complete lack of will to support Federal prosecution of known and repeat firearms violations in Chicago and other major cities.
In no particular order, but feel free to read at your leisure:
1)
The Syracuse study (Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse) also showed that nationally federal gun crime prosecutions hit a decade low in 2011 under President Obama, down 40% from their peak under President George W. Bush in 2004.
The number of federal weapons prosecutions fell from about 11,000 in 2004 to about 6,000 under the Obama administration in 2011, before ticking up to 7,770 in 2012.
2)
City's gun law has little firepower
Since the registration began, it has changed absolutely nothing in the way we police," says one veteran officer who doesn't want to be named for fear of a run-in with higher-ups. He says cops don't usually access the registration data—he has never seen it himself—but doubted it would make a huge difference if they did.
3)
Thousands of felony gun cases are being dismissed in Cook County criminal courts
4)
There were 2,000 offenders in 2012 convicted of "aggravated unlawful use of a weapon," for holding an illegal, unregistered gun without a FOID card. That charge carries a minimum of 1 year and a maximum of 3 years.
The Circuit Court of Cook County wouldn't tell ABC7 how many offenders received the minimum, but did provide us with raw data. Out of 36,000 individual charges in 2012, ABC7 found that only 12 percent resulted in a sentence- the majority of those sentences were a year or less.
5)
“In a city like Chicago, which saw 506 murders last year, it is appalling that the U.S. attorney’s office in that jurisdiction only prosecuted 25 federal firearms cases during 2011,” the group wrote.
The letter also points out that of the 76,142 gun permit requests that were denied following background checks by federally-licensed firearms dealers, only 4,732 were referred for prosecution. Of that total, only 62 prosecutions resulted.
While I should have included all of the players, and not just the police in my post, my point remains: words on paper mean nothing if there is not a willingness
and a means to apply action to those words. And I would suggest that before you or anyone else encourages me to walk a mile in anybody's shoes, why don't you back away from just looking at the "shark attack" gun stories that the media highlights, and look at the big picture? What I'm talking about is going after the bigger problem, not just focusing on the tragic story
du jour. And I couldn't care less what "the right" is for or against. I am for expansion of mental health databases, so that legally incapacitated individuals would not be able to legally and so easily procure firearms. I am for making databases more accurate and meaningful. I am for enforcement of laws which deal with international smuggling of illegal firearms into the United States. I am for using the RICO statutes to prosecute and cripple organized street and motorcycle gangs. I am for crime syndicates, like Los Zetas, the Sicilian Mafia, the Russian/Israeli Mafia, FARC and other drug and crime cartels, being categorized as narco-terrorists... and dealt with in the VERY same way that we have dealt with Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups. Maybe the President can put Joe Biden in charge of another strategy group and see if that would be an acceptable thing to do.
As for body armor, ballistic helmets and other statistically minor accessories to violent crime, I wouldn't expend a great deal of effort in dealing with them. But if it floats your boat, go for it. It's about like Feinstein worrying about whether a rifle had a bayonet lug on it. Meaningless. Personally, I would spend my time focusing on the major issues that actually contribute to violent or firearms related crimes. And the solutions that I would support would be real, broad, far reaching and meaningful... not just politically correct, feel-good fixes that drift away like a fart in the wind once the news crews leave the room.
Last, but not least, data from Obama/Holder's own DoJ:
U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics
