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by busymom0 1812 days ago
Stop letting them use gun control to ignore the underlying issues in the community.

ME: Chicago has strict gun control but high gun violence.

THEM: They get guns from states with loose gun control.

ME: But those states don't have the same gun violence

THEM: Places in Chicago are poor & neglected so there's more violence.

ME: BINGO, it's a socioeconomic issue not a gun issue!

This site tracks Chicago specifically:

https://heyjackass.com

2020: 456 Homicides, 1,902 Wounded

2021 so far 6 months in: 378 Homicides, 1727 wounded, 2082 shot

Until the gang problem gets solved, nothing will change. And politicians are too busy disarming the law abiding citizens and cutting police budgets instead of focusing on the illegal gang problem.

4 comments

Chicago gun control laws were ruled unconstitutional, so there is no longer strict gun control there: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/03/sarah-huck...
That's false and politifact has shown numerous times that they are nothing more than narrative control. Here are the facts:

1. Even the hyper liberal anti-gun Gifford Law Center gives their second highest score of A- to Illinois and A to New Jersey.

https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/scorecard/

Texas gets an “F” from Gifford Law Center, yet Houston and Dallas have murder rates that are half of that in Chicago. The rates in Austin and El Paso are tiny when compared to Chicago. All this despite Texas having neighbours with cartels south of border.

2. The age for purchasing handguns (pistols and revolvers) in Illinois is 21 years old. Vast majority of the gang violence and shootings happen using handguns.

3. The state requires gun owners to obtain licenses and face background checks as well as imposing waiting periods on firearms purchases. They also have red flag laws.

It's nice that you have it all figured out. Now solve for school shootings? I'll preload the specifics for you:

* Not gang related

* Never (almost never?) happened at an "inter city" school

* Not in places with strict gun control laws

Bonus points of you can do it while blaming mental health AND justify our decreased spending on mental health.

The mic is yours.

> Bonus points of you can do it while blaming mental health AND justify our decreased spending on mental health. The mic is yours.

This along with rest of your snide comment indicates to me that you have some pre-conceived incorrect assumptions about me and therefore I am not entertaining you.

You expressed a rather simplistic view of a much larger issue, stating a single problem as the core. I didn't judge your opinion untill you provided it, therefore it can't be preconceived.

As a gun owner, I'm fully aware of the complexity of the issue. Pointing at socioeconomics as the root is naive. It ignores the vast majority of incidents to focus very narrowly on one factor. The reality is if you only look at the one instance and ignore the whole, you cannot address the actual problems. Socioeconomics have nothing to do with almost all of our mass shootings because most of them aren't gang related. It doesn't account for most homicides by gun because they're individual issues.

We country divided politically, racially and sexually (gender, not intercourse) and pretty free access to firearms. Wanna guess what happens when people don't like each other or have heated arguments and have guns? Hint: shooting.

So sure, try and solve for the one thing and ignore all the rest. You can't solve for it because you're dealing with historically unrepresented populations of people that we've shoved into a corner together and we basically ignore. You wanna actually solve for all the killing we do? Make access to firearms require more than just a pulse.

ME: BINGO, it's a socioeconomic issue not a gun issue!

It could be both.

It's not both. The root cause of most of these killings is honor culture, which existed in plenty of societies before guns and led to just as many killings.
Maybe it's both.