52 shot, 10 killed in gang-fueled weekend violence in Chicago

As demonstrated by California, a place with restrictive gun laws is not greatly effected by neighboring less restrictive gun laws.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of illegal guns sold in California come from California, not Arizona which is right next door and separated by no walls and has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation.

So, why don't cities impose stricter gun laws within the confines of their city?

 

Thanks

Don't get me wrong, I hear what you're saying. Follow me around the forum long enough and you'll routinely see me telling folks that they need to just mind their own business in most cases if something isn't personally effecting them. I'm a huge proponent of that.

But there are some cases to where empathy as a society is necessary I believe. There's VERY LITTLE of anything my neighbor could actually do to get me up off my lawn chair on my back deck and have me go over and say something to him. Seriously, there was a time not too long ago when I was woken up one morning by him fussing at the top of his lungs. I look outside and see him literally toss somebody off of his front porch and proceed to start kicking the crap out of him until his wife came outside yelling at him to stop. And the guy who just got whooped got up and stumbled away down the road and I proceeded to go sit on the porch and drink my coffee like I always do. None of my business I don't know what the deal was and he's not bothering me so whatever lol. My neighbor and I are good friends, we drink beer together sometimes and he watches my house while I'm away, I'm not concerned about him fighting me so whatever other folks do to piss him off and get whooped by him is a whole hell of alotta not my problem lol.

But I mean there's a limit....if I ever see him out there with a gun to somebody's head or something then yeah I'll call the cops or speak up. Less than that? Whatever, just don't bring that mess into my yard.

Point is, as a society even if something isn't directly effecting us personally there are times when we should be concerned in some cases. A fairly large portion of US citizens are murdering each other on an hourly basis in America, and have been doing so for decades. We as a respectable civilized society can't all just collectively say "sucks for them" and ignore something like that. I get it, if you don't live there then it really is of no real concern to you and I don't blame really blame anybody for not caring in that regard. But in my particular case it does effect me therefore I do care.

Hell in reality society doesn't care either, neither do elected officials whether they be Republican or Democrat. If you've noticed, the relatively recent mass push for gun control came in the wake of "suburbia" being directly effected. Inner city blacks have been murdering each other on a daily basis for decades, yet it wasn't until Columbine (sort of) and really after Virginia Tech, Aurora, and Sandy Hook that we began to see folks like Senator Dianne Feinstein become holier than thou and develop a genuine concern about guns and public safety.

And take a look at the weapons most targeted by gun control proposals. AR-15s. Inner city blacks aren't shooting each other with AR-15s, "suburban America" is getting shot by AR-15s. I hear almost no proposal by anyone whether they be Democrat or Republican to ban pistols. Pistols which are used in 95% of black on black murders in the inner city ghetto. More inner city blacks are killed by pistols in America in 1 weekend than any number of people killed in any mass shooting ever by an AR-15. And it has been that way for decades, but there has been no outcry.

I don't like rap very much, and rarely will I ever quote one of those folks. But one rapper said it best. "Middle America...NOW it's a tragedy NOW it's so sad to see, an upper-class city having this happening".

And he's right, tens of thousands of blacks have died at the hands of gun violence in the past few decades and society gave no public outcry. A guy shoots up a movie theater in "suburbia" and kills 12 people and we now have a national emergency that requires immediate attention. I find that terribly sad.

 

I was incorrect in my statement of "majority" of illegal guns coming from within California, it's 40% or so not the majority. Those are ATF stats that I read somewhere but I can't find the article again at the moment, but I did find this one.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf

According to the DoJ, only 1.3% of criminals surveyed got their guns from a retail store. 0.8% got them from a gun show.

43% got them from the black market, 25% got them from friends or family, 6% stole them, 7% found it at the scene of the crime (likely lying).

Point is, criminals aren't buying their guns from an FFL dealer anyway, that's not where they are getting them from. Imposing strict gun control regulations which apply to legally purchasing firearms is tackling less than 2% of the "problem". Seeing how that would be restricting an avenue through which less than 2% of criminals actually obtain their guns. That's 1 in 50...

Legal avenues through which to obtain firearms isn't a problem. Before we begin to restrict that particular avenue I'd like to see data supporting just how real of a problem this actually is. As in how many legal gun owners are actually buying guns from the store then turning around and selling them on the black market? Is that actually something that happens with enough frequency to warrant extra attention or is it something that SEEMS like is happening as we speculate on what's supplying this black market? I get it, the black market guns have to come from somewhere they don't just appear out of thin air. But where? Are legal to possess gun owners buying guns legally and then selling them illegally?

If not then we are simply restricting the legal avenue through which law abiding gun owners can purchase guns and doing virtually nothing to tackle the avenues through which criminals obtain guns because according to stats they aren't buying them from the sporting goods store...

I never said gun laws don't work btw. I said let cities impose their own restrictive gun laws if they so desire seeing how cities are where most gun violence occurs. As is what California is doing as you pointed out. Just don't impose strict gun laws applying to everywhere when everywhere isn't a problem as many advocate we do.

 

I hear you about the problems in tracking. I've read that article you posted in the past and even I was a bit shocked that the ATF is virtually prohibited by law to even adequately track where guns come from. This will show my own personal ignorance on this particular matter but I was under the impression that when a gun was used in a crime law enforcement could at least track down it's origin via serial number. Like one of the shotguns I own for example that I've bought from the store. I knew that due to all sorts of weird complex laws it couldn't necessarily be traced back to me owning it directly but I was under the assumption that if I just left the thing on the side of the road they could at least run it and see which store it came from.

I have plenty of guns that are completely untraceable (legally unregistered and purchased via private sale) but I always thought that anything I bought from the store got written down somewhere at some point. Like if the cops ran the serial number they could say ok it came from this particular store, then goto that store and say ok show us your transaction history who did you sell this to. I guess I watch too many movies...

As far as figuring out where the black market guns are coming from is there any widespread data in reference to operations in this matter from which we can possibly interpolate some information? Law abiding gun owners getting caught selling store bought guns to undercover cops or something? I know even that data would be rare seeing how it's not illegal to do that in many places, I can legally go outside and sell my neighbor anything without so much as asking questions, but in the places where it's illegal to sell privately owned guns unless you are a dealer such as California?

Research points out that the vast majority of firearms that end up in the hands of criminals were at one point legal and through multiple transactions ended up in the hands of criminals. Which is obvious seeing how guns don't just magically appear out of thin air here. A few different articles I read claim that it's usually friends or family of the criminals who end up getting their guns for them. And the average age of the firearm confiscated from criminals is 11 years old meaning it's been that long since it came from the legal manufacturer and through various transactions ended up in the hands of the criminal.

None of the articles I can find seem to be definitive in their assumptions because at the end of the day nobody really knows. We know at one point most guns were legal and how they got in the hands of criminals is mostly speculation based on limited interviews with criminals and whatnot.

But at the end of the day it seems like the criminal isn't going up to the store and buying a gun. They're getting them through any number of both legal and/or illegal private transactions through traffickers or friends and family or something.

Seems the best way to combat that is more restrictive private sales legislation not more restrictive dealer sales legislation. The problem is that sort of thing being nearly impossible to actually enforce seeing how there's like 300+ million unregistered firearms floating around. Imposing a law like that without also implementing a massive continuous (and illegal) police sting operation would be impossible to enforce and have virtually no effect on anything.

Even if we snapped our fingers and magically instilled some sort of Australia gun buyback program to try to get some of these unregistered guns back it still wouldn't help. It's not like criminals and illegal gun traffickers running the black market are going to sell the government their guns back. All that would do is force legal citizens to sell their guns back thus leaving a heavily armed criminal populace and a disarmed law abiding one. I think we as a society, for better or worse, may have backed ourselves into a corner in this one. With 300 million + guns floating around there isn't much we can really do about this...It's not like guns expire.

Outside of something extreme like completely banning guns tomorrow (Constitutionally illegal) and then banning bullets as well (Constitutionally illegal) and waiting decades for everybody to fire off the billions of bullets around here I am honestly sitting here wondering what the hell we can even do about this. I think we opened Pandora's Box decades ago and there is no realistic way to actually close that now.