Tag: guns

Why they carry illegal guns in Chicago

There an interesting studyby the Urban Institute on young men carrying guns in Chicago. This has already been misrepresented in the Chicago Sun-Timesas “1 in 3 young people surveyed in four Chicago neighborhoods say they carry a gun.” Factually true… but meaningless because they’re trying to survey people who carry a gun. 100% is the…
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Chicago violence

Maybe killers don’t dress with such flair in Chicago as they do in Detroit. But what Chicago murders lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Some experts prefer to put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away: “Trying to read too much into this is a grave mistake,” said…
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I wanna be a cowboy…

In some ways this is just another shooting in the hood. But I post it because, well, look at her Jessie getup! Also, she packs her gun in her panties. And there’s high quality video. Does there have to be more? I wanna be a cowboy… and she can my cowgirl. This is the violence…
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Why did New Yorkers stop shooting each other?

In New York City not only has the number of homicides being going down, but the percentage of homicides committed with a gun has been decreasing. Put another way, there were about 309 people shot and killed in 2011 in NYC (for UCR reasons we’re talking incidents, so this is a bit of an undercount).…
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ShotSpotter

Anybody know if ShotSpotter is good? From an NYPD press release: This is one of more than 30 firearms that have been recovered since the inception of the ShotSpotter program, back in March of this year. Three guns a month doesn’t seem like so many. But then to get 30 guns off the streets, back…
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Yeah, but they’re foreigners!

What can we learn from them? I know. Nothing. Because this is America. Exceptionalism and all that. I’m not saying we could go to this model overnight, damnit! But we could still learn from it. We could learn a lot from other countries, if we got around to looking. If we start looking at police…
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Shootings up in NYC

The recent crime numbers in NYC will soon come out, and they’re not good. Homicides this week are way up compared to last year. Of course that’s just one week… till it’s not. Shootings are up in NYC. Not Baltimore up. But up. People are dying. It is time to ring the alarm. Maybe not…
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Bringing a gun to a gun fight

It does seem pretty stupid to rob a gun store. But it also calls into question the deterrent effect of guns. A good man with a gun was not enough to stop four bad people with guns. There was a gunfight. The store owner was killed. His wife believes her life was saved because of…
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Detroit police chief gives credit to armed citizens for drop in crime

From the Detroit News: The incident was the latest in a string of homeowners opening fire to defend themselves, although after a flurry of such shootings early this year, before Monday there hadn’t been a reported incident since May 4 — an indication that criminals are thinking twice about breaking into people’s houses, Craig said.…
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Guns and Homicides

We all, er, know that guns don’t kill people (even though that is what they’re designed to do). But what I didn’t know was that guns really didn’t kill people until just a few decades ago. As recently as 1960, just 20 percent of NYC homicides involved a gun! That went up to 48 percent…
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