Crisis in Chicago

[SerHaHa]

4350 shootings in 2016, up from around 3500 in 2015.  This is insane.  A friend of mine's father just retired from 35 years of being a Chicago policeman, his last 5 years were in admin, but he's pretty heartbroken over what's happened to his city. 

How does this happen in a city with the strictest gun laws out there, even stricter than Canada - far more so.  I realize that there are huge gang problems, and yes, only 5% of those shot are "white people", but that can't be the reason, otherwise every other large city would have the same numbers.  It just bakes my brain to think that every single week, 85 people are shot, in one single city.  And how on earth does it keep getting worse, with nothing being done about it?  What can be done?  Something needs to be, this is ridiculous.   Obviously strict gun laws that already exist aren't working there.  Total gun ban, with huge punishments for breaking that?  What else?

[Iskaral Pust]

I'm a Chicago resident.  It has been a huge topic of conversation for the past few years.  2015 was already considered a horrific year before 2016 came along.

"Gang" violence seems to be the major factor, with the previous oligopoly of large gangs replaced by many smaller piecemeal gangs just as cheaper heroin and fentanyl flood the region and increase competition for street corners to peddle.  Also there seems to be an escalating culture of redressing grievances -- often as trivial as social media insults, sometimes revenge for previous shootings -- with guns.

The NYTimes has been writing sociological articles on it all year.  The Chicago Tribune keeps a running tally to stoke fear and page clicks.

[Swordfish]

2 hours ago, SerHaHa said:

4350 shootings in 2016, up from around 3500 in 2015.  This is insane.  A friend of mine's father just retired from 35 years of being a Chicago policeman, his last 5 years were in admin, but he's pretty heartbroken over what's happened to his city. 

How does this happen in a city with the strictest gun laws out there, even stricter than Canada - far more so.  I realize that there are huge gang problems, and yes, only 5% of those shot are "white people", but that can't be the reason, otherwise every other large city would have the same numbers.  It just bakes my brain to think that every single week, 85 people are shot, in one single city.  And how on earth does it keep getting worse, with nothing being done about it?  What can be done?  Something needs to be, this is ridiculous.   Obviously strict gun laws that already exist aren't working there.  Total gun ban, with huge punishments for breaking that?  What else?

It has very little to do with gun laws.

A large part of it can be pinned on the war on drugs, and the failures of our judicial and penal systems.  And gangs.

It's not rocket science, really.

[Week]

Red Lining as well as out of state guns (mostly Indiana). https://www.thetrace.org/2015/11/chicago-gun-laws-shootings-trafficking/

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Swordfish said:

It has very little to do with gun laws.

A large part of it can be pinned on the war on drugs, and the failures of our judicial and penal systems.  And gangs.

It's not rocket science, really.

Yep.  Plus, it's not like it has a border where they check for guns.  You can drive a day in any direction from pretty much anywhere in this country and buy a gun if you're set on it.

Doesn't much matter how strict one municipality's laws are if you can curcumvent it just by driving a bit.

[Gertrude]

I live in eastern Iowa and the gangs have been spilling into cities surrounding Chicago. There has been a small up-tick of gang related shootings, which - to be honest - any serious gang activity in Iowa is kind of disconcerting. To be clear, it's not something I notice in my daily life, but the news sources talk about the Chicago connection to gangs here (so it must be true!)

I have zero idea why Chicago is such an outlier when compared to other large cities. I think decriminalizing drugs is a good place to start. Not a solution, but with drugs not being as big a factor in gang activity, we might be able to more clearly see other areas to focus on.

Something else I've thought about regarding guns: gun control is a losing battle. There will always be ways to get guns if you want them. What happens when you don't focus on the guns themselves, but what you do with them? Any crime committed with a gun automatically carries a much harsher sentence. Carrying a concealed gun without a permit carries a harsh penalty, etc. I have reservations about automatic penalties, but would harsh enough consequences dissuade people at all? I know the concealed carry would just give cops an incentive to stop and frisk, but in general, tell me why this is the wrong way to go about it. It's just something I've been thinking about.

[Iskaral Pust]

Australia banned guns after a mass shooting and it was hugely effective.  Gun control is completely practical if we have political will to do it. 

Chicago has by far the worst shooting and murder rate of the major cities but similar to or less than Ferguson, Baltimore, etc.  Chicago is reputedly the central point of El Chapo's distribution of Mexican drugs into the US.  OTOH a lot of the news articles focus on stories of gang rivalries where the individuals have social membership (not hard core professional criminals) of a local gang and a shooting is the conclusion of some trivial argument.  I don't know how representative that is, it could just be sociologists looking for the kind of problem they want to solve. 

[Gertrude]

But banning guns is the whole issue, isn't it? It's enshrined in the constitution. But let's say that somewhere down the line, there is the political will to re-interpret the constitution and we do ban guns. How long does it take to drain the existing guns out of circulation? A very, very long time.

And I didn't know that about El Chapo. interesting.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

4 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Yep.  Plus, it's not like it has a border where they check for guns.  You can drive a day in any direction from pretty much anywhere in this country and buy a gun if you're set on it.

Doesn't much matter how strict one municipality's laws are if you can curcumvent it just by driving a bit.

I like to talk to tourists on the Staten Island ferry and I had an interesting conversation with a Kiwi, an Aussie, and two women from the UK who thought I was exaggerating when I told them that if I wanted I could probably find someone willing to sell me a gun before sundown.  

[SerHaHa]

Quote

I think decriminalizing drugs is a good place to start.

I agree completely. The entire war on drugs has been futile.  Complete decrim - of ALL drugs - would IMO not increase users, and would kick organized crime where it hurts the most.  If there is no $ in it, why do it (ie sell drugs on the street)?  It'd be much the same effect as when prohibition of alcohol ended - an entire generation of gangs and criminals would mostly go away.  So much money, and so many lives would be saved, fewer people in prison for non violent crimes, less money wasted on HUGE law enforcement resources spent chasing down both dealers and users.  I couldn't give a crap about what anyone decides to put in their body, with the caveat that should they harm themselves, the taxpayers don't foot their medical bills.

I think without the violence surrounding the drug business and war on drugs, that the stats on gun violence would plummet. 

I too would be in favor of huge, huge penalties for any kind of illegal use of firearms - example, violent crime felons caught with a firearm should get a mandatory life - should be lots of room for them when all the non-violent offenders are released after decriminalization of drugs.  

Something needs to be done.  The numbers in Chicago still are mind numbing - the entire country of Canada has fewer shootings in an entire year than Chicago does in 2 weeks, yet there are 20 million guns according to RCMP estimates in Canadian homes, and fifteen times as many people in Canada compared to Chicago.

[Swordfish]

14 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Australia banned guns after a mass shooting and it was hugely effective.  Gun control is completely practical if we have political will to do it. 

If's and buts....  You aren't getting a gun ban.

We should focus ion the things we actually CAN do to curb the ongoing gang wars that are running in a few of our larger cities.

But good luck getting any traction on that conversation.

[Iskaral Pust]

14 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

If's and buts....  You aren't getting a gun ban.

We should focus ion the things we actually CAN do to curb the ongoing gang wars that are running in a few of our larger cities.

But good luck getting any traction on that conversation.

I know there is no political will to ban guns in America but I don't want us to pretend it's because it would not be effective.  We have an excellent natural experiment that says it would work very well.  So the persistence of guns and gun violence is preventable but we choose not to.

I agree that we need to address the "gang" violence.  I keep using "gang" because a lot of the violence seems to be between social members of gangs rather than hardcore professional criminals waging war over big dollars.  Traditional gang wars end when a victor consolidates and the cycle renews when the police break up the big gang, but a population of disenfranchised, unemployable young men in a culture of violence will keep on going.  But there's very little political will for most of the viable solutions: eradicate dense clusters of poverty, ban guns, fix the culture of poverty and/or legalize all narcotics.  Legalizing drugs is the least effective of that list because it alone could still leave a culture of social disenfranchisement and violence.

[aceluby]

Decriminalization of drugs won't solve the issue.  If drugs are decriminalized, but you still have to get them on the black market, gangs will look to control that black market.

I think decriminalization is a good first step, but it would do nothing to address this particular problem.  Anything on the black market that cannot be litigated through the justice system will lead itself to gangs filling that void.  Prohibition, prostitution, gambling, and the drug war are some of the easy major industries driving this model.

It also doesn't help that those who go to prison are basically stuck since finding a job after is pretty much impossible, leading them back to gangs and under the table money.

[felice]

20 hours ago, Gertrude said:

But let's say that somewhere down the line, there is the political will to re-interpret the constitution and we do ban guns. How long does it take to drain the existing guns out of circulation? A very, very long time.

Banning bullets might take effect faster?

[Happy Ent]

Making drugs legal but guns illegal should solve the issue… why? I don’t think these two positions can be defended simultaneously. 

(It sounds as if the underlying model is that crime is primarily the result of attempts to control access to an illegal something. If drugs and guns differ in how their criminality affects violence then this needs to be explained.

Anyway, the model seems to be very poor in that it makes bad predictions. I’m sure there are comparisons that allow you to control for one variable or the other to make sense of this. Are there, for instance, other urban areas with more/less restrictive gun/drug laws that falsify the model? If so, it would be interesting to see if there are other variables that have higher explanatory value.

Clearly, we all must be aware of the danger of our own psychology to project our favourite explanatory model on any phenomenon.)

[felice]

7 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

Making drugs legal but guns illegal should solve the issue… why? I don’t think these two positions can be defended simultaneously.

(It sounds as if the underlying model is that crime is primarily the result of attempts to control access to an illegal something. If drugs and guns differ in how their criminality affects violence then this needs to be explained.

Guns are typically less addictive than drugs, the potential customer base is a lot smaller, and there's far less repeat business. And gangs are unlikely to want to sell guns to rival gangs.

[Iskaral Pust]

While I like Happy Ent's scientific method, his reasoning that prohibition of different items is equivalent in effect or non-effect on crime is pretty amusing.  I'm willing to let gang members hurl dime bags at each other if they want.

[Jo498]

late 19th/early 20th century Europe was to my knowledge quite permissive wrt drugs, remember Freud using cocaine for treatment in psychiatry and some cough syrups containing heroin. I don't know about firearms but I am pretty sure they were rare compared to the US, regardless of legality. So there might be some data from societies with few guns but considerable (legal or tolerated) drug use.

[James Arryn]

9 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

Making drugs legal but guns illegal should solve the issue… why? I don’t think these two positions can be defended simultaneously. 

(It sounds as if the underlying model is that crime is primarily the result of attempts to control access to an illegal something. If drugs and guns differ in how their criminality affects violence then this needs to be explained.

Anyway, the model seems to be very poor in that it makes bad predictions. I’m sure there are comparisons that allow you to control for one variable or the other to make sense of this. Are there, for instance, other urban areas with more/less restrictive gun/drug laws that falsify the model? If so, it would be interesting to see if there are other variables that have higher explanatory value.

Clearly, we all must be aware of the danger of our own psychology to project our favourite explanatory model on any phenomenon.)

Legal drugs harm the user, and that harm is a side-effect. Guns harm others and that harm is the design.

Not that complicated, really.

 

 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

1 hour ago, Jo498 said:

late 19th/early 20th century Europe was to my knowledge quite permissive wrt drugs, remember Freud using cocaine for treatment in psychiatry and some cough syrups containing heroin. I don't know about firearms but I am pretty sure they were rare compared to the US, regardless of legality. So there might be some data from societies with few guns but considerable (legal or tolerated) drug use.

I'm not too sure about other European countries in this regard, but here firearms could be bought over the counter or purchased via mail order until a bit into the 1900's. No licenses or any other checks at all. 

Australia is also not a very good example wrt gun policy in the USA, given that Aussieland is both an island, and one with unusually strict control over its borders at that. Not just because of regular smuggling but also because they need to protect their ecosystems from invasive species. 

If Trump actually builds a wall, and it against expectations turns out to work, then you might be able to talk about enforcing gun bans. Otherwise there's little reason to think that your criminal gangs wouldn't just get their hands on firearms the same way they supply the enormous drug market in the USA; by bringing them in from other countries. 

 

1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

While I like Happy Ent's scientific method, his reasoning that prohibition of different items is equivalent in effect or non-effect on crime is pretty amusing.  I'm willing to let gang members hurl dime bags at each other if they want.

Brazil has quite restrictive gun laws, and they (like many Latin American countries) have extreme amounts of gang violence. The ones that can't get their hands on firearms hack each other to pieces with machetes instead.