The Problem With Constitutional Carry
Photo by Sarah, CC BY 4.0
Last week, I touched on some of the responsibilities of gun ownership when I discussed the case of Daniel Perry, a Texas man convicted of murder for shooting a man legally carrying a gun at a BLM protest (not a riot) in 2020. At the time, I stressed that, if you’re going to carry a gun, you have an obligation to be proficient with your weapon and knowledgeable about the relevant laws. Now, another tragic case underscores the need for such training and education.
On Thursday of last week, a white homeowner shot a black teen in Kansas City. There is no video of the encounter, but what apparently happened is that 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address when he tried to pick up his siblings. Andrew Lester, the owner of the home where Yarl rang the doorbell, allegedly opened fire through the glass window of the door before the two had even exchanged words reports CNN based on police documents and statements from the family.
Yarl was struck by bullets in the head and the arm. Neighbors heard the shooting and called police and an ambulance. Thankfully, Yarl was not killed, but his attorney reports that he has been released from the hospital, but is “not out of the woods yet.” Yarl is said to have been academically and musically gifted. Hopefully, his head injury will not affect these abilities.
The shooter, 84-year-old Andrew Lester, was originally released after the shooting but yesterday police charged him with two felonies for first-degree assault and armed criminal action. The assault charge is Missouri’s equivalent of an attempted murder charge. A separate CNN report said that Lester was released because police needed time to do more investigative work.
Charging documents say that Lester saw Yarl pulling on an exterior door handle. Lester reported that he was “scared to death” of Yarl because of his size.
Let’s stop right there. You cannot legally open fire through your front door because the person ringing your doorbell is a large, black man.
And Yarl’s race is relevant here. The county prosecutor said at a press conference, “I can tell you there was a racial component to this case,” but he did not say exactly what that component was.
Missouri law is being criticized for the shooting, but the fact is that Missouri law does not permit Lester’s behavior. Missouri law includes both the so-called “Stand Your Ground” law and the “Castle Doctrine,” but neither applies in this case.
Missouri’s law states that a person has the right to “use physical force upon another person when and to the extent he or she reasonably believes such force to be necessary to defend himself or herself or a third person from what he or she reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force by such other person.”
The most obvious problem with Lester’s self-defense claim is that his actions were not reasonable. Opening fire through the door without knowing who is on the other side is reckless rather than reasonable behavior. Yarl had committed no crime and there is no evidence that he had exhibited any threatening behavior other than being black. For all Lester knew, Yarl could have been a delivery driver or a meter reader or a good samaritan letting him know his dog was out.
If Lester was truly in fear for his life, there are other courses of action that he could have taken that were short of opening fire. He could have pretended that he wasn’t home until Yarl went away. He could have talked to Yarl through the door while keeping his gun ready in case the confrontation became violent. He could have called the police to report a suspicious person. If Lester had chosen any of these options, Yarl would not have been wounded and Lester would not be in jail.
Gun and self-defense laws vary by state. If you are going to arm yourself, especially outside the home, you have a duty to become familiar with the laws that apply to you. That includes being familiar with the laws in the states where you may travel. Whatever your opinion of guns and anti-gun groups, the Giffords Center provides an excellent online resource for learning about gun laws in different states. FindLaw also has good explanations of each state’s self-defense laws.
Although the laws vary, there is often commonality. Many states share several aspects of Missouri’s law, including:
- Use of force is justified if there is a reasonable belief that you or others are in danger
- Deadly force is justified when there is a reasonable belief that you are others are in danger of death or serious injury
- Although there is no duty to retreat if you are entitled to be at the location where the confrontation occurs, self-defense laws do not apply if the shooter is the initial aggressor or is involved in a crime
As to what constitutes a reasonable fear, Missouri criminal defense attorney Kevin Jamison, who teaches a course on gun laws and safety, told the Kansas City Star, “I call it the JAM elements.”
JAM is an acronym that stands for:
- Jeopardy – a threat of harm
- Ability – Can the person carry out the threat?
- Means – Does the person have the resources to carry out the threat? This could be a weapon or it could be the physical ability to inflict injury.
I cannot stress enough that you should check the laws where you live. This article does not constitute legal advice.
And that brings us to the biggest problem with constitutional carry, which is the fact that many people who carry, probably the majority, have no training in how to do so safely and legally. They have no proficiency training (including retention training) on their weapon and they have only the vaguest idea of the laws that govern them.
When people are armed and get “scared to death,” it ends with people getting shot unnecessarily. It also ends with people like Andrew Lester going to jail when they didn’t have to.
This is not just anecdotal either. The Kansas City Star points out that Stand Your Ground laws have led to increases in the homicide rate. The 2022 study of 41 states in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that states such as Missouri, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia with Stand Your Ground laws registered increases in the homicide rate that ranged from 16.2 to 33.5 percent. There is also some evidence that concealed carry laws also increase violent crime rates.
While I do support gun rights, including the right to carry outside the home, I also believe that having untrained people who are ignorant of the law carry their guns in public places is a bad idea. I believe that if someone is going to carry a deadly weapon, there should be a requirement that they be trained in general gun usage and safety as well as applicable laws. A brief, inexpensive course and background check leading to a shall-issue license to carry is a reasonable requirement.
In the case of Andrew Lester, who was not carrying outside his home, the requirements should be less stringent, but that still does not excuse Mr. Lester for being so ignorant of the law that he nearly kills an innocent teenager who rang his doorbell.
I’ll say it again: If you choose to carry a deadly weapon, you have the responsibility to educate and train yourself in order to stay out of legal trouble and avoid hurting or killing innocent people.
I’ll also say this, if states are going to permit people to carry deadly weapons in public, they have a responsibility to ensure that those armed civilians are safe and proficient. In far too many states, that is not being done.
I am pro-Second Amendment, but I believe the biggest threat to our Second Amendment rights comes from the unfettered, unsafe use of guns. If the non-gun-carrying public becomes so afraid of gun violence that they overwhelmingly elect anti-gun politicians, that is when gun rights will be lost. We can prevent that by enacting sensible restrictions that minimize the misuse of guns and save lives.
Shooter was 84, I wouldn’t be shocked if we’re looking at dementia.Report
Presupposing this is the case, what do we do about that? Have tests to keep your gun?Report
Gun rights folks become very angry when driver’s licenses are mentioned as an analogy.
But I’m not particularly here to make them happy. If you don’t have the mental capacity to drive a car, seems likely that you don’t have the mental capacity to carry a weapon. Mishandling either device, after all, carries the imminent potential of killing someone who doesn’t deserve to be killed.Report
For cars, I think the system defaults to someone keeping it unless the State has good reason to think she shouldn’t.
I got a first hand view of a very old and very confused-shouldn’t-be-driving lady driving the wrong way on a busy highway. 2nd time in two hours she’d caused issues from shear incompetence and this was also shear incompetence. Insurance company took me to lunch to get my statement a few weeks later.
Here, we don’t know yet what the system knows about this guy. Does he have a history of being demented or are we expecting the State to engage in serious big brother if we’re expecting to know this?
In addition, he’s at home. Does the state know he’s armed? Should they? Are we going to do home searches on everyone we suspect is demented because they might also be armed?Report
This suggests that in both cases, existing systems are inadequate to protect against such threats manifesting. Ideology may be (probably is) the reason for this — an ideology that is articulated in the first sentence of your comment.
I’m not saying we change that ideology, but a critical re-examination of it is probably overdue. …And, of course, impossible.Report
“Threats manifesting” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, so is “systems”.
With old people who shouldn’t drive, generally their families apply social pressure and/or it becomes clear they shouldn’t drive. So we have “systems” but they’re mostly not formal state ones.
If we count corpses this is by far a larger problem than firearms… although the young and inexperienced still manage to kill a lot more with cars than the old and infirm so there’s that.
With guns, how often does this happen? This was heinous, but if it’s at lightning bolt rarity or less then pretty much any solution is going to cause larger problems than the current ones.
If we’re looking at a single heinous thing whose prevention would require a serious restructuring of the current system, then odds are that not only will we not do anything but we shouldn’t.Report
As a general rule, I agree with this. If what we’re talking about are rare things, then making rules around preventing them may well not be particularly justified and may cost us more than we gain.
People shooting strangers through their front door is pretty rare. People shooting other people is, unfortunately, not rare at all.
As I understand it, if you’re going to be shot at all, chances are pretty good you’ll be shot by someone you know (including yourself in a suicide attempt). About 300-350 people are shot, on average, every day; about 2/3 of them survive with varying injuries. That works out to somewhere between 40,000-41,000 gun deaths a year (closer to the 41,000 figure in 2021) with about twice as many survived gun injuries a year.
Compare that to NHTSA estimating that about 43,000 people died in auto accidents (or “collisions” if you prefer) in 2021. It’s impossible, or at least really hard at a moment’s look-around, to tell how many people are injured but not particularly seriously in the ~6,000,000 auto collisions and accidents that happen every year.
How many of those accidents, injuries, and possibly fatalities are caused by drivers who have lost their physical and mental abilities to drive proficiently due to old age? Again, can’t find it very easily.
So yes, auto accidents are a greater cause of fatalities and injuries. But not by a lot.Report
You’re bouncing around between “the issue as a whole” and “the amount of the issue caused by old age/dementia”.
My back of the envelope suggests old age created car accidents are rare. 7/8ths of the total don’t involve people over 65. Include random chance and the problem can’t be very big.
For firearms, Age 65+ people do 2% of homicides (link at bottom, but I had to spreadsheet it).
If the potentially demented only committed 287 of the 14036 murders for whom we know the age, there’s not a lot of room in there for dementia.
Highly likely suicide by gun numbers are over represented in the 65+ age group, but we’re getting into “informed choice” territory there. You have to die of something and society insisting it be slow and painful is a problem and not a solution.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251884/murder-offenders-in-the-us-by-age/Report
So at the macro level, we approach the issue of auto safety now with extensive design-level regulation on the manufacturers to mandate safety features, and renewal-by-mail for driver’s licenses.
At the macro level for guns, we now have constitutional carry laws in most places. Some states have red flag laws, which I applaud. (Despite acknowledging that they, like all laws, are subject to potential abuse.)
At the micro level of what to do about older folks who might be losing their faculties, there is little if any official structure to review either driver licenses or possession of firearms once issued.
I think we can imagine other issues that might go beyond dementia to identify issues in which there are legitimate safety concerns. I know we can, precisely because red flag laws exist.
I take your point that checking in on people too much can become intrusive and authoritarian and ripe for abuse. That’s correct.
Not checking in on them at all has a price, too.
Seems to me that on the whole, we aren’t at the sweet spot* between “letting people be” and “preventing preventable harm.”
* Pareto optimization, if you prefer.Report
Intuitively that seems more true with cars than guns. 1/8th of 40k is a big number, there’s more need for it in most people’s lives thus more desire to push the edges.
There’s also a lot more trust that the gov won’t set the goal posts too high in an effort to remove rights… and if you’re old and live in a neighborhood where using a gun to defend your home is reasonable then losing it would be bad.
Be interesting if, for the old, the danger profile they get from having a gun around changes. Are you more likely to use it in self defense? More likely to do something really stupid and hurt yourself or others?
The moment I need to say “intuitively” on this subject I’m also saying “I don’t trust my feelings but…”.Report
For cars, I think the system defaults to someone keeping it unless the State has good reason to think she shouldn’t.
No this is simply false.
Driving is a privilege, as every state DMV will repeatedly remind you. You are not allowed this privilege unless you pass a series of tests and qualifications, and over a certain age, even the most minor moving violation results in extra scrutiny, and in California for ANYONE over the age of 70 regardless of driving record, the driving privilege must be re-applied for in person every 5 years, no matter what.
The fact that, as you point out, no one knows if he is demented or remotely qualified to possess a deadly weapon and there is no system which would discover that, is something that virtually all civilized nations would find bizarre.
Its easier to strip a demented person of their car than their gun.
Which is itself kind of demented.Report
This is different spin on what I said. The in person tests are a joke and “minor moving violations” are getting into “good reason to think she shouldn’t”.
If it’s as easy to strip someone of their rights as their privileges, then that gets ugly real quick.
Pretty sure most/all states have passed laws keeping firearms out of the insane.
Also pretty sure any system which defaults people over age X to being demented until proven otherwise instantly gets abused in all sorts of ways.Report
right, because no old white guy of sound mind would shoot a black kid through the door would he?Report
Yes. That’s why it’s in the news as the most heinous act of the day. Legal system will treat it as that. Min sentence for this is 10 years but for him that’s life.
Now it’s viral because it matches the desired narrative that America is still the 1950’s. We have millions of social justice warriors who don’t have a dragon to slay.
Also in my news feed we have a 20 year old white woman shot in her car for trying to turn around in the wrong driveway. She never got out and had no interaction with the shooter at all.
Although heinous it doesn’t match the desired narrative so we won’t be talking about it next week.Report
It may not have gone viral, but it is making national news:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170648617/how-stand-your-ground-laws-have-proliferated-in-the-last-decadeReport
Point.
Although I don’t see how SYG applies in either case.
I expect we’ll find dementia and/or alcohol and/or meth is involved in both.Report
I agree — SYG is subject to criticism but neither of these cases invoke it.
A mentality of “fire first, figure it out later,” is the link I suspect we’ll find is in common here, possibly augmented, as we discussed above, by diminishment in mental capacity.Report
““fire first, figure it out later,”” That is the anti definition of responsible firearm use and defense.Report
Yes and? Its also a frighteningly common attitude among American gun owners.Report
There aren’t enough dead bodies for that to be true.Report
There doesn’t necessarily need to be bodies.
https://youtu.be/saQ72NZtrS0Report
We count dead bodies to see how serious a problem is and whether the problem is increasing or decreasing.
Without that we’re dealing with single data points presented from the media. Those singletons will be picked because they’re very unusual but we’ll get the impression that they’re common because we see them all the time in the media.Report
Sure! I agree! Here’s the thing: the law does not mandate responsible firearm use and defense. The law says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” And any attempt by people who suggest that those who fail to demonstrate a mentality of responsible firearm use and defense and therefore maybe oughtn’t be trusted with firearms, get accused of violating that law. And we get into low-trust situations and a lot of now-very-familiar arguments about all sorts of things that basically come down to “I distrust you therefore I oppose anything that you suggest.”Report
CNN pulls these two cases – and a parking lot attack on two cheerleaders – into a common narrative.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/19/politics/deadly-shootings-wrong-place-what-matters/index.htmlReport
Interesting. They really want the first one to be about race but they’re still reporting the others. Good for them I guess.
As far as what’s going on, my expectation is nothing. We had three stupid people do stupid things with guns close in time to each other. Presumably this happens every year in single digits but we’re just paying attention at the moment.
The human brain is a pattern matching device. We want to see a pattern even if it’s random noise.Report
Frankly there’s no good reason this is even a national story, other than maybe how bizarre it is and that it supports a particular albeit misleading narrative about guns and race that legacy media really want to be true.
I was listening to the radio yesterday and there was a 5 second report on a 12 year old killed in Baltimore. No suspects and no one knows why but everyone can fairly assume it probably had something to do with gangs or the drug trade, even if he was just an innocent bystander. There will be no deep chin scratching think pieces on that one and yet it’s the much more representative situation.Report
What is common to the stories about the 12 year old killed by gunfire in Baltimore and the girls killed by gunfire in upstate New York?
What makes them different than the stories about people shoplifting at Walgreens in Portland and New York City?
With gun deaths, we are repeatedly told that this is just something we need to live with. We can punish the perpetrators after the fact, but there is simply no way to prevent them, absolutely nothing do you understand?
With shoplifting, we are told that crime is OUTTACONTROL and chaos is overwhelming us and we must DO SOMETHING NOW!
I think the solution is clear.
Shoplifters just need to start gunning down a few clerks before taking the can of Red Bull, then everyone would just relax and accept it.Report
From Corporate:
You don’t need to do something now.
You don’t have to do anything at all.Report
And…you believe them?
You remember when Walgreens and REI closed their stores, using the same rationale?
What happened next?Report
I believe that they will be closing the stores, yes.
But the good news is this: THIS IS ONE HECK OF AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A COMPETITOR.
The building infrastructure is already there. Just take it over and start printing money! I’m sure that it’d be fairly easy to get some VC on board.
There’s money to be made!Report
So, that cynicism and skepticism of yours just kinda comes and goes, I guess.Report
Here’s a hypothesis and you can tell me how irrational it is:
“If it would make them more money to leave the stores open, they’d leave the stores open.”
I mean, at this point, maintaining the status quo is almost always the easy thing to do.
Now, if your attitude is that, no, they’re playing a longer game and they know that they can make more money next year by closing the store (and enough more money to make up for any losses inbetween), let me point out that this is an opportunity for someone to go in there and start making money instead!
And, get this, it would cut Walmart’s long-term plan off at the knees!
That strikes me as absurd… because it simply makes a lot more sense that “If it would make them more money to leave the stores open, they’d leave the stores open.”Report
Stores close, even Wal-Marts, all the time. Usually because they aren’t making money. Are you aware of some unusual facts about the closing of a few stores in a market where few people would expect Wal-Mart to be successful that connects the closings to the nominal subject of this post?Report
I was just running with the whole importance of dealing with out of control crime and the need to do something.
I was merely pointing out that doing nothing was also an option.
Granted, it has attendant costs but what doesn’t?
As for the nominal subject of the post, I think that this is all part and parcel with moving from higher trust to lower trust and the breakdown in higher trust norms.
People don’t want to have to rely upon themselves instead of having culture do the heavy lifting.
But many will do so anyway.
What is your counterproposal?
“You should trust the police?”Report
So you aren’t aware of some unusual facts about the closing of some Wal-Marts that would relate to the nominal topic of the original post. Glad we cleared that up.
My counter-proposal to what? Some proposal? What proposal? Maybe if you explained what you were talking about I could answer.Report
They are both the result of moving from higher trust to lower trust.
Constitutional Carry makes much more sense in a low trust society than a high trust one.
All in all, I see the original post making the point that it would be nice if people weren’t acting in a way that doesn’t make sense in a high trust society.
On that point, I am in 100% agreement with the author.
It would be.Report
What effect does the advice of “just surrender and accept disorder” have on trust levels?Report
Seems likely to result in people choosing to carry.Report
What happened in the 1970s when a political party became associated with “Just surrender and accept disorder”?Report
There was a reaction and the “Tough On Crime” party won a lot of elections for years and years and a whole bunch of “Tough On Crime!” laws were passed culminating in the 1994 Crime Bill.Report
Food for thought don’t ya think?Report
What is the attendant cost of prevalent gun access?Report
Type I errors.Report
Let’s, for the moment put aside the fact that there is at least a 50% chance that the stores are closing due to poor business decisions or larger consumer trends.
Let’s assume the reasons are “fear of violence and general lawlessness and disorder”.
So, is there anything we as a society can do about this or is it just the price pay for Constitutional liberty?Report
I take the controversial position that people who break the law should be arrested and prosecuted. I’m not sure what can be done beyond that.Report
As far as shoplifting is concerned, very little.Report
There is a world of difference between “the level of shoplifting is too high, we should do things that prevent organized crime from exploiting it” and “every single gun crime needs to be stopped!”
For every shop lifting that ends up in the news there are thousands that don’t. No one expects to stop them all.
If you want to talk about solutions for shoplifting, increase the punishment so organized crime doesn’t view it as a career. That seems reasonable.
The gun crimes you want to prevent require either a time machine or removing every gun from society.Report
Nope, no pattern at all . . . .Report
You can’t pick three points and call it a pattern. There have been a lot of shooting stories in the past couple of weeks that don’t fit the pattern we’re usually being sold.Report
Nope, no pattern at all . . . . .Report
Do you really believe that these three stories represent a pattern? How many shootings have there been in the past couple of weeks that you didn’t mention and don’t fit the pattern? The trans activist? The anti-Trump guy at the bank? The four kids in Alabama?Report
You really don’t see it do you?
Try this – there are between 1.2 and 1.3 3 gun PER US Citizen in the US.
Now do you see a pattern? Because EVERY story you mention has a commonality to it . . . .Report
Not the narrative that you and CNN were promoting though.Report
You’re a researcher. If a fellow researcher came to you and said, “I’ve taken a thousand sunspot readings in the past two weeks and I found a pattern between three of them”, you wouldn’t listen to the rest. You’d chew him out. But then if he said, “but all one thousand readings have one thing in common – they’re all from the Sun!”, would you ever talk to him again?Report
You are whiffing the forest for the trees my dude.
Plus in statistics, three data points is always taught as the minimum number of data points you need for statistical significance . . . . so while I might encourage that researcher to get more data, I’m not going to laugh at her.Report
You started by talking about CNN and stand your ground. You then called it a pattern. Then you said that the pattern was guns. So don’t pretend that didn’t happen. If there’s a pattern of things that remind you and CNN of stand your ground, make the case.Report
I used that analysis to open the subject about the easy availability of guns. At no time did I state that stand your ground was the pattern I was referencing. You took that road all by yourself.
Which by the way Is what often happens to me when people here don’t write clearly and succinctly. Perhaps we can all work to change that in the future.Report
You raised the CNN article, then when Dark Matter made a comment that included the sentence:
“We had three stupid people do stupid things with guns close in time to each other.”
You singled that sentence out and replied to him:
“Nope, no pattern at all . . . “
Were you serious that there was no pattern at all? Not from context. So you took the position that there was a pattern. If you meant that the pattern was gun violence, you should have said so, and it was your failure of clarity, no one else’s.Report
I want to echo what I think is your sentiment and where I think it would he best for all of us to redirect from hypotheticals. In the United States it is illegal for someone adjudicated mentally defective or who has been institutionalized to own a firearm. Whether that’s the right place to draw the line on the (totally reasonable) sentiment that crazy people should not be allowed to buy guns, I don’t know. But there is a law, and like with other laws there are issues of enforcement, including the possibility that the kind of hard evidence required of mental incompetence doesn’t exist until after the person commits some criminal act with the firearm.
What I’d also say is that there is no perfect answer to that. The guy who did the mass shooting in Germany last month (yes, the Onion lied to us) had gone through the German process which both requires a psychological evaluation and where self protection is not deemed a permissible reason to own a firearm.
All of this is to say we should maybe focus on what the law actually is and maybe the conversation will be more productive. Probably not but at least it might be more informed.Report
I think you meant to post this further downthread. My point up here is about Philip wiggling away from a failed point. But further down I do consider the mental health aspect.Report
Yes, misthreaded. Oh well.Report
If we’re interested in reducing gun crimes, then the “pattern” is the bulk of them happen in a handful of zip codes, are are committed by people who fit a certain profile, part of that profile is they are a member of a certain sub-culture and didn’t get the gun legally.
We don’t want to have that conversation nor do we want to do anything about it.
What all three of those points have in common is they are outliers, they don’t fit the normal pattern. If they did fit the typical pattern then they wouldn’t be in the news.
We have had hundreds of people die who match the real pattern in the time we’ve been talking about the three who don’t. If this conversation goes on for another month then we’ll get into the thousands.Report
The issue isn’t gun crimes, its gun violence. Much much different lens. Suicide by handgun – the most significant cause of death by firearms in the US – isn’t a gun crime, but it very much is gun violence.
And again there is a commonality to ALL gun violence. A single glaring commonality which conservatives don’t want to talk about either.Report
Well then, all you need to do is get rid of the 2nd AM, disarm the entire country, and convince criminals to follow the law.
The results will be worse than imagined. Suicide-by-gun will be replaced with suicide, the rates might be lower or they might not.Report
Or maybe we get to the well regulated part of the 2A, so that people not mentally or emotionally fit to have guns don’t get them. Maybe the we tax ourselves enought to provide real mental health services to our citizens that are actually affordable. Maybe we get to single payer so that people don’t have to struggle economically just to keep healthcare.
And maybe, just maybe, we start socially shaming politicians who use the rhetoric of violence to motivate their base so that people stop thinking that shoot first sort it out later is a good idea.
But that requires long term commitment and deep compassion which are in very short supply in this country these days.Report
Another thing we’ve been over before is “well-regulated”. That doesn’t mean governmental regulation. Our own Clare Briggs often uses the phrase “It happens in the best regulated families”.Report
Our Constitution is all about government regulation and function. That’s its reason for existing. And well regulated militias have to be made functional by SOMETHING. While the members of the day may not have been professional military men, the state militia was still and arm of state GOVERNMENT. Its composition, training, and call-out were STATE FUNCTIONS. Mandating every man be prepared to respond to the call out in a certain time with a certain number of musket balls and a certain amount of power was a STATE MANDATE. All from units of government.
Next?Report
For a couple of minutes I thought you had me. But then I remembered that there’s a part of the Constitution that’s specifically about things government isn’t allowed to do: the Bill of Rights. The reason for that section existing is to keep people in the future from doing what you’re doing right now. And the only argument against it was that it might not stop people from doing what you’re doing right now well enough.Report
What I’m doing is insisting that we look at a public health emergency, caused by having more guns then citizens, and ask ourselves if that’s morally right, given the significant level of interpersonal violence that said gun to people ratio creates. I don’t believe it is morally right, nor do I believe its a public health crisis that we need to ignore.
The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact – and in this case it clearly delineates the single reason why government might have its hand steadied in regulating firearms. For the creating of a state militia as needed for territorial defense. Not personal property defense – territorial defense. Not defense of individual private lives – territorial defense.
None of the gun violence reported in the last week – none of it – was the provenance of a well regulated militia defending a free state.
Which brings me back to my other point – this level of killing – form a device that can be far more effectively regulated then it is – is immoral and a public health emergency. It MUST be dealt with on those grounds. Since, ya know, it impacts the ability of citizens to enjoy life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Report
Forget it, comrade.
Conservatives responded to the last public health crisis by staying silent while the more vocal, extreme members of their caucus urged people to not get vaccinated against it, and to ignore masking and social distancing rules as intrusive upon their rights and freedoms.
Let us pray they do not proffer a similar solution to the health issue of “getting shot” as they did to “getting COVID,” viz., “just go get it already and acquire ‘natural immunity.'”Report
Your use of “more guns than citizens” reminds me of your use of “.4% of the population”. It’s a datum that doesn’t make your argument by your own terms. If there were .9 guns for each citizen, you wouldn’t be happy, right? So why raise it?
Note that you can’t argue that the particular ratio is the problem historically. The number of citizens isn’t related to the number of residents. The rate of serious crime fluctuates. The population has been increasing, and the number of guns increasing faster, but the rate of violent crime has fallen since the crack era (at least I assume it’s still lower than that peak). And logically the increase in gun collection size wouldn’t affect crime rates.
I know this isn’t your main point, but it’s worth noting, and also I don’t think you refuted my earlier point, which was that since the Bill of Rights serves as a restriction of government, it’s not contradictory to hold that the word “well-regulated” isn’t an invitation to governmental regulation.Report
It begs credulity to think that a “well regulated” militia – which serves a government function – should be free of government regulation. That’s so oxymoronic as to be, well, moronic.Report
I don’t think the militia is free from government regulation, but the term “well-regulated” doesn’t mean government regulation. And it wasn’t oxymoronic 250 years ago.Report
The definition of militia is: (HISTORICAL: in the US) all able-bodied citizens eligible by law to be called on to provide military service supplementary to the regular armed forces.
Training, or the lack there of, doesn’t matter. If gov could, in theory, call you up (because you’re healthy and of draft age), then you are a member of a militia.
If the gov activates you, then you’ll need to bring your own gun. In order for that to be possible you have to have the right to own a gun that you can bring.Report
I hate to say it Dark but this might actually be a situation where it weighs the other way, at least when it comes to the problem of old coots opening fire on people at their doorstep. When the Anglo-Saxons had to summon the fyrd to help fight off a party of vikings they sent the able bodied men and yes those men had to bring their own spears. But do they bring the old crazy guy who isn’t fighting or weapons competent? Replace with colonists and Indians as needed for historical analytic purposes.Report
There’s an old line, “my idea of gun control is a steady hand”. In this case it may be an actual policy directive.Report
I like it!Report
Sure, if you’re old enough or senile enough that you’re no longer able bodied, then by definition you’re not part of “the militia” and the 2nd AM no longer applies.
That’s the good news. The bad news is we’d need to turn that fact into a law, pass it, and enforce it.
The terrible news is…
1) We’d be addressing something like 0.2% of homicides (10% (WAG) of homicides where the shooter is at least 65).
2) That’s not preventing 0.2% because we’re not going to get 100% compliance nor do we have 100% knowledge.
3) There are lots and lots of old people and not many police. It’s not clear to me we’d end up with a good use of their time.
I suspect the laws which prevent crazy people from having firearms already cover this. If they don’t they should. We probably don’t need a “crazy because he’s old” addition.Report
“…all able-bodied citizens…”
Did they distinguish between the physical body and the mind? Having a functioning hand should not be the only requirement to have a gun.Report
There are probably plenty of psychiatric evaluations we could make that would let us conclude “this person shouldn’t own a gun”.
“They’re not in their right mind!”, we can say.
Oooh! And certain prescriptions should be able to trigger that particular red flag as well. What if they stop taking it?
If you want to own a gun, you need to give proof of sanity.
Is there a way that we could somehow block out the full medical history and just have a toggle that gun sellers would have access to? Just a simple “this person is clear” versus “this person is not clear” should meet the requirements of privacy, right?Report
Does the military do any psych evals? Maybe start there.Report
There are plenty of places to look, once we establish that there are certain mental states that preclude gun ownership.Report
Do you sincerely believe this? Or are you being an asshole again?
That isn’t related to my question so… I’m guessing the latter.Report
I sincerely believe that if we open the door to red flagging people for mental health reasons, we’re going to start finding all sorts of mental maladies.Report
Jaybird opines:
I ask: would that be a bad thing? (Which is pretty similar to the question Pinky asks below, now that I think about it.)Report
“Jaybird opines:
I sincerely believe that if we open the door to red flagging people for mental health reasons, we’re going to start finding all sorts of mental maladies.
I ask: would that be a bad thing? ”
because it’s absolutely certain that nobody would ever declare some innocent thing like gender dysphoria to be a “mental malady”, right?Report
If only we had the ability to distinguish between things.
If only we could say “This situation justifies doing X and that different situation does not.”
If only…
If only…Report
“If only we had the ability to distinguish between things.”
You know, you’re right; gender dysphoria is demonstrably more often associated with mass shootings than “is old”.Report
Without getting into the weeds of “ableism” and all that wacky stuff, I’d just ask you if it strikes you as likely that we have good mechanisms to determine positive mental health.Report
Fair. What we can do with things like welfare checks right now is maybe identify behavior that suggests the most serious or overt of mental health problems. Like the guy who lived in the park near my house for a week and screamed at the trees. I’m not a psychologist, but I think it’s reasonable to suspect that fellow has a mental health problem and to go just a step further and say that ma-a-a-a-aybe that guy shouldn’t have access to weapons. But what I don’t have is a person I can call and say “Hey, there’s a dude in the park across the street from my house who screams at the trees and I’m feeling a little unsafe here.” I could call the police with that and I’d get one of a) “Is he committing a crime? Because screaming at trees isn’t a crime.” (To which one would be tempted to retort, “If he does it at two in the morning it is.”) or b) “Too bad for you, should have voted for a city council member we like better, but now everyone on the force has the Blue Flu,” or c) “We’ll be right there” and they show up and scare the hell out of the guy and he winds up getting shot which I didn’t want, I just wanted someone to calm his inner demons so that the rest of us folks in the neighborhood can get some sleep. (Options b) and c) are what you’d get in Portland today; I hope you’d at least get a) in your city.)Report
My city had a policy of buying these guys bus tickets.
Ostensibly it was “bus tickets back home” to, you know, family or friends or whatever but, in practice, it was to someplace out West.
Hey, they had a negative environmental impact on our green spaces and we were doing our best to make sure that our green spaces were clean.
We *ALL* live downstream.Report
It depends. I see three issues.
First is the clearly howling at the moon insane. Everyone agrees they shouldn’t armed. We passed some sanity laws after Virginia Tech. I assume their bar for mental illness is set very high since the NRA and Team Red signed off on it.
2nd, more generally, about 20% of the population are mentally ill (Google). Most people live with it, most people are pretty functional. It’s not workable to use that as the standard to prevent gun ownership.
3rd issue is it’d be a lot easier to tighten standards if we could assume good faith from the anti-gun crowd. They are clearly trying to engineer a march to full disarmament.Report
I asked: Does the military do any psych evals?
My thinking is that if the military — who routinely hand people guns and send them into places to kill people — have a mechanism to say, “We don’t think this person should be handed a gun and sent into a place to kill people”, maybe we should start there.
You responded with a link to somethingsomethingsomething menstruation is a mental illness.
So, either you’re being a total ass (again) or you are engaging in an absurdist slippery slope.Report
The military does more than merely psych evals.
Oooh. Maybe we could make “could pass a security clearance test” a pre-req.
Hey, Kazzy. Have you smoked marijuana in the last 7 years?
Be careful: how you answer will determine whether you can legally own a gun.Report
Why can’t you answer a simple question?
If someone is excluded from the military wholly on the grounds of a psych eval, I’d argue that psych eval is a good starting place for evaluating a civilian’s fitness to possess a firearm.
You can agree with that. You can disagree with that.
You can also argue that menstruation is a reason to exclude someone from possessing a firearm.
That last thing has nothing to do with anything I wrote.
So… either you sincerely believe menstruation is a reason to exclude someone from possessing a firearm…
-or-
You’re being an asshole
Given, well, everything in this exchange, I reckon you’re being an asshole.Report
Kazzy, marijuana use has gotten people kicked out of the military too.
You wouldn’t believe what else would get you kicked out in living memory.
Serious question: Would we be using the DSM V to determine what constitutes a malady? If not, what would we be using? The same standard as what the military uses to kick people out?Report
Not. What. I. Asked.
Stupid or asshole?
I vote the latter.
Cheers.Report
Kazzy, you *DO* realize that I was not the one who, in an official capacity, questioned whether that particular malady constituted an official mental state that could provide for an Insanity Defense in an official capacity, right?
Like, I wasn’t the person arguing that it was. I was telling you that it has been considered so in the past… right?
So, like, when you’re saying “we should be able to use mental insanity as a reason to exclude gun ownership from certain persons”, that’s a good reason to bring up stuff that has been officially declared “mental insanity” by people with actual governmental power… right?Report
Things I never said but an asshole will lie and say I said for $1000:
What is “we should be able to use mental insanity as a reason to exclude gun ownership from certain persons”?Report
Kazzy, so long as you’re arguing that it’s offensive that I implied that you argued that “we should use mental maladies as reasons to exclude gun ownership from certain persons”, I’m good.
We agree that it’s offensive to even imply that such an implication is offensive.
Magnificent.
Wait.
What was the original argument again?Report
Assholes for $2000.
Who is Jaybird?Report
Is it offensive to argue that mental maladies are grounds for non mentis compos?
Is it not offensive to argue that?
Because, if it is, I am *DELIGHTED* to show you things that have been presented as grounds for non mentis compos in living memory.
If you think that the things that have been grounds for non mentis compos in living memory are offensive in theory…
Well, I’d advise you to wander away from the whole “grounds for non mentis compos” thing if you were looking for ways to prevent gun ownership.
Because, as we agree, only an asshole would agree with the government on the grounds for non mentis compos.Report
I have a link for what that means. Military gives a DQ for the following.
1) Anxiety Disorder
2) Asperger’s
3) Autism
4) Bipolar
5) Depression
6) Learning Disabilities (ADHD & ADD)
7) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
8) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
9) Suicidal Tendencies
This gets rid of about 20% of the population. Note there’s a vast difference between “have it a little” and “have it a lot”.
https://www.operationmilitarykids.org/military-disqualifications-for-mental-health/Report
It *MAY* give a DQ for those things.
Nowhere on that list was menstruation.
If someone wants to sincerely argue that everyone should be able to buy a gun regardless of their mental health status, let them argue that.
My position is we should consider mental health status and should maybe take cues from the military’s psych eval process. Plenty of room for folks to disagree with that.
Saying “BUT WHAT ABOUT VAGINAS!!?!?1!!” is an insincere, asshole ‘argument.’Report
The federal form 4473 asks if a person has been ‘adjudicated mentally defective’ or ‘committed to a mental institution.’ Different states may require similar certifications and also have some sort of checks. YMMV as to whether you find it sufficient but if the answer is yes the person is prohibited from having a firearm.Report
It is not only possible but has historically been demonstrated that governments can use mental health concerns as an excuse for oppression. Does that mean that government should never address mental health concerns?Report
And the “well regulated” aspect of that means that those individuals need to be competent in the use of their own firearm, because there wouldn’t be much time to train during a call up. Therefore they have to train prior to the call up.Report
I would not be opposed to setting up an actual militia, where most able-bodied folks show up and get training. A big part of any such training would go well beyond learning to flick off a safety and pull a trigger. Much more important would be training in when not to shoot, recognizing genuine threats and their opposites, and exercising good judgment under stress.Report
And yet such training – say completed every 5 years by law abiding gun owners as a condition of possession and purchase – will never be the law of the land . . .Report
True. Probably assumed but not actually black letter.Report
There is no “probably”. It goes back to medieval times where commoners (men) had to practice archery in the common a certain number of times a month or some such. IIRC they were also required to produce a certain number of arrows a year.Report
“Black letter” is “what the 2nd AM actually says”.
“Assumed” is “what it was assumed would happen”.
So the “well regulated” (i.e. highly functional) aspect of potentially being summoned to a militia certainly includes being competent with your own weapon.
What the 2ndAM actually says is preventing you from owning a weapon instantly makes the militia dysfunctional so that can’t be outlawed.
The States probably could pass laws saying you’re supposed to get training for your weapons, but the punishment for not getting it can’t be taking your weapon (2nd AM again) so I’m not sure where that goes.
For the insane there’s wide agreement that there’s no way in hell they’d be allowed in a militia, i.e. they’re not “abled bodied”. That probably also means the old and infirm.Report
“Well regulated” at that time period did not mean “state controlled”, it meant “well functioning”. So a clock would be well regulated if it told the correct time.
The mentally ill shooter is a serious outlier. The typical shooter simply has a violent (sub)culture.Report
The Wilhoit Principle, spotted in the wild.Report
Very likely the success rate will be lower, and most people who survive suicide attempts don’t try again.Report
Other countries, some of whom are gun free, don’t seem to have seriously lower suicide rates. The strong implication is replacing suicide-by-gun with suicide-by-something-else is somewhere between “not a strong improvement” and “not an improvement”.
That’s why I dislike lumping suicide in there with “gun violence”. The rhetorical suggestion is it’d go away, the real world experience is that it doesn’t when applied at a country level.
There is something to the idea that in our country “the gun as a symbol of death” is a thing ergo removing guns from someone who is suicidal is a good thing. However that works at a level of detail that isn’t being suggested here.Report
Are suicides in those countries where guns are harder to get more competent than American suicides? Are they better at dispatching themselves with less certain means?Report
What we have are rates created by counting corpses. That’s probably more important than how successful they are.Report
If we’re interested in reducing gun crimes, then the “pattern” is the bulk of them happen in a handful of zip codes, are are committed by people who fit a certain profile, part of that profile is they are a member of a certain sub-culture and didn’t get the gun legally.
Well then all you need to do is get rid of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th and 7th Amendments, conduct house to house searches, imprison tens of millions of people and convince the rest of America to surrender their rights.
The results will be worse than you imagine.
So really, rampant shoplifting and the occasional slaughter of schoolchildren is preferable. Nothing we can do about either one.Report
imprison tens of millions of people
I’m not understanding this part of it.
I don’t know that it would have to be more than “thousands”.Report
Straw man.
It is not useful to pretend people are calling for the total elimination of all shoplifting. The comparison is silly.
Nor is it useful to handwave the difference between “doing nothing” and totally eliminating school shootings. Schools do stuff. When it works it doesn’t end up in the news. When it doesn’t you proclaim that we’re doing nothing.
If your goal is to totally eliminate something from society (lightning deaths, drownings), then we can’t do it and yes, we’ll just need to live with it.Report
Of course its a straw man.
So what if we adopted the gun laws which were in effect for the first two hundred years of American history?
Y’know, that principle of Burkean conservatism where we take what was good about the past and learn from it.
Things like those Wild West towns where open carry of guns was illegal, or the world that Claire Briggs lived in where it was legal for a jurisdiction to regulate guns.
In other words, maybe the idea that “Gun control requires repeal of the 2nd Amendment and draconian government intervention” is itself a straw man.Report
I’ve often that that Oscar Gordon (where has he been, by the way?) and I could lock ourselves in a room with pizza delivery and adult beverages and come out by the end of the day with a gun regulation regimen that would get 75% plus popular support. Too bad we never had the chance.Report
And if you and Oscar were to do that, CJ, certain members of the dissenting 25% would nevertheless fight the immensely-popular proposal with the tenacity of 1960’s George Wallace resisting integration.Report
Indeed, but since, under the CJ-Oscar rules, most sane, law-abiding folk could, after jumping through some hoops, arm themselves with common sporting weapons if they were so inclined (more hoops for handguns), we could outshoot the 25% if they get too obstreperous.Report
So you’re claiming that the zip codes who are responsible for the bulk of the killings have no gun laws and allow open carry?
Or is the claim that if my zip code (murder rate: zero) bans open carry the zip codes who actually have problems’ criminals will be so impressed with what we do that they’ll stop getting guns illegally?
As far as I can tell, these “nationally do X” proposals are an effort to avoid thinking about the reality that certain zip codes are responsible for the bulk of the killings.Report
Gun nuts are today’s version of 1972 era civil libertarians, the sort who were parodied in movies like Dirty Harry.
Innocent people get murdered and gun nuts just chirp “Constitutional rights!Constitutional rights! This is what we must accept!”
Which nonsense then and is nonsense now.
We don’t need to shred the Constitution in order to reduce crime, we don’t need to turn the country upside down, and regulating guns doesn’t result in gulags.Report
Dark Matter raised the question of incidences of gun violence increasing dramatically in certain zip codes. And when we’re talking about “certain zip codes” I for one read that as shorthand for “economically-challenged dense urban communities populated mostly by people of color” and as long as we’re trying to be real, let’s be real about what that phrase means.
1. I trust that everyone here is repelled by the idea that there would be one rule for areas that are populated principally by people of color and a different rule for areas that are populated principally by descendants of fair-skinned Europeans. Can we all at least agree that although different areas of the country do indeed have varying problems of varying degrees of immediacy, when we’re talking about the law, we are necessarily talking about something that’s a uniform rule for everyone? If you are going to answer that question “no,” I’d appreciate your being explicit about taking that position and promise in exchange to read a justification for that from a default position of charity. Also note that it is possible to have a uniform rule that is enforced with different kinds or levels of emphasis in different areas, which can happen both for good faith reasons and bad faith reasons. Thinking about “bad faith reasons” brings me to point #2…
2. Confronting the fact that we see greater reports of gun violence in urban, poor, and majority-minority neighborhoods SCREAMS to me that addressing this disparity demands we confront the underlying reasons why these neighborhoods suffer from economic poverty and high crime, which again I hope we can all agree is not any sort of genetic difference between the people who live in these neighborhoods but rather the immediate local culture, which is another euphemism for why there are these variances in immediate local culture, viz., the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. Which, while we’re on that subject, take a moment to consider point #3…
3. Considering our historical legacy of racism also gestures very strongly to consider resulting disparities in the level and quality of criminal justice administration, from policing to sentencing, that occurs in these varying neighborhoods. Which again, takes us ultimately back to the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. To be more explicit: perhaps one of the reasons we see areas that are mostly populated by white affluent folks with very low incidences of gun violence reported by police compared with neighbors populated by people of color and lower economic means is that police classify the affluent white people misbehavior differently than they classify poor minority people misbehavior. I do not mean by this statement that affluent white people necessarily engage in the same kinds of misbehavior involving weapons that occurs in the inner cities, as I think there very likely is a very significant difference. But I do think it suggests we should moderate our interpretation of police reporting to account for the possibility that there is lensing going on at least at the margins and the differences between these neighborhoods (or zip codes, if you prefer) might be a little less dramatic than has been previously suggested. So keep the salt shaker handy, because we are probably going to need a few grains here and there if we want to get at the truth.Report
My response:
1. I’m ok with this, as long as there’s an acknowledgement that different areas can have different laws. I don’t think you were trying to push against that but it’s worth stating that clearly.
2. While I don’t accept any genetic argument for the crime rates, I won’t limit the cultural consideration to past racism, nor do I even believe it’s the primary driver of the cultural problem.
3. I reject this as speculation.
P.S. – Maybe this should be its own article.Report
Maybe it should be its own article. I’ve written what I chose to on the subject, though, above, while this discussion is hot.
Can I get you to consider point #3 as a cautionary call for skepticism and critical thought when approaching crime statistics?Report
I believe in critical thought when approaching any statistics. However, regional crime stats can diverge on an order of magnitude, so I doubt that they can be explained away.Report
I’d simplify the point. There are probably a hell of a lot of things that would be more impactful on homicide rates in inner city predominantly black areas than more gun laws. It’s also more than fair to note that the major party that tends to be more supportive of gun rights is fundamentally uninterested in any of those, even as they are willing to cynically trot them out when defending gun rights.
Of course it also takes some acknowledging from the gun control side that the gun rights side is probably mostly right about that, then calling them on the hypocrisy of not being willing to do anything about it. It makes a lot more practical sense than pretending we’re a few good laws away from the homicide rate in America being identical to the one in whichever other rich country. I googled it and the 12 year old I mentioned shot in Baltimore was (allegedly) shot with an assault style rifle. Those rifles were banned in Maryland over a decade ago, and yet someone had it anyway. I see no reason to believe Congress passing the same law would somehow result in that person who shot the 12 year old not having the rifle or something equivalent to it, and shooting the 12 year old. It baffles me that anyone could think otherwise.Report
I find it sadly maddeningly humorous that one of my proposals way upthread was to reduce gun violence by address the underlying economic and mental issues leading to significant gun violence, and suicide by gun . . . and all I got back were diatribes about my interpretation of the constitution. And yet after many more words were spilled we are right back here. Go figure.
I also note that As alluded to above – there are ALREADY gun control proposals enjoying between 60% and 70% Approval in the US in poll after poll after poll. Almost none of which are law. So CJ, you and Oscar save yourselves the trouble – though enjoying the pizza and beer is always a good Idea.Report
My daughter got called for jury duty last August for a trial concerning a murder of a 19 year old black girl that lived and died about mile from us. My daughter basically lives out of state now and was home for a break btw/ her summer job and the start of the school year. When she left, I decided to look at the court website to see what jury trials were scheduled, and there was only one. Crap.
The shooter was also charged with illegal possession of a firearm (handgun) by a felon, which seems at least a day late to enforce. Who cares what conditions you place on having a firearm if access isn’t enforced?Report
What could we do that is going to reduce these zip’s murder rates?Report
Depends on which zip code. But if we really wanted to do something the first would be saturation with police walking beats, not rolling in reactively in vehicles and SWAT gear. Probably would also make sense to have a big investment in detectives to see if more of the murders in those places can be solved so people are less likely to think they can get away with it. There’s a lot of evidence out there that these areas are under policed and when they are policed its done poorly in various ways.
Beyond that there’s macro level stuff. Medicaid expansion has at least correlated with statistically significant decreases in crime. Changing our approach to drugs to make dealing on corners then fighting over said corners less profitable may help. Maybe considering incentives to break up concentrations of poverty. Again, there’s evidence out there suggesting that the majority of violent crime is committed by a surprisingly small number of individuals embedded in those areas.
Now is any of it going to put them on par with the safest suburbs in the country? Of course not and we can probably fairly assume that’s a totally unrealistic goal. But we also might be surprised what could happen if we concentrated our efforts.Report
Here’s an article of maybe some relevance:
https://whyy.org/segments/the-police-experiment-that-changed-what-we-know-about-foot-patrol/Report
This should be tried.
Probably cheaper to have cams set up all over the place.
Yes, that.Report
A very fair statement, although historically we’ve had white zip codes like this too, not sure if there are at the moment. Maybe biker gangs rule a small town or two.
RE: Uniformity of Law.
Agreed… although uniformity of law will look like structural racism.
We have very violent people in some zips. Targeting their zip with more resources to arrest the violent will look racist.
Poverty doesn’t create crime, crime creates poverty.
As for the underlying reasons, we have various gov efforts to “help” people combined with racism and cultural adaptations to racism.
However pointing out that we were heinous 60+ years ago doesn’t change that theirs is the culture that needs to change now.
Not calling the police made sense when the cops’ job was to keep the black man down, and part of that meant you had to resolve differences personally and violence was acceptable. Now, not involving the police enables gangs.
This is wishful thinking. It’s an effort to spin an extremely dysfunctional subculture into something that would be functional if we’d just leave it alone.
We get the numbers we do by counting corpses. The related issues with violence largely match those.
For that matter we could just ask the people involved. There are invisible lines in Chicago over which predatory gangs instinctively don’t cross.
On the other side of the line is a neighborhood that follows different rules and those rules don’t smile on criminals. Victims call the police, so do their neighbors.Report
It is really funny you understand _why_ the police do not historically get called, but somehow think it has changed.
Why exactly do you think you’d be a better judge of how the police behave towards certain people than those people who interact with police?
A reminder: The article Something Is Very Wrong In McCurtain County, Oklahoma was posted right after this one. It’s literally the next one on the site.
Do I need to summarize what happened there?
Do I need to repeat the point I made there, that we have absolutely no evidence that this isn’t the way that _all_ police departments operate?Report
McCurtain is a tiny county (population: 34k) covering a very large area (3rd largest in Oklahoma, 2k square miles), with few blacks.
For all it’s isolation, the likely result of it’s leadership’s attitudes going public is everyone loses their jobs.
That you need to use it as your example for “typical” speaks wonders. Trying to claim it’s identical to Chicago is a non-starter.
It’s like claiming since we found one person with mumps we must all have it.
Let’s list what’s changed since the 1950s.
1) Blacks have the right to vote and have become either a strong or dominate voice in the liberal areas which have these zips.
2) The political network which they run often totally controls all levels of power in those areas.
3) The political servants hired/elected reflects both #1 and #2. So the last Mayor of Chicago was a gay black woman, two of the three Heads of the Chicago Police for whom I have pictures were black.
4) We now have millions of social justice warriors sniffing around looking for a hint of racism to oppose.
5) We have vastly increased our ability to report racism. Every adult in the US is a potential film crew.
6) Reports of racism are treated seriously, thus McCurtain going viral.
Large numbers of people want racism to be the core problem. So much so that very large data sets are sifted through to pick individual points that match what they want to believe.
Either the black community very consistently votes in black racists to oppose themselves or the narrative is wrong and there are other problems.Report
It’s the first, Dark. Except, of course, the Black community doesn’t do that, they get voted in by white liberals who are happy to find a Black person to play the game and not shake anything up. Or they fail at that, do shake things up and they get rid of them.
A reminder: A Federal judge in Portland barred the use of tear gas during BLM protests. The mayor of Portland also barred them from using it, first with an exemption if their life was in danger and then just flatly barred the use.
The police continued to use it in violation of the law.
One of the most liberal cities in this country literally could not get the police to stop doing something.
Hey, question: Do you remember Michael Brown? We had a long discussion about how his body was left on the street. Do you remember the fact that Ferguson Missouri had a very Black population but an _astonishingly_ white government?
Do you know what those two Black men (Eddie T. Johnson and David Brown) have both, completely independently, have said is a major problem? That minorities do not trust them.
Johnson specifically pointed out how badly the murder of Laquan McDonald had damaged trust in the police among the Black community. And he approved of the investigation into the CPD that found widespread excessive use of force and racial discrimination by the CPD. He also saw a pretty substantial drop in violent crime despite only being office two years. (He was removed from office due to a drinking problem, which sort sucks because he does seem to have been pretty good at the job.)
Brown, meanwhile, said the right things about community outreach, but…didn’t really seem to do anything to reign in the worst excess of police behavior…and violence went up quite a lot, although probably not all of that is on him, a lot of it is probably on the economy. He seemed somewhat unable to stand up the police, and ultimately, that’s what caused him to lose his job. (He resigned after Lori Lightfoot was not re-elected as mayor as both the remaining candidate had vowed to fire him.)
Wow, it’s almost as if the people you’re talking about know there’s a problem and yet are unable to fix it because it is part of the structure of the system instead of anything they can tweak.
If you’re going to say ‘Look, a bunch of places have Black police leadership’, you really need to follow up with ‘And they all literally agree with DavidTC that the problem is that police are fairly racist and are not trusted for by minorities for pretty good reasons’ because that’s actually what they tend to say, and their entire time in office is spent struggling against that, with various levels of success.
Hey, question: What if we had really really obviously, completely unassailable proof that police operate racistly in at least one very specific way? Like, all across the country, in cities and rural areas, in a very specific and objectively determined way?
Cause I have one.
If cops pull someone over at 7 in the evening, that person is about 3%-5% more likely to be Black _if it’s not dark yet_. (And that may not sound like much, but remember that that Blacks are only like 12% of the population, so it actually is a pretty serious difference.)
Same time of day (They used 7 because it’s sometime dark and sometimes not.), presumably the same drivers and cars, driving in the same way, statistically true across the entire country, or at least everywhere that’s been looked at, across 100 million traffic stops.
https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf
And as the report points out, this number assumes that the police can’t actually see all drivers’ race, which is probably not true. Whatever percentage they can’t see is producing a pretty large statistical different, though.
Which is then promptly dismissed by people like you, Dark.
6) Reports of racism are treated seriously, thus McCurtain going viral.
Oh, viral! That solves the problem, I guess?
Every single person who participated in that is still in their position.Report
I grew up watching the antics of Colman Young, 5 time mayor of Detroit, stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee, elected by the 50% of Detroit that was black. If you need to describe him as “an anti-black racist” to make your case then your argument is beyond absurd.
His career is an interesting case study. He took over a major American city when the police force was openly racist and he reformed them. Police Brutality dropped by two thirds. Detroit also became “the murder capital of the world” so there’s that. If we assume the reforms weren’t related to the increase in violence then we’re showcasing police’s limits.
Two thirds is not 100%, but it does suggest the current reality is vastly better than the 1950s. Comparing it to some theoretical utopia is useful but claiming that we’ve done nothing is not.
RE: Ferguson Missouri
Cherry picked because it’s unusual.
RE: minorities do not trust them.
Yes, I think I said that.
RE: …the murder of Laquan McDonald
There are billions of interactions between the cops and civilians, some of them will be heinous. If you choose to let the heinous ones define your relationship(s) then it’s what you want to do.
Yes, bias still exists at measurable levels. We don’t have utopia yet.
Jumping from “this still exists” to “this is still the dominate force in people’s lives” is a bit much.
So blacks have no responsibility for their own culture. Their culture will continue to be dysfunctional until we create a police force (and society) that has no measurable bias, but until then it’s not their fault, they should get a pass on it.
So when a 15 year old decides to shoot his ex-gf’s new bf, it’s the fault of white America and society as a whole.
We should reform the police. However, 15 year olds will still have girlfriends, lose them, and want respect. If their culture says you kill in that situation, then having nicer cops around probably won’t mean much in terms of lowering the murder rate.Report
The increase in violence is almost certainly due to Detroit’s economy completely collapsing and the city continuing to be hollowed out as everyone who can leave, leaves. I think we can all agree with that.
And, yes, the police are actually astonishingly bad at stopping violence, or indeed stopping crime in general. In fact, the police seem to have almost no correlation to that!
You want to know the cultures that actually cause the most gun violence?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413
There’s an actual cultural difference for you.
As opposed to ‘Interacting with the police is incredibly risking as a Black person so we choose not to interact with them.’, which is the Black position. Which I guess you can argue is cultural, but it’s pretty directly learned cultural position off of facts that are still true today, as opposed to the culture _I’m_ from, the Appalachian culture, who learned a bunch of lessons 100s of years ago in Ireland and Scotland about government control and haven’t changed their minds since.
Detroit still has a problem with racism _within its own department_. That’s how the Detroit police _treats fellow police officers_ who are Black: https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/2016-dpd-report-revealed-racial-tensions-in-detroits-6th-precinct
And you have decided that the threshold for interacting with the police is that they are only beating 1/3 the Black people? (Which is apparently your standard of racism? What?)
I’m glad you’ve become in charge of when an minority’s oppression at the hands of the police is something they should decide to put up for the Greater Good…
…except that doesn’t actually make sense, because racist police have a long record of making situations _much worse_, and there’s no indication this has stopped. This isn’t some tradeoff that Black people are making, where on one side the police might make thing better but on the other side they might randomly murder people.
No, a bunch of people have started noticing that the police don’t actually do anything. Like, at all. They are not, in any manner, helpful in any sort of practical manner, and they don’t stop crimes that people actually care about. They don’t even _solve_ crimes that people care about.
You sorta mentioned that above but didn’t seem to notice.
So on the ‘cons of calling the police’ side, we have ‘all sorts of violence and death might ensure’, and on the ‘pro’ side we literally have a blank board with a big question mark on it.
—
In fact, let’s do a fun study here: What problems has anyone had here that has been solved by contacting the police and they did something? (To be clear, I’m not saying there aren’t any, I just want to show how trivial these things tend to be.)Report
I’m going to reply to this at the bottom so text margin gets wider.Report
Have you ever read “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”? It does a decent job of explaining the violence of Southern culture and how it got transferred to Northern black culture.Report
While Sowell is a hack, the work on Southern (and Western) violence was done by a psychologist named Richard Nisbett, who wrote a good (though now somewhat dated) book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-Directions/dp/0813319935Report
I got an email about DavidTC replying to my post here but I can’t see it.
Was it deleted or something?Report
I released multiple comments by regulars, including that one. All contained links.
A gentle reminder that if a comment contains a link, invoking the edit function will immediately throw the comment into moderation. Standard WordPress behavior, not something that can be changed.Report
I have lived in NYC for over four decades and, despite near-daily subway rides through neighborhoods that would cause the cast of Jim Jordan’s Traveling Clown Show to soil themselves, I have literally never been in a situation where, realistically, I would have been safer carrying a gun. If the current push to expand concealed carry gains any traction, however, I may have to reconsider and strap up.
Not that I would be any more afraid of criminal predators than I am now. They operate by getting the drop on someone, making the presence of a holstered gun you can’t get to in time irrelevant. But all bets are off if I have to worry about random armed NY assholes having a bad day. Then I would likely have a decent chance to defend myself. Even then, however, more armed NYers, not to mention the cops, could easily react to the scene not knowing who the bad guy is and taking out whoever has a gun. I hope it doesn’t come to that.Report
Maryland’s law on carrying went down along with NY’s in Bruen. I ended up getting my CCW under the new standard, not so much out of any desire to carry, but out of concern that the legislative backlash might jeopardize my ability to keep what I have or buy something new. Essentially I wanted to get the highest possible level of ‘legal’ I could. In order to do this I did a class on the law (which for me was review but whatever, others needed to know) and a basic proficiency test. Anyone who couldn’t pass it should probably strongly reconsider whether they should have a firearm.
Anyway I think your inclination is right. Any instructor worth a damn will tell you that carrying comes with its own risks and it’s really pretty rare that you’re net lowering your risk by having a gun on you. There are accidents of course but you’re also making yourself a target or risking some kind of misunderstanding with other people, including other people legally armed. It isn’t like there’s some determination of lawfulness that’s going to put you back together, pay your bills, or in the worst case bring you back from the graveReport
Support the NRA and your local range.Report
American gun culture remains something that baffles me entirely as a person raised in Canada. The school shootings strike me as a relentless but slowly advancing social siege though. If policy makers can’t figure out how to sort that issue out then eventually, possibly generations from now, the 2nd amendment is going to go down.Report
Lester was on his own property, shooting at someone who was also on his property. He should be tried and convicted of whatever crime is appropriate, depending on what happens to Yarl–while you have rights about conduct on your property, deploying lethal violence without prior warning is not one of them–but I’m not sure what “Constitutional Carry” has to do with any of this.
Or even guns, for that matter. If Lester had stabbed Yarl with a pitchfork, the legal aspects of the conversation would be identical.Report
It’s hard to shove a pitchfork through two doors and into someone standing, probably, a foot or so away from the outer door.Report
That’s the kind of brilliant insight your clients pay money for?Report
No, it’s what I offer to you, for free.Report
Right. Constitutional carry doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. Ten years ago Illinois was the only state that banned carry and every other state had addressed the rules governing how carry would work and whether and what training was required.
Last year a 15 year old girl stabbed to death another student and seriously injured a second student on school grounds here. She claimed self defense because she said the two were planning to attack her once she left the school, but she was widely seen chasing the second student through the hallway with the knife. The jury found her guilty and she was just sentenced to 43 years in prison. The same self defense laws applied as if she had a gun.Report
On the subject:
– The FBI isn’t releasing the Nashville school shooter’s manifesto because it’s so warped it’d cause public unrest.
– Leaks indicate that the Louisville bank shooter’s manifesto was anti-gun.
– Police have arrested 6 in the Alabama sweet 16 shooting. I’ve only seen pictures of five, who are all young black males.Report
The fundamental problem when it comes to the question of resolving this problem from the top-down is that we, fundamentally, have a principal-agent problem.
You may recall that, very recently, there were serious calls to Defund the Police.
So any call for a law that would need to be enforced would need to wrestle with the need to deal with Law Enforcement.
And that’s after you deal with the whole issue of “could this law pass?” which, lemme tell ya, ain’t a gimme either.
I still have no idea why The War On Guns would turn out any different than The War On Drugs and the more I think about what’s likely to happen, the more I think that it’d result in more fully automatic weapons than fewer of them. (Hey, if you’re going to smuggle a lower, might as well drill that third hole, right? Sorry, we don’t have any opium. Just heroin.)Report
I don’t presume to speak for any of my commiepinko brethren but for me, “Defund the Police” was ever something I understood even by its most extreme advocates to be a call for zero law enforcement. Rather, it was a call to divert particular governmental functions that may or may not be characterized as “law enforcement” which are currently being executed by the police to different agencies. You don’t necessarily need an armed police office to serve an eviction warrant, for instance (unless the tenant responds to the service with violence) nor do you even always want to have armed, uniformed police officers responding to people having mental health meltdowns in public.
Maybe “Defund the Police” was and remains a bad idea. Maybe “Defund the Police” was and remains a strategically-more-extreme-than-sincere position taken by progressives because previously, calls for the more moderate-sounding “Reform the Police” or even “How About You Cops Just Shoot People Less Often And Maybe Dial The Racism Back A Couple Notches” appeared to have gone ignored or dismissed.
Furthermore, I don’t think anyone in this thread has mentioned confiscating guns from anyone. There is discussion of gun control generally but I haven’t seen a lot of policy specifics about what gun control would look like. Even back in the Oppressive Totalitarian State days of 1994-2004, the “assault weapons ban” prohibited the manufacturing, sale and resale of certain semi-automatic weapons, but not the possession of any such weapon that had been acquired legally before the ban took effect. The ex post facto clause seems to me like it would prohibit any ban or other criminalization of any weapon that was acquired legally at the time it was acquired, so if you have an AR-15 that you acquired legally today, even if AR-15’s were banned tomorrow, you’d be able to keep it.
IOW, no one was ever going to reduce our cities to anarchy, and no one is going to come to try and take your guns away from you.Report
Yeah, yeah. It’s dishonest to interpret “Defund” as “Defund”. It *REALLY* meant “Reallocate to Social Workers.”
In any case, the Principal-Agent problem remains: You pass the laws… who enforces them? The aforementioned social workers that you promise to trust more than the police that actually exist?
I’m not even talking about whether “Defund” is or was a good idea.
I’m saying that pivoting from “Defund” to “Additional Laws That Will Require Enforcement” indicates something a lot closer to a windmill than an actual plan.
“Nobody mentioned confiscation!”
“I’m not talking about confiscation. I’m talking about enforcement.”Report
“Defund” is not the same word as “Abolish.” There are people who advocate a position of “Abolish the Police.” Feel free to criticize that policy if you want, but it’s a different policy than what the “Defund” people were advocating.
Why did they use such a clumsy phrase if that wasn’t what they meant? Because “Reallocate to Social Workers” is even worse.Report
And I am not saying that “Abolish” is the same as “Defund”.
I am assuming that “Defund” means, at least, “as many cops as exist now but with less military equipment” but could mean as much as “fewer cops but the numbers that are gone from the cops are added to social workers”.
So we’d have more or less the same cops that exist today dealing with the new and additional laws that they have to enforce?
I still see that we have a Principal-Agent problem.Report
This is a case of arbitrarily inventing rules that apply only to guns and are discarded a moment later.
Like, apply this logic to shoplifting or speed limits or oh I don’t know abortion clinics.
We simply cannot enforce laws against shoplifting without wrestling with law enforcement argue bargle gibber squee and the War on Speeding will be just like the War on Drugs.Report
We simply cannot enforce laws against shoplifting without wrestling with law enforcement argue bargle gibber squee and the War on Speeding will be just like the War on Drugs.
We aren’t enforcing the laws against shoplifting, Chip. That’s one of the complaints about law enforcement that doesn’t neatly fall under “they’re misallocating funding that should be going to social work!”
And despite your mockery of the concept, I still have no idea why The War On Guns would turn out any different than The War On Drugs.
“We’ll do it for real this time. With the competence that we have been holding back.”Report
Yes we absolutely are enforcing the law on shoplifting, just as we are enforcing the laws on murder, speeding, and every other law.
The War on X is a stupid framing since it can be applied to anything- the War On Rape, the War On Burglary, etc.
Again, you don’t use this logic on those laws, only this one.Report
Well, let me ask you:
Do you feel that the War on Shoplifting is going particularly well? I can provide you with footage that contradicts your assertion that we are enforcing the law on shoplifting, if you’d care to see it.
I ask because I grew up smack dab in the middle of the War on Drugs and that only resulted in stuff like this.
Again, you don’t use this logic on those laws, only this one.
Chip, I am coming out and asking you why this will be any different than the laws against Shoplifting and Drugs. I am using the logic that we use on those laws on this proposed one.
I promise.Report
Well, let me ask you:
Do you feel that the War on Murder/Arson/Rape is going particularly well? I can provide you with footage that contradicts your assertion that we are enforcing the law on Murder/Arson/Rape, if you’d care to see it.
I am coming out and asking you why this will be any different than the laws against Guns and Drugs. I am using the logic that we use on those laws on this proposed one.Report
Do you feel that the War on Murder/Arson/Rape is going particularly well?
Given that the numbers are going up, I’d say “no”.
Seriously, did you set that up deliberately?
I can provide you with footage that contradicts your assertion that we are enforcing the law on Murder/Arson/Rape, if you’d care to see it.
I would *LOVE* to see the footage you have that contradicts me.
I am coming out and asking you why this will be any different than the laws against Guns and Drugs. I am using the logic that we use on those laws on this proposed one.
Chip, I’m the guy saying that they wouldn’t be any different.
It’s your job to say “NO! THIS IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT!”Report
OK, great.
So if the laws against Guns/Shoplifting/Drugs/Murder/Rape are not working, what is the logical conclusion here?Report
There are several.
One of them is Constitutional Carry.Report
Keep going.
You’re almost there.Report
“Law Enforcement doesn’t work half as well as people pretend it does”?Report
Good.
Ok so now lets follow that to its next step.
Should law enforcement, which as you say doesn’t work, get more funding, or less?
Especially since, as you have pointed out so many times, when it tries to enforce the law that effort in itself creates injustice?
How would you argue against the proposition that the police should be defunded, or even abolished?Report
which as you say doesn’t work
See? This is one of those things. That’s not what I actually said. What I actually said is right there.
How would you argue against the proposition that the police should be defunded, or even abolished?
I’d probably point to stuff like this from Freddie.
I’d probably also discuss what would be a pre-req to police reformation. Stuff like wrestling with QI and Police Unions.
You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you that there are people out there who support police unions despite police corruption. Like, actively. It’s crazy.Report
So putting your words and logic together, doesn’t that just suggest that all we need to do to make the War On Drugs/Murder/Guns/Shoplifting work is robust police reform?
And conversely, none of them work until and unless that happens?Report
Are you asking me for a silver bullet?
Nope, don’t have one.
It’s a whole issue with moving from a society that has higher trust to a society that has lower trust.
We need to reestablish trust.
Until that happens, we’re going to be in a place where it makes sense to conclude “rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6”.Report
Who is this “we” who has to re-establish the trust of who in whom? And how do “we” do that with whoever that is?Report
We. As a society. This includes our trust in each other as well as our institutions.
And how do “we” do that with whoever that is?
It’s the same as trying to make a marriage work.
In the iterated game, quit defecting.Report
Let’s try again. Who doesn’t trust whom? And why? Whose fault is it? What can be done about it?
Most people I know trust most other people they know, and many they don’t. Most of them have a fair amount of trust in many of our institutions, while having a healthy regard for their shortcomings. We know that because of what they do and how they act, not because of what they say or claim to feel.
But if you insist on game theory jargon, whose move is it, and what is the non-defecting move?Report
Eh, I decline to answer the topmost questions.
We’re moving from a higher-trust society to a lower-trust one. That manifests in such ways as “don’t call the cops”.
For some, we shouldn’t call the cops because they’re racist and will shoot people. For others, we shouldn’t call the cops because they won’t do anything but shrug. (The majority of police that I see around town seem to be an arm of the insurance companies.)
But if you insist on game theory jargon, whose move is it, and what is the non-defecting move?
The moves happen at the same time. That’s part of the problem. As for the non-defecting move, there’s a different one for each individual playing.
The police have a different one than non-police citizens have, people in this part of town have different ones than people in that part of town, and so on and so forth.
Reformation of the slide we’re going down doesn’t have a specific universal act.
And, get this, some of the reformation will require stuff that will *APPEAR* to be a defection… for example, busting police unions and firing bad police for bad action (which means getting rid of QI, among other things).
As it is, we have corrupt police who can’t be trusted to deal with laws that we very badly want enforced.
And if we don’t have those, we’re going to be stuck discussing how we ever got to a place where Constitutional Carry became a thing.Report
Jaybird, this is a classic “Decline and fall” narrative, combined with almost a wish fulfillment of same.
I say wish fulfillment because you are the loudest voice trumpeting every bit of crime hysteria mingled with corrupt police blotter, with dashes of survivalist “get yersef a gun an lock yer doors” cliches.
The message being sent is one of retreat and disengagement, which is really the core of reactionary sentiment.Report
Chip, people are getting themselves guns and locking their doors.
That is what the original post is about.Report
By any measure, America is safer and more peaceful, with higher levels of trust now than anytime in its history.
Which is why the “decline” narrative is a manifestation of political grievance, not a rational assessment of the situation. It is about a restoration of some perceived status.Report
By any measure, you say?
Higher levels of trust now than anytime in its history, you say?
I would be interested in your measures for that.Report
The measures are:
Crime rates, family abuse rates, addiction/ substance abuse, enfranchisement and participation in public life.Report
Oh, interesting.
I seem to have different information. Here’s Vox on crime rates:
Here’s a report on domestic violence going unreported. Did you know that DV *SPIKED* during the 2020 lockdowns? Saying it’s down from a local maxima is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But we don’t know whether it’s regression to the mean yet.
Drug abuse statistics points out:
I’m not finding good numbers for enfranchisement.
I’m not finding good numbers for participation in public life. (Wait, is this a “Mostly Peaceful Protests” joke? If so, it’s a good one.)
In any case, I’d like to see your numbers.Report
Your numbers prove my point.
All your metrics are better now than a decade ago, better than where you were a child, probably better than when your parents were children.
By enfranchisement, I mean it in the literal sense of being able to vote freely, and in the broader sense of being accepted in society as an equals.
Those measures have improved dramatically over the past decades, while declining for none.Report
We are down from the peak of 1990, yes, but our rates in 2023 are higher than their local minima in 2012.
Maybe it’s just regression to the mean.Report
Respectfully, I think you guys have gone well beyond the line of talking passed each other with this. I’d redirect to that PBS link I shared above about the policing study in Philadelphia. They determined that about 50% of violent crime was happening within about 3% of the city’s geography, and were able to get something like a 40% drop with heavy foot patrols targeted to those specific areas (as opposed to foot patrols everywhere or the normal American method of vehicles driving around all over the place responding to 911 calls).
It’s totally possible to have areas with real law and order issues and locals rationally reacting to them in defensive ways as well as having people going off the antisocial deep end over perceived risks they don’t actually face.Report
The first step is admitting that there is even a problem.Report
What is “participation in public life” and how is it measured?Report
A century ago, only a minority of American adult citizens could vote, or realistically own property, or hold office.
Even within my lifetime large swaths of Americans weren’t hired or promoted because of their race or gender, and women couldn’t have a bank account or credit in their own name.
Only in the past couple decades have LGBTQ people been allowed to live openly, to marry and have children and hold positions of public trust.
The “Decline” narrative is an explicit grievance against this change of affairs and a call to return to when these people were relegated to second class status.Report
My impression is this narrative, like BLM and a few others, is a reflection that all local news is now national.
That’s a statement you really shouldn’t put into other people’s mouths without them being a lot more direct about it.Report
If moving to a crime free zip code counts, then this is very common.Report
“Studies show that 80% of traffic accidents happen within a mile of your house.”
“Wow, I should move to a better neighborhood!”
Zip codes aren’t dangerous, your behavior and chosen circle of friends are.Report
This barely works as a solution for me as an adult. It doesn’t work for children.
I don’t know how to tell a elementary or middle school child that they should only have friends who are from functional cultures. Children are learning machines, if they’re around people behaving badly they’ll copy that.
What I can do is look at stats which describe the zip before I move in and remove the issue. That has the additional side effect of removing lots of negative situations.Report
So you’re defecting. Got it.Report
It’s the optimal play when playing against a defector.
Would that it were not so.Report
The optimal play can be determined only in relation to some end. Whether a play is cooperation or defection can be determined only in relation to the rules of the game. When the end is unclear and the rules up for grabs, the optimal play is to grade one’s own papers. That’s often easy to spot.Report
This is why communication about the game is important while the game occurs.
If you’re dealing with someone who tells you “I’m not defecting” even as they are defecting, that’s important information.
(There’s also the whole issue of “who gets to decide whether a defection took place?” which adds to how the game is played. “Grading your own papers” is a good way to put it. You should not be the judge of whether what you did was, technically, a defection.)Report
You said you were defecting, and I took you at your word. If you have an example of defection from someone else, which would make that optimal play, that might move the ball along. To do that, however, you would have to explain the game and show whether someone else is even playing.Report
See? That’s not what happened.
You said that I was defecting. I pointed out that defection is the optimal play in response to you saying that.
This happened right above us. It’s, like, RIGHT THERE.Report
And you admitted it.
People can read for themselves.Report
No. I just accept that the individual is not the judge of whether or not the individual defected.
This is me *NOT* grading my own papers.Report
Pushing the “Decline” narrative, as you do, is itself a defection.
Look at your posts, and how they are relentlessly pushing the themes of fear and anxiety and distrust.
Maybe its the Lab Leak theory, or the “masks don’t work and The Man is lying to you” story.
Maybe its the “Here’s another story of outtacontrol urban crime”, or “hey look at these black kids who can’t read”.
Or the “Divorce Or War” fetish, or simply the “Game Is Iterated So You Better Watch Out” stuff.
Overall the one constant is fear and distrust and well, decline.
And even when presented with contradictory evidence, like conspiracists you doggedly insist that no, Something Awful is happening, and if people tell you otherwise it’s just delusions on their part.
You’re the one defecting, telling us all that you don’t trust your fellow citizens.Report
Pushing the “Decline” narrative, as you do, is itself a defection.
If you see it as such, I guess I can’t dissuade you.
But if I see movement from a higher trust society to a lower one, and you are actively telling me that I am not seeing what I am seeing, then that falls into the whole category of “gaslighting” and whatnot.
Defection against defection is the logical play.Report
IMHO moving to a lower trust society is a natural part of increasing the value of taking control of the gov plus using the gov to resolve cultural conflicts.
We might be moving into a pro-life gov, that not only can but should inspire a lack of trust from the pro-choice supporters.
It’s also a side effect of using the gov for social engineering and group rights. If the gov is insisting people should have their lives fixed because of what happened to their ancestors, then that’s going to look very unfair to people who disagree.
Explaining to poor whites that they need to stay poor because of racial justice and there are enough successful whites doesn’t go well. Claiming that they’re racist if they disagree is just refusing to engage on the original disagreement.Report
“When the end is unclear and the rules up for grabs, the optimal play is to grade one’s own papers.”
congratulations, you invented defectingReport
What are we trying to accomplish here?
If the answer is, “how can we get people to trust the gov so we can march towards full disarmament”, then the question is self defeating.
If the question is, “how can we lower gun violence”, then the answer needs to focus on the zip codes fueling the numbers. Stop pretending that taking guns from my zero-murder zip is going to reduce the murder rate.
If it’s too politically painful to focus on those zip codes because it’s going to look racist but you still need to virtue signal your opposition to gun violence, then you’ve answered the question on why people don’t trust you.
Insisting that you want a high trust society while also insisting that large groups of people need to accept cultural cramdowns is a mess. When those cultural cramdowns are pretty worthless and only virtue signaling to the faithful, then it’s more of a mess.Report
I think I speak for all liberals, everywhere, in saying that “focusing on zip codes with a lot of crime” is a wonderful idea and we absolutely should do a lot more of it.
From La Times:
Mayor Karen Bass’ first budget: more cops, more hotel rooms for L.A.’s homeless population
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-18/la-mayor-karen-bass-budget-calls-for-200-retired-cops-to-returnReport
Well, we agree here so I guess hell froze over. 😉
I’m not sure “all liberals everywhere” agree; IMHO much of the national discourse is an effort to avoid this reality.Report
What is who trying to accomplish here?Report
Which brings us right back to the “We must accept a certain level of lawlessness and disorder to avoid a larger problem of civil rights violations”.
I think its fair to characterize this as the anarcho-libertarian thesis for short.Report
If the choice is between me accepting lawlessness or someone else suffering civil rights violations, then that’s an easy choice.
The acceptable level of murder in my zip is zero, if that’s a problem then we’ll pass laws making it your problem and not mine.Report
Imagine if we re-write your comment like this:
If the choice is between me accepting lawlessness or
someone elsegun owners suffering civil rights violations, then that’s an easy choice.The acceptable level of murder in my zip is zero, if that’s a problem then we’ll pass laws making it
yourgun owners’ problem and not mine.ReportThe suggestions are not mirrors of each other. If we want to reduce murders, then restricting the civil rights of a zip code which already has none isn’t going to do anything.
The people you need to target already don’t get their guns legally. Restricting their civil rights may need to be on the table because outlawing both murder and their gun ownership hasn’t done enough.Report
There will likely always be a certain level of lawlessness. We cannot reduce the number to zero.
That does not mean that we are at an optimal level now.Report
We do not expect garbage men to eliminate garbage.
Eliminating garbage men because they’ve “failed” to do so will result in predictable and terrible results.Report
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Garbage collection works fine in my neighborhood.”
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On the other hand, garbage men collect 100% of the garbage they set out to collect every day.Report
New constituencies.
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Google: Does violence increase during recession?
This data suggests that while violent crime and property crime rates did increase during some recessions, they either remained relatively stable or decreased during others, suggesting no determinable trend.
So no, a lack of money doesn’t cause violence. I didn’t start shooting people during the years when I had a negative income.
Agreed. They’re garbage men. They clean up the aftermath.
Quote from your link: The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5.
This is:
1) Summing up vast regions of territory, ignoring zip code differences.
2) Using the most expansive definition of “gun violence”.
For perspective: The most violent zip code in Chicago has a murder rate of 300 per 100k.
The author of that link is assuming the most violent zip in Chicago has the same culture, society, etc of multiple zero murder zip codes in Michigan.
This looks like an effort to avoid talking about the real problems.
After we’ve both largely agreed that the police don’t do much in terms of preventing crime, we’re kind of left with “what determines the level of violence in a zip code”? The only real answer left is “culture of the people living there”.Report
What drives that culture?Report
Beats me. Seriously not my field. If the question becomes “what do we do now?” I still don’t know.
However, we haven’t admitted we even have a problem much less admitted what it is.
Grouping together multiple states, or even all states, or grouping suicide together with homicide, is avoiding identification of the problem.
Saying that a 15 per 100k rate is a problem while ignoring a 300 per 100k rate is obfuscation. The later is responsible for the bulk of the former.Report
After the many exchanges we have had over gun availability vs. culture this comes across aa s very much a dodge on your part.
We have agreed long since that there is a public health emergency level of death and injury from gun violence in the US. But if you are going to point to zip code by zip code cultural differences as the reason for that emergency, you really need to be open and frank about what’s driving that.Report
NPR had a really interesting article talking about this.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the middle:
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There was a time I would have pointed to the war on drugs, but as far as I can tell these issues predate the war and most of the examples of murder I’ve drilled down into weren’t economically motivated.
We also have examples of the WoD and drug dealing in general without scary high murder rates.
Agreed… but that approach probably helps a lot more for the various mental illnesses and suicide.
Math. The median county has a murder rate of zero (i.e. 52%). I think an additional 14% have one per year (i.e. effectively zero).
One zip code with a 300 per 100k murder rate averaged with 19 zeroes results in an overall average of 15, which as DavidTC pointed out is pretty high.
Splitting your resources among all 20 zips results in 19 zips trying to reduce a zero (good luck with that), while the one zip driving the numbers gets low resources.
Worse, the policies are going to be a mess. Whatever is attempted will be dealing with an average that doesn’t exist anywhere.
The 19 can rightfully feel it’s not their problem and not cooperate with whatever is attempted… however their society and their culture is going to define the average which implies the policy will be aimed at them.
This is the gun control debate in micro. We’ll just pass a law to fix the issue, but the law abiding many aren’t involved in the problem and since the last group already isn’t following the law it probably won’t help there either.Report
It’s equally true isn’t it, that grouping together households into zip codes also obfuscates the problem.
In any given zip code only a minority of households or individuals are dysfunctional or criminal.
And this isn’t a new problem or unique to America. The causes of crime are maddeningly difficult to isolate because the human person is complex and contradictory.
We do know that poverty is one variable, especially sudden wrenching changes of fortune and status. Not determinative, but associative.
We know that a sense of solidarity, of belonging to the larger societal group also plays a part.
We know that interventions can help, things like day care and financial assistance and rehabilitation and restorative justice programs can break the cycle of violence and dysfunction.Report
A zip code is as small a unit as I can get data.
My expectation is we have a small(ish) number of criminal individuals and then there are a larger number of enablers. Various cultural roles, various cultural habits. Everything from not calling the police, to looking down on people who are trying to get educated enough to flee.
Source? I haven’t heard this before.
What we’ve seen work is the Hawaii programs for intervention. You’ve occasionally posted great links on that.
That’s basically realizing one kid is going down an ugly path and putting a huge amount of social pressure on him to change and moving him away from wherever he’s festering. That would be hard or impossible to scale up to Chicago.
As for the others, “day care and financial assistance” and so on, I’m not familiar with stats suggesting they work.Report
Zip codes are the smallest unit for which there is easily-Googlable data.
Criminology isn’t new and all the factors I mentioned have been written about for decades if not longer.
And most studies show that there isn’t some easily identifiable marker or causal variable.
It’s not like in certain zip codes there is some strange miasma turning the law abiding into criminals.
Crime has been trending downward in America since the mid-70s.
Why? No one really knows for certain. But as a nation we are safer and more peaceful now than when you were a kid.
And it suggests that we as a nation have been doing something right. Maybe it was banning lead paint or programs to warn mothers about drinking, or maybe it’s mass incarceration, or maybe no fault divorce or maybe more permissive attitudes towards parenting.
Whatever the cause, the cycle can be broken.Report
Like heckadaisy nobody knows for certain. Lead Paint and Lead Gasoline make people more violent. This is what your CIA spent good money on.Report
Exactly this.
See link for graph of violent crime between 1960 and 2020.
Your info is out of date. 1960 was really low, 70’s were high, we’d only started to look like we were going to get back to the 60’s in 2000 but instead it hovered at that level and has peaked up again.
I’m tempted to think it’s the baby boomer’s violent years but I’m not sure anyone knows. However this makes the mistake of averaging everything. We should be looking at the most violent (1%) zip codes and seeing how they did during all this time.
My impression is when we ended segregation we concentrated dysfunction and got very high levels of violence in very small places. We’ve never figured out what to do about them.
“The cycle can be broken” may be unproven. We’d need to find some violent cities which used to enjoy triple digit murder rates and now don’t.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hGbNcXxIxaTpRqpIUGdHMgCaFv0=/1400×0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22397064/IqOvd_murders_surged_in_america_in_2020__1_.pngReport
Of course there is a confusion when someone asserts “crime is outtacontrol” without clarifying what sort of crime or where or over what timeframe.
But overall crime rates are still lower than their peak in the late 70s.
There are periodic spikes over time and in different areas. The data for 2022 are not complete but the downward trend time-frame. homicide seems to have resumed.
Property crimes have dropped most dramatically, down to about half the 1990 rate (2000/100,000 residents compared to 4000 in 1990.
So it’s completely accurate to say that for nearly all Americans life is safer and more crime free than when they were kids, and I’d say that definitively shows that the cycle of crime can be broken.Report
Here’s a thread from 2021 that discussed multiple cities hitting homicide records.
Note: This isn’t one story that talks about multiple cities. This is multiple local stories from multiple cities.
The thread starts there and covers:
Philadelphia, Louisville, Cincinatti, Columbus, Baltimore City, Trenton, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Austin, Memphis, Tuscon, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Portland, Jacksonville, Rochester, Tulsa, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, Fayetteville, Jackson, Greensboro, Wichita, Lansing, and Shreveport.Report