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Just before Covid, a gun store was robbed in my town. I worked in a different gun store, so we got some of the inside scoop. Proprietor of the robbed store used to work on my computer whenever I fucked it up too badly. The shop was the shittiest one in the county, lodged in a former meat market. The robbers just pulled part of the roof off the building to get into the secure room.
Turned out to be the local high school football team. They stole around fifty guns, fifteen of which have been recovered some seven years later. The recovered guns have been used in at least three homicides so far. One was just recovered at a traffic stop this year, one killed a high school senior just after prom not two weeks ago. Perp there hasn't been identified or caught.
The kids who robbed the place were caught within days. It remains unclear exactly how many people were involved, at least two unnamed juveniles were processed, but shield laws prevent the public knowing anything. Three of the older kids were charged for the robbery, one got no time, other two got three and ten months respectively, despite not cooperating with police in the recovery of the firearms or identification of other perpetrators. Everyone involved was put into a youth criminal diversion program that released them without a criminal record.
The ringleader and one who got the most time, one Travontis (Drink!) Miller, was given the ten month sentence, but due to the protective nature of the diversion program, it will never be public knowledge that he plead guilty to multiple firearm felonies or how long he actually served of that jail term. What we do know is that he was out prior to December of 2021, because that's when he was arrested for a series of other crimes we're not entirely sure what happened.
He was charged with assault and battery (strangulation), robbery and domestic violence, but once again was given protected youth status despite being in his twenties by this point (the program runs until age 24). He also picked up charges of resisting arrest and being in possession of one of the stolen firearms from the original gun store case. These charges too were concealed under the diversion program.
So when people tell me that what we really need to cut down on gun violence in this country is to ensure that every state has a different magazine limit, or force used gun sales into stores, or ban AR-15s, or not allow gun companies to advertise, it makes me irrationally angry. This dude, when he hits 25, will have no criminal record and will be able to pass a background check to buy a firearm legally. At least until his next felony, which I don't expect to take long.
Below are two quote sets for those who didn't read the articles, first the prosecution in the original case:
The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.
But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.
Edit: added/fixed links
Edit: Added a CDC study of gun violence by ethnicity for support, as requested by mod. Honestly I've never looked it up until now, the below was just based on my personal lived experience.
Guns and blacks just don't mix well if you don't want a society with high gun violence.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm
If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.
You could also toughen up juvenile sentencing to reduce the age of adult criminal responsibility to like, 10 or something. If guns are still legal in this scenario then blacks will still have high gun violence, but at least their genetic pool will slowly improve over time. You might have to wait a few thousand years to get any benefit of lowered aggression through genetic selection though, much faster to ban guns.
You’re making some pretty dramatic claims there. Proactively provide evidence rather than just asserting that “you must” do something. Why do you think that? How have you ruled out other explanations, models? These are the questions people are going to ask you. Preempting them helps to keep things…civil.
Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring. And it's biased that you guard this specific topic with the provide evidence rule much more than other topics.
Yeah, the claim that generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups is very obvious and very well supported.
In my view, the inflammatory claim is the opposite. People who claim that blacks behave more or less the same as every other group are the ones who should be proactively providing evidence. Because, in effect, they are claiming that people who observe and comment on black dysfunction (and its intractability) are either delusional or are liars.
Obviously a society where (1) guns are freely available to adults; and (2) there are a lot of black people, is a society where there will be a lot of shootings.
It most certainly is not. If you want to make that claim, you best bring receipts if you want people to take it seriously (or if you want the mods to not ding you for making inflammatory claims without evidence).
Just so we are clear, are you highly skeptical of the following claims:
(1) In the United States, black people commit crime at rates which are significantly disproportionate;
(2) In the United States, black people become parents out-of-wedlock at rates which are significantly disproportionate;
(3) In the United States, black people save money and accumulate wealth at rates which are significantly under-proportionate;
Here on this forum it is often stated outright or implied that those problems are strongly intractable, i.e. that there is no sociocultural intervention (cutting race-based leniency, welfare reforms, penitentiary reforms, less glorification of crime in pop media, etc.) that would, if not completely erase the gap between racial groups, at least make them decent enough neighbors. I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.
It is not that there is no sociocultural intervention that would reduce the gap. It is that there is no politically acceptable intervention, because all of them will look like they are disproportionately punitive to black people.
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