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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.
It might be a good idea. It just takes a link (which @sleepyegg actually has in his post, maybe he added it after @netstack's comment). If posters assume familiarity with such things, newcomers might be bewildered and turned off. FBI crime statistics aren't like "the sun rises in the morning", which you can assume everyone other than insane people acknowledges. Vast numbers of people, including many intelligent ones, have absolutely no idea about the FBI crime statistics you are talking about. It's not that they've even been exposed to the information and rejected it. It's that they have absolutely no idea the information exists. It might not be good for the site to turn (even more) into an insular group of users who assume familiarity with controversial and relatively obscure information.
Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.
Even the FBI crime statistics, by themselves, aren't enough to support the original claim. The claim was that (paraphrasing a bit) you can have guns, black people, or a society without much violence, pick two. For that to be true, you need more than statistics which show "look, most crimes are committed by black people", because it does not follow from such statistics that most black people are committing crimes. You need evidence to bridge that gap, the crime statistics themselves can't get there.
You don't need to show that most black people are committing crimes. You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so, which seems to be empirically correct.
Except you haven't shown that. As @FCfromSSC observes we, as society, know how to create better outcomes. The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.
I can't help but notice that the same people who say "you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so" are the same people who also lionize George Floyd, defend DeCarlos Brown as "a victim of circumstance", and make excuses for liberal AGs releasing violent schizophrenics back onto the street for the umpteenth time.
We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.
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