Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

CookieMasochist OP t1_iwzobr0 wrote

Reply to comment by AsparagusFirm7764 in Chicago Alderman who said he wants fewer cops in his ward is now asking people to PLEASE stop shooting each other for 48 hours by CookieMasochist

Chicago's 25th ward, home to the Alderman in the story, is only about a 30 minute drive from the Indiana State border. While Chicago and Illinois has relatively sane gun laws, Indiana has extremely lax laws and there's not really anything Chicago/Illinois residents can do about that. Add in a history of corruption, segregationist urban planning, a decline in the city's manufacturing base, and 2 drug epidemics in a generation and you have a perfect recipe for violence.

EDIT: I did not know you couldn't legally purchase guns across state lines.

8

speckyradge t1_ix00q4z wrote

That's somewhat of a fallacy. Chicagoans buy guns from outside of Chicago because.... there are no gun stores in Chicago. Secondly, an Illinois resident cannot legally go into Indiana, buy a handgun from a store and drive home with it. That's a federal law. So for Indiana guns to wind up in criminal hands, multiple laws have to be broken by multiple people. Straw purchasing, private party sales across state lines or interstate weapons trafficking.

8

Kind_Bullfrog_4073 t1_ix0z1tn wrote

You also can't legally murder people with guns, but that doesn't stop it from happening.

11

speckyradge t1_ix0zvw3 wrote

Absolutely true, same as the point I'm making. Making Indiana gun laws the same as Illinois won't change anything, Federal laws are already being broken to get guns to Chicago from Indiana.

−1

ProfCharlesBrainman t1_ix0tvsj wrote

They can if they go to a gun show, since Indiana police only started cracking down on them last year.

1

AsparagusFirm7764 t1_iwzprej wrote

The thing is gun laws can't be limited to a local area. That's the really unfortunate part, where parts of the country WANT to do the right thing, but are inhibited from doing it because the rest of the country doesn't wanna.

2

Okie_Chimpo t1_ix3wl3i wrote

The problem with your "lax gun laws" theory is that your friends and neighbors who own guns aren't the problem. Limiting access to firearms only works with honest people, and they aren't the ones committing the crime. This is why gun control efforts always fail, because you are only preventing good people from protecting themselves, and disarming honest citizens won't make the dishonest ones less dangerous.

If you want to reduce gun crime and violence, then you need to be working towards correcting poverty, addressing gang violence, improving mental health care and providing a real economic option for kids growing up now to support themselves.

Stripping the rights of normal folks won't do that. Never has, never will.

2

dbell t1_ix6v6ok wrote

Legal guns are not the problem.

1

CookieMasochist OP t1_ix6xgt5 wrote

Yeah that's been made abundantly clear to me by several commenters. That said, it is still significantly easier to get a gun in the US, legally or illegally, than it is in most other advanced economies. Nonetheless I've made note of my misunderstanding in an edit to my original comment. Mea culpa.

1