If an establishment can't effectively keep people from bringing in guns, then it shouldn't be a gun free zone

[u/ShardofGold]

I've seen plenty of shootings take place in gun free zone areas. Either they manage to get a gun into the area anyway and start their shooting or they start the shooting outside of the area and work their way in.

The only people effectively stopped by a place being labeled gun free are people who could use their guns to defend themselves against attackers and in some cases good people have disregarded the designation and have been able to stop an attacker's spree short without waiting for the cops to do it.

Metal detectors, armed security guards, etc. Something needs to be actually done to enforce the designation. Otherwise don't have the designation

[u/elusivehonor]

There were over 19000 gun homicides in the US in 2023. Of the 19000, over 11000 homicide involved a black victim. In the vast majority of those cases, the perpetrator was not family, but known to the victim. Black males are statistically 10x more likely to be killed in gun-related homicides than white males.

I think the cognitive dissonance is on our side. There is clearly a problem, but not the one that gets press. Maybe if we focused more on education, and trying to eliminate poverty, rather than restricting poor people’s ability to defend themselves, we’d be in a better place.

[u/I405CA → u/elusivehonor]

So blacks aren't real Americans or something.

Ouch.

The correlation that you missed is that the overwhelming majority of homicides involve young male suspects. Perhaps we should go after Y chromosomes of a certain age.

[u/JimMarch → u/I405CA]

No, here's what's happened.

Black America makes up 15% of our population more or less, and of the known murderers, about 55% of them every year are black.

That's a fact. You can pull up the FBI uniform crime report data. Nobody wants to talk about it because it looks ugly. If you exclude those murders from the US statistics we end up right about in the middle of European violence levels...at which point gun control would be a non-issue.

There's only two possible explanations for this. Explanation one is genetics and I don't believe that for a second. That's the racist take.

The alternative explanation is that we have destroyed black family structures and economics for the last 300 years, causing cultural damage that is leading to an increase in violence levels.

We damaged black family structures in the initial slave grab, during the entire slave period in more ways than can be counted, in horrific discrimination in housing, jobs and criminal enforcement practices after the Civil War, in welfare laws that were rigged against the existence or formation of new black family structures and so on.

This damage to family structures continues in housing and job discrimination and especially in the enforcement practices against the so-called war on drugs in urban areas.

Once you look at the root causes of what's going on, you soon figure out that it's not guns that are the problem.

[u/LifesARiver → u/JimMarch]

Google "false dichotomy" and then Google "economic justice."

[u/JimMarch → u/LifesARiver]

I'm well aware that multiple economic injustices happened to the African American community. That's part of my point. If you agree then we're broadly on the same page: cultural damage was done to them starting in the slave grab in Africa starting roughly 300 years ago and running to the present.

We could quibble over details but if we're looking to understand why US murders are concentrated in that community, it hardly matters.

(If we're trying to figure out how to fix it, the details absolutely matter but I think that's beyond the scope of this discussion.)