Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has a “pretty obvious” solution for addressing gun-related violence, but “nobody wants to go there.”
Ballard believes that if we upped the mandatory minimum sentence for gun crimes society would drastically reduce gun violence.
The mayor told News 8 that based on the city’s tracking of cases, “homicides in 2014 would have been dramatically less, dramatically less,” because many of those arrested had previous arrests for gun crimes.
Ballard would like to see the mandatory minimum raised to 20 years, but said that even 10 years would make a significant difference in the number of homicides year to year.
In addition to strengthening penalties for gun crimes, Ballard said that youth intervention programs can also make a difference.
“You’re not going to turn the tide unless we start at an earlier age — to make sure these young men and women don’t go down the wrong path,” he said.
Given that it would take time, 15 or 20 years, to see the results of such programs, Ballard said that we need to do a better job “of differentiating between people who need help and a hand up — and the people who are truly violent and need to go away for a long, long time.”
Month: February 2018
Categories
Old School Crowd Control
Categories
A "brief" (not) List of firearms
Random Fact
I read somewhere recently that about a quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America.
Non-Americans are going to draw all sorts of conclusions about this, and most of them will be wrong. Here are the facts.
All the stupid surveys apart, the United States is one of the most free countries in the world — which by the way is why so many inhabitants of shithole countries (to quote some famous guy) want to come and live here.
We take our freedoms seriously, and one of the freedoms we cherish is the freedom to fuck up. Fucking up can be the result of larceny, or failed experimentation, or any such human endeavor which falls outside the usual norms and conventions. This is why we are a leader of innovation in the world — pick an industry, and we’re in there kicking ass — and it’s also why we throw more people in jail: because we are a nation of laws. (Too many laws for my liking, but that’s a rant for another occasion.)
Here’s the best example. Want a gun? Go ahead and get one: there’s a special on S&W revolvers at Academy Surplus. Use it in any way you want: self-defense, plinking at tin cans, target competition, whatever. You’re free to do all that, and except in Euro-style shitholes like New York and California, you don’t have to be licensed or belong to a club or any of that jive. Go ahead and enjoy your gun; it’s your individual right, the second-most important right in our Constitution.
However: use your gun to commit a crime, and it’s to jail you’ll be going. And we Americans don’t issue sentences of just a few years for that kind of crime either (unlike some countries I could name). No, we slam you in a cell for decades or the rest of your life (sometimes we even shorten your life if you shortened somebody else’s).
That’s why we have so many people in jail. They were all free to choose, and they chose poorly. On the whole, it’s a better system than all the others, unless of course you’re a control freak who wants to do what’s best for people because you know what’s good for them, better than they do. (These assholes we call “Democrats”, and this is why they’re trying to turn the U.S. into Europe. But that too is a rant for another time.)
Non-Americans are going to draw all sorts of conclusions about this, and most of them will be wrong. Here are the facts.
All the stupid surveys apart, the United States is one of the most free countries in the world — which by the way is why so many inhabitants of shithole countries (to quote some famous guy) want to come and live here.
We take our freedoms seriously, and one of the freedoms we cherish is the freedom to fuck up. Fucking up can be the result of larceny, or failed experimentation, or any such human endeavor which falls outside the usual norms and conventions. This is why we are a leader of innovation in the world — pick an industry, and we’re in there kicking ass — and it’s also why we throw more people in jail: because we are a nation of laws. (Too many laws for my liking, but that’s a rant for another occasion.)
Here’s the best example. Want a gun? Go ahead and get one: there’s a special on S&W revolvers at Academy Surplus. Use it in any way you want: self-defense, plinking at tin cans, target competition, whatever. You’re free to do all that, and except in Euro-style shitholes like New York and California, you don’t have to be licensed or belong to a club or any of that jive. Go ahead and enjoy your gun; it’s your individual right, the second-most important right in our Constitution.
However: use your gun to commit a crime, and it’s to jail you’ll be going. And we Americans don’t issue sentences of just a few years for that kind of crime either (unlike some countries I could name). No, we slam you in a cell for decades or the rest of your life (sometimes we even shorten your life if you shortened somebody else’s).
That’s why we have so many people in jail. They were all free to choose, and they chose poorly. On the whole, it’s a better system than all the others, unless of course you’re a control freak who wants to do what’s best for people because you know what’s good for them, better than they do. (These assholes we call “Democrats”, and this is why they’re trying to turn the U.S. into Europe. But that too is a rant for another time.)
By the way: the reason that China, with its enormous population, doesn’t have as many people in jail as we do is that their people aren’t free. Another reason is that the Chinese summarily execute more people than we do, thus helping their incarceration numbers. Ditto North Korea, a shithole to beat all shitholes.
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Just one more Honest Honey!
The Holy Grail of ACW Pistols!
