The takeaway for me is the most likely victims of gun violence are violent felons. And in reality, the most likely victims in the spike of homicides have been violent felons. Draw your own conclusions on how much money we should spend stopping that.
So now you have 'owned it' and are you saying that the victims are subhuman garbage so we shouldn't spend any money keeping them from getting killed?
I disagree with this for two reasons:
First, they are citizens and it may be possible to rehabilitate at least some of them.
Second:
Their aim usually is not more than 'spray and pray', meaning a lot of bystanders get shot too.
^^^^This, exactly this.^^^^
If you want to know what urban gun crime really looks like I highly recommend an A&E show called "The First 48". They follow homicide investigations for the first 48 hours after the report. There is no script. It isn't racially biased like the scripted fictional shows. It is just real homicide investigations of real murders.
The name of the show and the reason for the 48 hour window, according to the show's intro is based on some stat that if the cops don't have a solid lead in 48 hours, the murder will probably go unsolved.
My two biggest take-aways from watching:
First, I previously thought that when the news talked about a "drug related murder" it was something like Tony Soprano taking out Tony Montana or vice-versa in an organized crime turf war over MILLIONS of dollars in drug profits. The sad reality of modern urban America is that these "drug related murders" aren't high level fights between real-life versions of New Jersey Mob Boss Tony Soprano and Miami Mob Boss Tony Montana. Instead the reality is usually some knucklehead spraying gunfire at a gathering hoping to hit or at least intimidate some other knucklehead that knucklehead #1 feels "dissed" him. Either that or fights over dime bags.
It was eye opening for me to learn that and it is frankly insane. I'm not endorsing Soprano/Montana level killings, but I can understand that a rational person might decide it was worth risking a homicide rap to capture literally MILLIONS in drug trade. I can't for the life of me understand how anyone can think that a dime bag is worth killing someone over. Even if I completely ignored the morality of killing another person, I can't understand how anyone would think it was worth risking a homicide rap over something so trivial.
Second, most of the murders on the show aren't "drug related", they are about "disrespect". Mind you this is among knuckleheads who NOBODY should respect but it is what it is. Knucklehead #1 does something to "diss" knucklehead #2 whereupon knucklehead #2 either pulls out a gun or goes somewhere (car, home, grandma's house) to retrieve his gun and proceeds to come back and, as
@Cincydawg put it, "spray and pray" shooting up a whole park, party, backyard bbq, whatever.
The appalling thing about these murders is the depravity of the killers. They literally think that life is so meaningless that it is perfectly reasonable to kill someone over a trivial "disrespect" issue. Worse, they think NOTHING of the lives of the innocent bystanders who are put at risk and sometimes killed in these "spray and pray" attacks.
The knuckleheads described above are EXACTLY the people that we need to get guns away from. Nearly EVERY killer in every episode I've seen had prior convictions. Almost every time the cops get a name in one of the investigations they go to the database and pull up multiple mug shots from prior arrests for lesser but still violent crimes.
The way to disarm these idiots is through a lot of police interactions. The kinds of knuckleheads who spray gunfire at parties over trivial disrespect aren't generally very good at following other laws either so they tend to have stolen cars, expired or suspended licenses, outstanding warrants, prior felony convictions that prohibit possession of firearms, etc and they also tend to speed and otherwise recklessly operate motor vehicles. If police pull over speeders (rather than mailing them tickets) the officer has an interaction with them. They call in the name, check if the car and driver are licensed, check for warrants, look for contraband, etc.
The interactions described in the foregoing paragraph declined precipitously due to BLM and the left-wing push for depolicing. When those police interactions declined, chaos ensued. That is so blindingly obvious that it is analogous to saying that night follows day. The idiots who pushed this lunacy either knew better or were so depraved that they didn't care because:
"
the most likely victims of gun violence are violent felons. And in reality, the most likely victims in the spike of homicides have been violent felons. Draw your own conclusions on how much money we should spend stopping that."
Those people, the left, have blood on their hands.
