Reply #148: They have a problem with drug-gang violence

[krispos42]

which manifests itself in dead bodies with bullet holes in them.

The issue is not that city-dellers own guns and have a compulsion to use them to kill random people, it's that criminal gangs need to kill people as part of their business operations.

Cities and counties that have strict gun-control laws that substantially inhibit and discourage gun ownership have found that the pool of available guns for criminals to buy or steal has not shrunken enough to form any kind of inhibition to criminal availability. Only a few hundred or few thousand guns need to be in a major city's criminal population to fully meet crimnal demands. If one person in 10 in Chicago owns a gun you have an available pool of over a quarter-million firearms... a 20 year supply, perhaps, even if not a single gun was sold in the Chicago area.


The problem is the gangs. And the best way to destroy the gangs is drug legalization, not gun illeglization. This won't solve every social problem, but it will go a long way towards helping it.

We still need to do things like universal single-payer health care, break up industry monopolies, re-erect protective tariffs, re-unionize, get off of oil, and heavily subsidize higher education if we're going to have a healthy, prosperous nation, but drug legalization is the fastest and easiest first step.