whose northern border it touches. It's one of the best examples of the need for Federal gun laws.

Unless it is does through a dealer who must do a background check and ensure the sale complied with all laws of the purchasers residence. A private sale that is between residents of two different states is illegal anywhere.

And that is only long guns. It is 100% illegal for any Illinois resident to buy any handgun in Indiana.

Those are actual existing Federal laws.

What law do you think is needed that this doesn’t cover.

guns to be purchased legally in other states and then trafficked illegally into Chicago. The same goes for many other cities which, on their own, have adequate gun laws, but the fact it's so easy to carry guns across state lines cuts into their effectiveness.

That's why Chicago has a lot of gun violence but London, for example, doesn't.

If there are already stricter Federal laws in place that make it a serious felony, how would more laws change anything.

Why do you think people ignoring Federal laws, that are stricter and mean time with no early release, will suddenly stop the behavior if a state law is passed making is double illegal?

Your assuming criminals will change behavior with a new law when they ignore harsher laws on the subject already in place.

That doesn’t happen in the real world. Just look at the opiate problems now, many states are cracking down with harsher and harsher restrictions in addition to Federal laws and it doesn’t change things one bit, the illegal stuff still flows and the criminals still divert from the legal market to illegal ones in the same or even greater amounts. All it does is hassle the doctors more and the people who have legitimate need more making it harder to get.

If there were a national handgun registry, they would drop, though not as much. If there were national universal background checks, they would drop slightly.

It's not particularly complicated, every other first-world nation on earth has it figured out. The argument that we shouldn't have laws because some people might break them is silly.

I thought you were going to talk about something reasonable with some chance of being passed.

have higher murder rates that Illinois at large and much higher than Chicago.

But they don’t.

Using your logic murder rates should be higher in all those surrounding states than in Illinois and Chicago by itself. Because they have more freedom in those states with regards to firearms ownership.

That they don’t points to the problem being something else.

Blaming the adjacent states is the excuse used by people who just want to play that game to advocate more guns laws in those places or by Chicago politicians who want an easy scapegoat to blame instead of doing the hard work to work on the real problems that cause violence there. But the fact that those adjacent states have lower crime rates shows that the therory is without merit.

Again, it's not very complicated. The NRA talking points you are pushing are all too familiar, but they are silly.

Just look around the world. There are big dense cities in Europe, with a fraction of the homicide rate not just in Chicago, but in the US as a whole. And yes, there have been more granular studies across states, controlling for other factors, confirming the obvious.

You're right that there isn't political will to enact the kinds of gun laws that would dramatically reduce homicide rates. But it's a question of political will, not efficacy.

Nobody becomes a violent person or a criminal because they hold a gun.

The causes of the problems in Chicago are deep inequality, School systems that fail the kids, cycles of poverty with no way out evident to young people except gangs and the drug trade, and a cultural shift in the poor population that all this has brought on that has allowed violence and crime to be seen as socially acceptable ways to live your life.

You fix the glaring cycles of continual poverty, the deep inequality and provide a quality education to the poor and you will see the violence problem fix itself.

It’s just like drug abuse. You don’t get people to stop abusing drugs by making them harder to get. All that will do is cause the people to get them differently. You combat it by treatment and programs to get people off the stuff and reduce demand. Nobody quit using drugs because their drug dealer got arrested or they had to find a new place to get them. They quit when given the help and resources needed to quit and live a productive sober life.

By focusing on guns it makes an easy scapegoat that allows people to ignore the real problems. Attack the reasons for the crime and violence, not one tool being used, and you will not just reduce crime but make everyone’s life better as well.

That's why if you look at say the UK or Europe, the level of overall crime is comparable to in the US, but there's a lot less murder. Because less guns, less murder.

Not that it would ever happen. But you can't have an "on your honor" System where people can buy 10 20 30 40 50 guns for personal use and then change their mind "for personal use" 10 minutes after they leave the store and sell them to whomever.

We don't have a legislation problem we have a flooding problem.

How about we limit gun sales to one per year per person? Oh no we couldn't have that. You never know when the king of England might come over and try to start pushing us around.

What's the current score again? I mean innocent civilian deaths versus tyrannies defeated?

A private sale that is between residents of two different states is illegal anywhere.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahabahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Yeah wink, wink.

18 USC Chapter 44 Sextion 922

They use straw men.

The problem here isn’t a lack of laws.

if you know the "real" reason do feel free to share it with us.

No or crappy jobs, no hope, no way out, bad family situations. If you live in those circumstances, the color of your skin is irrelevant to why crime occurs.

Most won't escape, a few, through luck and hard work, MIGHT get out.

If they work hard and get good grades maybe they get a scholarship or join the military.
If they work hard and have above average physical skills maybe they get a sports scholarship
If they work hard and have above average musical talents maybe they end up in the entertainment industry.

Now magnify that by multiple generations of a family experiencing this.

Based on the above, I'm not surprised many join a gang, it provides a sense of belonging or family, a better life (however short it might be) then working low paying jobs in the service industry.

"real" or otherwise..... Maybe you can find the poster who was.

How about a central database of dealer inventory so we can see where the guns disappear to.

The BATFE right now can’t even keep the database it has to legally maintain of legally owned machine guns and suppressors accurate- it’s so bad that even the agents say it’s a mess and now that FOIA requests have forced the BATFE to admit how bad it is there is talk that convictions for owning machine guns my get overturned and get new trials because the BATFE testified the registry database was accurate and that the gun in question not being listed was evidence of the crime- while their own internal reports painted a different picture than what they testified about. And that isn’t a funding issue, each of those guns has to have a $200 tax paid every time it changes hands.

If you don’t like that example, look at Canada. They tried it and it failed miserably and they gave up.

It would be a HUGE drain of resources to actually implement correctly and accurately that would provide very little benefit for what you spend. That money could be used in much better ways to reduce crime if reducing crime is the goal.

And the BATFE and FBI don’t bother using the tools they have right now. Every year over 70,000 people get denied on the background checks. There are only two ways that happens- either it was an error by the FBI or that person just committed a felony. If you allow a 20% error rate for the FBI (and that is way too high) that leaves around 55,000 people left who can’t legally own a gun, are actively trying to get one, and who just committed a felony. They prosecute less than 100 of those 50,000+ a year because they just don’t care. They have the resources, it is the easiest case to work because the dealer has the paperwork with their signature on it proving the crime. But it doesn’t happen.

Same for straw purchasers- most never get prosecuted.

It isn’t a lack of tools that keeps them from enforcement of those laws. It’s lack of interest or give a damm.

"They don't give a damn"


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/atf-gun-laws-nra/

How the NRA Hobbled the ATF

Rules pushed by the gun lobby and its allies in Congress have left the agency unable to enforce the law.

Just a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama signed nearly two dozen executive actions and proposed a package of legislative initiatives that together represent the most comprehensive effort in decades to reduce what he called “the broader epidemic of gun violence in this country.”

Conspicuously absent from the president’s agenda, however, is much of anything that might address the stunning and widespread weaknesses that have for years crippled the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Yes, the president announced his nomination of a full-time director for the long-leaderless agency, and some of the new proposals do tacitly acknowledge a number of ATF’s long-standing challenges. But the initiatives are modest, and Congress may not go along with any of them. So for now, the bureau remains systematically hobbled by purposeful restrictions, flimsy laws, impotent leadership and paltry budgets. And it’s not at all clear there’s anything on the horizon that would change that situation.

“If you want an agency to be small and ineffective at what it does, the ATF is really the model,” says Robert J. Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control. Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland, says the ATF’s critics, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA), have been “extremely successful at demonizing, belittling and hemming in the ATF as a government regulatory agency.” The result, he says, is an agency with insufficient staff and resources, whose agents are “hamstrung” by laws and rules that make it difficult or impossible to fulfill their mission.

ATF declined to make any senior officials available for an interview. But agent George Semonick, a spokesman for the agency noted that ATF “does not make the laws and regulations…ATF will hold to what the laws and regulations allow us to do.”

A lack of resources—by design

The ATF employs about 5,000 men and women, approximately the same number of staff it had a decade ago; about half are special agents assigned to conduct criminal investigations. That’s a force about the size of the Harris County, Texas, Sheriff’s Department. In a letter to Vice President Joe Biden’s gun violence commission, 108 academic researchers complained that the ATF’s funding was “stagnating” while the budgets of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI had seen “dramatic expansions.” Since 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has more than doubled, while the FBI’s is up by two-thirds. The ATF’s current budget of $1.15 billion is little changed from the $900 million it received 10 years ago.

The agency has the manpower and ability to go after these cases.

They choose not to in order to focus on stuff they would rather mess with.

They always want the big, sexy cases that make headlines. They choose to focus on those.

When I was a deputy I had a perfectly formed case of a straw purchase. I had the buyer confessing on tape she bought the gun for her boyfriend with his money because she knew he couldn’t because he was subject to a domestic violence restraining order.

I had the gun. I had the arrest for him being in possession of it. I had the copy of he 4473 she filled out stating she was the actual buyer of the firearm when she wasn’t. I had her admitting on video that she did it.

I could not have it prosecuted at my level because it’s a federal crime.

It was a zero effort case for them to prosecute. I called them. I handed them 100% of the evidence needed for a conviction.

They came out and interviewed her and told her how much trouble she was in and how serious the charges were. Then they asked her a long list of people and groups asking if she knew any of them- because what they really wanted to do was make her an informant against biker gangs. Because they were running multi-year undercover operations against biker gangs under the excuse they sometimes broke firearms laws, but really because they wanted big cases.

When they decided she wasn’t of any use as an informant they said they would be in touch and left.

They never filed charges. They said when I followed up they didn’t have time for those “little cases”.

The truth is they have the time, but focus it elsewhere. If they put forth the small amount of effort on these cases instead of big expansive multi-year cases against things like biker gangs they could make a huge dent on this kind of crime.

Organized crime, drug rings and the rest are not what the BATFE is supposed to do, but they have a bad case of the “small agency” syndrome where they want to be like the FBI and DEA and they try to be them, everything from trying to work cases that are better left to their domain to calling themselves “ATF” instead of BATFE because the cool kids are all 3 letter agencies so they want to be too.

In reality the BATFE shouldn’t even be its own agency. There is no legitimate reason for an agency focused on that handful of things that are not even related. But it’s an anachronism left over from the days of prohibition when the “Treasury Agents” went around busting illegal alcohol and after prohibition ended they had firearms added to their list in order to continue to justify their existence.

If I had my way the firearms and arson investigation roles would be handed to the FBI, the safety aspects of the Alcohol and Tobacco parts turned over to the FDA and the tax parts of all of them turned over to the IRS.

It pisses me off to no end when I here repigs talk about "strict Chicago gun laws" as if we have borders and check points when you enter Chicago.

This shit has been known for decades.

beg to differ, it seems.

Either the dealers are breaking the law and selling to people not permitted to buy a firearm under Federal & State law or the guns are being bought by a straw buyer and given to criminals. Either way, someone belongs in jail for an extended period of time.

When fighting a massive forest fire, it does no good to extinguish the blaze in a mile-square area. Even if no new fires are started there, the surrounding fire will easily reignite the blaze.

A similar analogy might note the futility of trying to drain only a phonebooth-sized area from the middle of a lake. Or like treating a massive infection with one dose of antibiotics. Etc.


Chicago's anti-gun measures were doomed to fail because it was too limited in scoe.

Where cities are next to state lines, People cross to buy things that are cheaper. Booze and gas come to mind. Often around holidays, a State will send police across the line and stake out a liquor store. The take license number and stop the car when it re-enters the state. Chicago should do the same.

Elsewhere in the thread, straw purchasers are noted. This is the BATF’s job. It is illegal and these people can be caught.

Since you seem to know what the "real" problem is, maybe you can run for office and fix it.. Have a nice day.

I have no intention of doing that. Sorry I ruined your excuse.

from Texas, I'd call that an improvement.. Sorry I ruined your 'dig'.

Life in Texas is great. I would not trade it for any where else - especially Chicago. You didn’t ruin my dig at all.

Sure.

Dealing with repeat offenders is also a major issue. Policing issues too.

With such a concentrated % of people actually responsible, and with their Strategic Subject List, they know who most of the preps/victims are; they need better ways to deal with them both socially and through the justice system.

It's a Black thing with them.. they don't fool me.

...gangs = blacks.

And it's Mexicans in Texas. It's *insert dark skinned* type of people in general everywhere.

Those strong gun laws seem to work fine.

http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2017/07/chicagos-safest-and-most-dangerous-neighborhoods-by-murder-rate/

About 10% of all US mass shooting happen somewhere in Chicago.

Note that there is no universally accepted definition of mass shooting.

https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data