Stretch sends in this interesting story out of NYC, which has some pretty strict gun laws...
Youth Beaten to Death After Shooting at Group
At the sprawling Edenwald Houses, the largest housing project in the Bronx, memorials to the victims of gang violence are common. There were two on a recent day, one for a young man nicknamed Smooth who was shot to death a few years earlier.
A message on it read, “Thug N Peace.”
There might have been a few more memorials had Antonio Lyles, a 17 -year-old from a rival apartment complex, struck any of his presumed targets.
He opened fire on a group of people with a small handgun. Apparently he missed everyone, and when he ran out of ammunition, the group started chasing him. They caught him a few blocks later, and started beating him, eventually crushing his skull with a rock.
Think about how many things are wrong with that paragraph right there.
A) He's 17. He's not old enough to own a firearm in NY.
B) He's also not old enough to have a license to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in the country, let alone NY
C) He opened fire on a group of people.
D) When caught, he was killed with hands, fists, and a blunt object.
There's gun control in a nutshell for you, folks. In one of the states with the toughest gun control laws in the country, someone who was ineligible to own or carry a firearm was using his illegally obtained gun to illegally shoot at people. Even better, when he missed he was caught and then killed using weapons available since the very beginning of Man himself.
The anti-rights crowd will tell you we need "just one more law" to stop this sort of thing from happening. This is one of the rare occasions where they are actually telling the truth, however, they're not telling you what that law is. The only law that might stop an underage thug from shooting randomly at a group of people would be one that outlaws all firearms and ammunition and carries the death penalty on the spot for breaking that law. Are they ready for that?
Because that young man was already breaking *numerous* state and possibly federal laws in the commission of his crime. Adding "just one more law" to the books isn't going to stop other men like him from doing the same; it's just another law that will be ignored during prosecution or plea-bargained away. $20 says he already has a criminal record; another $20 says he doesn't even know - or care - what the SAFE Act is.
I know I've said it before, but it's obviously not sinking in. We don't have a gun problem; we have a criminal problem. We have a significant failure in the criminal justice system to punish people who break existing gun laws that would otherwise act as a deterrent to those thinking about doing the same. Three teenagers in OK gunned down a man allegedly because they were bored (or trying to establish their gangbanger cred, it's hard to tell); any bets on whether they actually *do* spend the rest of their lives in jail? That's a sucker's bet BTW.
We don't need gun control. We need to find out why a young man in NY decides that opening fire on a group of people because they're from a different housing complex is a viable course of action. We need to figure out why gunning a man down in cold blood was even on the table for a group of teenagers. We need to determine why our young people value life so little and fear getting caught and punished so little - and how we can change both of these factors.
What we don't need to do is restrict access further to firearms. These laws do nothing to stop 17 year old gangbangers in New York City from getting guns - making it "double plus illegal" isn't going to do a damn thing more than it does now, which is nothing. What restricting access further does is take firearms out of the hands of the good people, who decide that the processes and pathways to lawful gun ownership are too expensive and fraught with legal peril that they opt not to go through with it.
Which, of course, is exactly what the forces against freedom want.
That is all.
