They could go a long way to solving the problem of gun crimes with two actions – prosecute the laws we have and keep repeat criminals in prison. Government officials won’t do it. They’d rather abolish gun ownership.
It’s not the gun per se causing the problem. It’s the gun criminal wielding it.
If the US went back to the three strikes law – with room for exceptions – and followed through on prosecuting gun crimes, the problem would be reduced tremendously – TREMENDOUSLY.
No one wants to do that because the gun criminals are mostly Black, and a smaller number are Hispanic. It should also be noted that the crimes are committed by a relatively small number of criminals.
The Washington Examiner collected some data that shows we are not prosecuting gun criminals most of the time. We don’t need new laws. We need to prosecute the ones we have. Kevin Williamson collected data for an article at the NY Post. He found that a relatively small number of criminals commit the crimes over and over. If we kept them in prison, it would stop most crimes.
Homicides rose 44% nationally between 2019 and last year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, The Washington Examiner reports. Yet, prosecutions and convictions are going down.
Gun stores and gun shows are insignificant despite what we are told.
A Justice Department study published in 2019 showed that only 7% of federal prisoners who were in possession of a firearm at the time of their crimes had purchased the gun from a licensed firearm dealer. Half stole or bought the gun on the black market.
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Some of the statistics follow from the Examiner and the NY Post.
WE DON’T PROSECUTE GUN CRIMES
In Washington, D.C., police took roughly 2,400 illegal guns off the streets in 2021, according to the Washington Post. No matter how many shootings and murders, officials won’t put these gun criminals in prison or keep them there.
In Philadelphia in 2021, police were arresting an average of nine people per day for illegal firearm possession. But gun convictions fell dramatically under the leadership of Soros DA Larry Krasner. That is according to the Philly Inquirer.
Last year, through the month of August, police in Portland, Oregon, had filed gun violence charges in 285 cases. The city, however, had seen more than 840 shootings up to that point in the year, according to the Oregonian.
Those are just a few of the failures.
Federal Level
Last year, U.S. attorney’s offices around the country filed federal charges for a firearm offense against 15,525 defendants, according to the Justice Department. Just 9,971 were ultimately found guilty of a violation. That means thousands of others arrested and charged with federal gun offenses walked free.
THE SAME PEOPLE COMMIT MOST OF THE CRIMES
The Department of Justice reports, only about two percent of prisoners who were in possession of a firearm at the time of their crime got that gun from a gun store, while the share of prisoners who got their guns at a gun show is vanishingly small at 0.8 percent.
The much-ballyhooed gun store and gun show problems don’t exist.
A great deal of U.S. crime is driven by a relatively small number of career criminals. Prisoners in state custody have an average of ten arrests and five convictions on their résumés.
You won’t be surprised to learn that more than 80 percent of the murderers in New York City have prior arrest records. (So do about 80 percent of the victims.)
In Chicago, 87 percent of the killers have police records, with an average of 12 arrests by the time they are brought in for murder.
In Baltimore, the average killer has 9.3 prior arrests, and a third of the murderers are on probation when they kill.
According to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, only 30 percent of gun cases were dismissed or withdrawn in 2016—and by 2021, that figure had doubled, to 60 percent.
In 2017, 71 percent of those convicted of Class 4 felony firearms possession in Cook County got jail time. But just two years later, that number had sunk to 35 percent.
In Illinois, more than 80 percent of those arrested on gun charges had a prior criminal arrest, between half and two-thirds of them for a violent crime, according to the CCJRPP at Loyola. What’s more, half of them had already been convicted of a felony – one in four of a violent felony.
In Houston, 113 of the 407 people arrested on capital murder charges between 2016 and 2021 were set free on bail, and 27 percent of them were arrested for another crime while out and about waiting trial.
The federal government rarely prosecutes gun cases unless the arresting agency is federal.
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