Friday, April 18, 2008

LA Homicide Report

I read an article today about the LA Homicide Report. It's a blog of all the victims of killings in LA over the past year written by an LA Times reporter. There have been over 800 murders in the past year in LA, in streets, homes, stores, driveways, alleys, cars, and parks. I know there are a lot of people in LA, 9.9 million according to the 2006 CA consensus. Oakland CA, a large city also prone to gangs, guns, and violence, had 115 homicides in 2007 with a population of 1.2 million....598 homicides Chicago with a population of 9.7 million...

I'm not putting in the effort to do a thorough examination of these numbers or the variables that contribute to them, it would be very interesting to look into this further. My main point is there are too many homicides! Just from scrolling through the LA blog, I would guess that majority of these homicides are from gunshots. To me, this is a serious problem, it is wrong to let this continue. But then again, it's not something I think about every day, personally, I've never known someone who was murdered, and to my knowledge I've never known a murderer. I don't know anything about the culture within these killings occur, I don't know the circumstances, the outcomes, or the reason for killing this people. What I do know is that if we could have better control of the use of arms in this country, we could dramatically reduce the number of people who die from them. Given the complexity of understanding why these homicides continue, why don't we just put a plug in the bottleneck? I understand the perverse cyclical thinking some people have, "If I can't get a gun I can't protect myself from those that do not give their guns in".
This is true, and this is why America and other developed countries with soft gun restrictions are in a predictament. But I really think it's the only way.

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