Guns: Location, Location, Location

In the June 5 edition of Newsweek, Christopher Dicky explains one of the complications that makes talking about gun regulation so difficult.  Rural dwellers and urban dwellers see the issue differently and may actually have different needs.  In rural areas with low numbers of police officers, guns may provide additional safety.  In urban areas, it's different. 

The embattled streets of the city and the gunland of the heartland are wildly different places, and the failure to understand that difference, and overcome it, is the great American tragedy of our time. 

Mostly, the discussions about firearms are framed as a question of constitutional rights for gun owners. But what about the gun owners in Tyquran’s world [high crime urban areas]? Are the rights of the 223 people shot to death in New York City last year, or the 435 in Chicago, or the 414 in Los Angeles being protected by the right to bear arms? In big cities across the country, gun control doesn’t hurt gun owners, other gun owners do, especially if they are people of color. Recent Pew surveys show that 82 percent of the nation’s gun owners are white, and most are outside metropolitan areas, but 72 percent of gun-homicide victims are black or Hispanic, and live—and die—in the cities. 

This article is packed with interesting information and presents a slightly different perspective to the gun issue.  The conclusion of the article talks a lot about New York city crime reduction.

In 20 years the number of murders in New York City has plunged (let me reiterate the scale—from 2,000 to just over 400) and partly that’s because of a nationwide drop in crime attributable to an aging population, high rates of incarceration, and the end of the crack-cocaine epidemic that plagued the early 1990s. But it’s also because the NYPD has moved aggressively and from every possible angle against the sources of illegal guns coming into the city, and also against the people who carry them.

NYC has a high number of police officers per capita which allows an extensive “stop and frisk” policy.   This practice has probably contributed to this reduction of murders in the city, but it’s controversial.  It’s hard to know what to think of it.  It's hard on innocent black teens who are stopped, but it is a comfort to some of the mothers and grandmothers who have lost children to wayward bullets.