FOX News reports a phenomenal jogj scjpp; basketball player from the Bronx, Brandon Hendricks, was shot to death at a birthday party. https://www.foxnews.com/us/bronx-basketball-phenom-slain-when-shots-fired-at-birthday-party-report
You could safely bet anything you have that the shooter could not legally buy the murder weapon. For the last 109 years, the Sullivan Law has limited gun ownership to actors, celebrities, politicians, and the ultra rich. And under Federal law, a young man may become a soldier and put his life in jeopardy on his 17th birthday but must four full years to buy a handgun.
This tragedy points up the central fact about “gun control.” The law abiding usually buy guns from dealers and leave a paper trail from factory to purchaser. Criminals either steal their own guns or buy guns from friends or relatives who are also criminals. So criminals are not inconvenienced at all buy gun control laws. In fact, prison surveys such as the Carter Administrations Wright Rossi Report show criminals enthusiastically support “gun control.”
The hisoty of gun control shows the result, In the chart below, an explosive device that resulted in the death of a Western State Governor resulted in a rash of “anti-carry laws in 1905 and 1906, and the result is one of the most spectacular rises in criminal violence in human history.
The solid area in the chart shows the results of gun control and prohibition combined, We will come back to that area in a bit, for now, But for the moment, let’s take a look at the man responsible for New York’s Sullivan Law.
By reputation, Timothy Sullivan was a big man, and a man who not only made his living on the shady side of the law, managed to become an important man in the Tammany Hall political machine and a New Your State Assemblyman as well as a brothel owner and criminal gang leader. It was this last that resulted in New York’s “Sullivan Law” which disarmed those who were not notorious but only law abiding.
At the time, the City had a multitude of tiny shops, many consisting of a sales area in the front separated by a hanging blanket from the living area in the back. A New Yorker hungry for oysters could visit a seafood retailer, and buy fresh Long Island oysters, in anything from live in shell to ready to eat. The gangs supported themselves by running various protection rackets on these shop owners. But the shopkeepers had gotten wise, and started giving the bagmen a look at a gun muzzle instead of gold pieces. With collections dwindling every day, weekly funerals for bagmen, and the situation becoming desperate, something had to be done, and that was right down Big Tim Sullivan’s alley.
Sullivan, who was already suffing from the disease that killed him, went to Albany and traded votes until he had the votes to disarm those small shopkeepers with the gall to defy the gangs. And that brings us back to the graph.
As you can see the murder rte in the 1880’s was as low as anywhere in the world. There was a rise due to labor problems, usually the result of striking workers violently attacking “scabs,” as strikebreakers were generally known. But an IUD took the life of a Western State governor, and set off a rash of restrictive gun laws.
When the laws took effect, the homicide rate “went vertical,” After a three year peak changing conditions resulted in some softening of the laws, and a small reduction in the murder rate. Until 1911, when Big Tim Sullivan and his law enters the picture.
If you follow the graph, there are the very low homicide rates in a period that included the most violent years of the “Wild West,” then the sharp rise in homicide resulting from gun control, particularly anti-carry legislation, and then the decline. Moving across the near flat at the bottom of the decline, we come to 1911, and the effects of Tim Sullivan’s law.
If the size of the vertical rise of the homicide rate is less than the massive gun control fever of the 1905-1906 period, it only affected a very small part of the US population, while the laws of the 1905-1906 period adversely affected more than 85% of the law abiding Americans – but the violent not at all.
Tim Sullivan’s law has been in effect for almost 111 year and ans contributed to one more out of tens of thousands of murders. It is an extremely safe bet that the killer was a juvenile offender, valued by the gangs as a “hitter” because under our truly criminal justice system, if the shooter is caught and convicted, something that is always iffy in Gotham, the shooter will serve only a few years before he is released into society. Where he will become an adult criminal, serving brief vacations instead of meaningful sentences until someone kills him.
With that, the is the place where I usually sign off on the post. But I have not explained the provenance of the chart. Murder rates, Homicide is college level chatter for any sort of “man killing,” dat since 1900 are from a table and chart released by the Department of Justice in 2008. Homicide rates between 1880 and 2+00 are taken from a University study of homicide rates in the 19th Century, and may include some paleface victims of the Indian wars. Here is the DOJ chart of homicides from 1900 to 200.
While the resolution is not good, a comparison between the Alley Chart and the DOH chart will show the Alley chart reflects the reality that every restrictive gun law in history, American, European, Asian or “Other,” has resulted in sharp increases in violent crime.
Alaw written for and enacted by the efforts of a man suffering the early symptoms of a fatal social disease has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It is true that the majority of those victims were criminals killed in disputes with other criminals, the lives lost were human lives and their deaths are tragedies to at least their families.
It is time and past time to carefully examine the results of the restrictive gun laws we have as well as the universally successful permissive gun laws, and to make our laws in accordance with those laws results.
And yes, Chucky, rational laws enacted by rational people would allow a law abiding Arizonan to carry in Times Square.
Stranger