Who would have thought it?<\/p>\n
U.S. Murder Toll From Guns Highest in Big Cities: CDC<\/a><\/p>\n Large metropolitan areas suffer about two-thirds of all firearm homicides in the United States, with inner cities most affected, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”The central cities really bear the burden of firearm homicides,” said Linda L. Dahlberg, the associate director for science in CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, noting that the gun murder rate was highest among male children and teens.<\/p>\n These findings “speak to the importance of addressing youth if we really want to do something about the gun violence problem,” Dahlberg said.<\/p>\n According to the CDC, 25,423 murders by gunfire took place in the United States in 2006 through 2007 — the years of the most recent available statistics.<\/p>\n Among these deaths, the rate of firearm homicides was higher in inner cities than in other parts of cities and higher than the murder rate of the country as a whole, Dahlberg said. People living in 50 of the largest cities, in fact, accounted for 67% of all firearm homicides.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now I’m not making light of the plight of folks in big cities… only the\u00a0 notion that this new or news.\u00a0 There have been many studies over the years with rats and monkeys (et. al.) that have demonstrated what can happen in overcrowded environments.<\/p>\n The first step in problem solving is to correctly identifying the problem one is trying to solve.\u00a0 Yet again pointing at guns would seem to be missing that mark by a large margin.<\/p>\n To be fair this article does offer some common sense towards the end:<\/p>\n Gary Kleck, the David J. Bordua Professor of Criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has another take on how to reduce inner-city gun violence.<\/p>\n The evidence suggests that better gun control doesn’t necessarily reduce violence, but a broad-based approach tends to reduce homicide in general, he said.<\/p>\n For one thing, “locking up more criminals reduces violence; it’s not gun specific,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n More from Gary Kleck below the fold.<\/p>\n In recent decades, advocates of gun control have taken their cause to court, bringing lawsuits that charge the gun industry with negligence because of how it distributes firearms. Large-scale traffickers, these suits claim, purchase guns in big batches from corrupt or irresponsible dealers, especially those operating in states with weak gun control laws. These guns are then moved to places with stricter laws, where they are sold, supposedly at high markups, to criminal buyers.<\/p>\n
\nThe Myth of Big-Time Gun Trafficking<\/a><\/p>\n