A 27-year-old man was killed and 24 other people were shot after gunfire erupted early Sunday morning in Akron, Ohio, during what a police official said was a big birthday party.
Officers responded to 911 calls shortly after midnight, reporting shots fired and multiple victims struck in the area of Kelly Ave. and 8th Ave., according to a statement from the city’s mayor and police chief.
The shooting took place during a “large birthday party” that earlier in the night had more than 200 people in attendance, Akron Police Chief Brian Harding said in a Sunday evening news conference.
In the shooting’s aftermath, authorities found the scene “littered” with spent shell casings that stretched down a whole block, the police chief said.
I know that people hate hearing it, but the violence–specifically gun violence–is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
This was likely gang activity. Gang activity is driven by a lot of socioeconomic factors; long-term fixes are things like community reinvestment, properly funded education, reducing income inequality, criminal justice reform, and so on. Even things like reproductive rights and access to birth control and abortion help rather significantly here. If you fix the underlying issues that drive gang activity in the first place, then you eliminate most of the violence problem without also affecting civil rights.
Unfortunately, in the US, one side appears to only have the political will to remove a particular civil right, and the other side wants to obstruct everything and blame it on all “personal responsibility”.
Doctors treat symptoms while they treat the problem, they don’t just offer you thoughts and prayers. Even if the problem isn’t treatable, they still do everything in their power to control your symptoms.
Imagine you turned up to a doctor with every bone in your hand broken, only to have them claim “Sorry, we refuse to give you painkillers because the pain is just a symptom. If someone just spends 12 months reconstructing your hand, the symptoms should be mostly gone. I won’t do it (and I’ll staunchly oppose anyone that tries), but that’s the real solution”.
They wouldn’t just be considered a dogshit doctor, they’d be considered a genuinely evil person.
So stop with the apologist bullshit. No gun control advocates are stopping you from building your violence-free utopia that you insist will solve everything. The society we have today is fucked up and you need to stop selling them guns.
I’m not sure that makes sense, you’re arguing that gangs, not guns are the problem when every country has gangs but not every country has guns so readily available.
The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right in the US, and I believe that access to the means of self-protection is a human right. I think that correcting the underlying issues that lead to gang activity would have more benefits overall than trying to ban a constitutional right.
While gang activity exists in all countries, countries with fewer social problems and lower economic inequality have far less of a problem with gang activity.
Couldn’t owning more guns contribute to threats in life at a greater rate then they protect individuals?
Let me ask you this - do you believe that people have the right to protect their own lives? Does that right depend on your size and gender?
The pro-gun community has wasted the last 20 years demonstrating that they’re unwilling or incapable of addressing gun violence and they use the second amendment to prevent others from addressing it.
Eventually, the people you’ve sold out will have no other choice but to repeal it. Pro-gun groups will throw an almighty tantrum but so what? They have no room left to escalate because we already have to listen to them endlessly bleat about guns, we already have to constantly fight them politically and we already live under the threat of being murdered by a far-right extremist with a gun.
Sure, if you can prove you’re not what we need protection from because you’ve been sold a gun. Nobody is opposing legitimate self-defense – that’s why they’re not banning door locks, burglar alarms and MMA classes because you can’t easily use those things to murder people on a whim.
Let’s take you at your extremely dishonest word and say that gun violence is 95% social problems and 5% access to firearms.
Well the overwhelming majority of the actual people you’ve grouped as “enemies” support both gun-control and social policies designed to combat inequality, which addresses 100% of the problem. It’s literally the progressive platform.
For you to actual have an argument, they would need to support gun-control but oppose progressive social policies, and those people simply don’t exist in significant numbers outside your imagination.
But what about your “allies”? Well the majority of them support neither gun-control nor progressive social policies, for a grand total of 0% of the problem fixed. This tracks with the last 20+ years of them not solving any of these problems. It’s literally the Republican platform.
However you’re happy to be dishonest so you present them as a group that only opposes gun-control and sure, they exist, but they’re still only fixing 95% of the problem.
And all of them also have far more restrictive gun laws, making them far more closely aligned with gun-control advocates than pro-gun groups.