Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, generated an outpouring of grief and compassionate empathy from across the country for the people in that rural community. And well it should have. Comes now the blame game played by both sides in the gun rights fight.
What usually happens after these episodes is a rush to “do something.” One such suggestion comes from Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. Klarevas feels that more laws are needed to begin to solve the problem.
“One law is good, but it’s just a starting point. The more laws you have, the more effective your framework will be,” he said.
Adding another layer of laws to criminalize what is already against the law seems a waste of time to me. Let’s enforce the laws that exist on the books as they are written today. Start there.
Other experts point to red flag laws that allow judges to temporarily take away guns from people determined to be a danger to themselves or others. If these experts really believed in red flag laws, they would start by petitioning judges to take away all guns from gang-bangers in major cities.
The gangsters have long since been determined to be a danger to themselves or others on many occasions and will continue to be a danger to others on many more. Our red flag experts and our judicial system really don’t want to tackle this taking of guns problem.
Data published in January from three cities tells the following tale.
The Chicago police department says that 2021 ended with 797 homicides. There were also 3,561 shooting incidents in 2021.
Baltimore had 337 homicides and 728 non-fatal shootings in 2021.
Finally, in Philadelphia, there were 481 homicides and 1,846 non-fatal shooting incidents. Additionally, Beatrice Forman, writing in the Billy Penn Daily Newsletter says that Philly had at least 25 mass shootings. According to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, a mass shooting is defined as an incident when “4 or more [people are] shot or killed, not including the shooter.”
The above data is for 2021. The current year is shaping up to be more of the same in the three cities cited. Why don’t we have the same sense of outrage about the gun violence that occurs annually in these cities?
It happened once in Uvalde. It’ll happen again and again in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
I’ve said it before in these pages. Use a gun in the commission of a crime, go to jail for a long time, no plea bargains considered. Kill someone during the commission of crime in which a gun is used, you forfeit your life.
Rube Render is a former Clovis city commissioner and former chair of the Curry County Republican Party. Contact him:
