http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/su ... rrer=&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
and...But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.
Of course, can't stop glowering about handguns:Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago.
By the very end, the writer stumbles onto something useful:Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of murders each year, but gun control advocates had failed to interest enough of the public in a handgun ban. Handguns were the weapons most likely to kill you, but they were associated by the public with self-defense. (In 2008, the Supreme Court said there was a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.)
More than 20 years of research funded by the Justice Department has found that programs to target high-risk people or places, rather than targeting certain kinds of guns, can reduce gun violence./quote]
Ok, but how about just "violence." The fact that a gun was used sometimes is a lesser part of the issue than the fact that certain people prefer to use criminal violence in any form.
So open your checkbook:David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argues that the issue of gun violence can seem enormous and intractable without first addressing poverty or drugs. A closer look at the social networks of neighborhoods most afflicted, he says, often shows that only a small number of men drive most of the violence. Identify them and change their behavior, and it’s possible to have an immediate impact.Working with Professor Kennedy, and building on successes in other cities, New Orleans is now identifying the young men most at risk and intervening to help them get jobs. How well this strategy will work in the long term remains to be seen.
I have little faith that offering jobs and counseling to the people who engage in repetitive criminal violence is going to alter their behavior in any appreciable way. You catch youngsters early enough, and change their environment, their role models, make sure they realize bad behavior has instant consequences, then yes you might get some place. But those guys who are already in the life, robbing and killing...jail them. Chicago has already gone down the road with so-called gang intervention programs, and it basically is a way to distribute taxpayer dollars to favored individuals and groups.