The numbers may help explain why an overwhelming majority of black Americans—75 percent according to a 2013 Washington Post/ABC News poll—support stronger gun control laws. Yet even in areas where local governments have enacted gun control measures, lax regulations elsewhere have sustained a robust network of unregulated private transactions that allow gun dealers to look the other way while supplying gangs and other criminals with a vast assortment of weapons.
This network leaves a place like Chicago, which remains crippled by violence despite relatively strict gun laws, hard-pressed to keep weapons off the street—as this New York Times map illustrates, anybody in the city who wants a gun need only take a short drive outside Cook County to get to a jurisdiction with much weaker regulations.
A similar situation has arisen in Maryland, which despite having some of the country's most stringent gun laws, has been plagued by violent crime in urban areas. Amid finger-pointing over the rioting that ravaged Baltimore earlier this year, it's worth pointing out that the majority of crime guns are trafficked in from outside the state. So while the gun policies Maryland has implemented—including a policy requiring individuals to pass a background check and obtain a permit prior to buying a firearm—have been shown to reliably reduce gun violence, neighboring states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia have much looser requirements, making it easy for weapons to flow across the border.
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This haphazard patchworks of state and local gun laws has enabled many private gun dealers to effectively exploit gang violence and crime to boost sales. Chuck's Gun Shop, for example, which operates just outside Chicago, is responsible for selling at least 1,300 crime guns since 2008, and one study found that 20 percent of all guns used in Chicago crimes recovered within a year of purchase came from the store, because existing gun laws allow the store to sell firearms to criminals who would undoubtedly fail a background check if it were required.
Across the country, the evidence suggests that weak gun laws not only play into the hands of mass murderers looking for the easiest way to commit atrocity, but also exacerbate the tragic, everyday violence that disproportionately cripples minority communities. The solution is not to pretend, as has become fashionable among gun advocates, that gun violence is simply the unavoidable cost our of constitutional freedoms, but to instead support commonsense policies of the sort implemented in nearly every other industrialized nation.
Originally Posted by sandydandy
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