In addition to steps being taken by the current administration to deal with the rapid upswing in gun violence, ideas have appeared in the local papers and in other cities. If you do decide to "continue reading," I promise that you'll get an actual debate with two sides represented on two separate policy ideas with all of the work done by people much smarter than I.
Policy Idea #1: Gun laws - stricter enforcement vs. more restrictive laws
About three weeks ago, Daily News columnist, Penn professor and generator of interesting ideas, Mark Alan Hughes, suggested that maybe the mayor (this one or the next) should make a deal with the NRA:
What if we say to the pro-gun majority in the legislature that we will drop all calls for changing the gun laws in exchange for more resources to effectively enforce the laws we already have?
...
Straw-buying is already illegal, gun crimes already carry a five-year mandatory sentence; handguns already must be registered.
But we need more resources to enforce these existing laws. What if we called the bluff of our legislature and their National Rifle Association funders?
What if we embraced their position that guns don't kill, people do - and that we need 500 more cops to prevent people from abusing their right to bear arms?
Philadelphia becomes the city with zero-tolerance for any violation of lax gun laws. We get, say, $100 million annually in new police and court and prison resources to enforce existing laws in exchange for dropping all appeals for stronger gun laws. Would the NRA back us and tell their boys to vote our way?
This "put your money where your mouth is" has the advantage that it doesn't raise the automatic red flag of trying to pry anyone's gun from their cold, dead hands. The risk we take is that we find out that guns actually do kill people and that restricting the sale of guns turns out to be the most effective way to reduce death by firearm.
Tom Ferrick takes the other side of the argument and uses the work done in New York by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an example. We wrote about Bloomberg here. Anyway, Ferrick did a great job digging up the numbers that compare us to New York, numbers that you'll be seeing on this web site a lot.
Here is what the numbers say:
Nationally, the rate of shootings was 57 per 100,000 population in 2004, the last year complete data is available.
For the nation's eight largest cities, the rate was 147 per 100,000.
Higher and higher
For Philadelphia, it was 209 shootings per 100,000 - more than triple the national average, and about 40 percent higher than the big-city average.
In 2004, Philadelphia even had more shooting victims than New York. We had 1,530, while the Big Apple had 1,205.
Now, let's take the issue of gun confiscations. Those are firearms seized by police in criminal investigations.
This is a number that can be used as a rough barometer of the total number of guns on the streets.
In New York City, police confiscated 5,299 guns in 2004, a rate of 65 confiscations per 100,000 population.
In the same year in Philadelphia, police confiscated 5,044 guns, a rate of 343 guns per 100,000.
In other words, Philadelphia, with 1.5 million people, had nearly the same number of guns confiscated as New York, with 8.1 million people.
Ferrick credit's New York City's gun laws, which are more restrictive than Philly's, and Mayor Bloomberg's legal authority to regulate firearms within his own city. He'll be following up this column with the results of a questionnaire he sent out to all of the state legislators in the five-county area. Apparently it's a simple questionnaire, asking whether they support legislation restricting the sale of handguns to one a month (FYI, in New York City, Bloomberg wants to limit it to one gun every three months).
Of course the major disadvantage to Ferrick's idea - and he'll readily acknowledge that he's not the first to come up with this - is that until handgun violence spreads to places like Elk and Forest counties, there won't be enough support in the state legislature to take on the NRA. Hughes calls the idea "pursuing the impossible to avoid doing the possible."
Policy Idea #2: Get more cops out there fighting crime
The founder of Civic Strategies, Otis White, writes in his daily column for Governing.com about an idea being pursued in some cities to hire "civilian traffic enforcers to direct traffic, clear wrecks and maybe handle some accident investigations." This would free up regular cops for everything else that requires a gun and a badge, including fighting crime.
Clearly, this has the advantage of putting more police on the street to fight crime at a lower cost. However, the arguments against it are equally valid: police unions would never go for it and without the power to arrest people, traffic enforcers would be dependent on police anyway if anyone actually violated a traffic law. We all know people don't treat cops the same way they treat parking authority officers. It would be the same for these traffic enforcers.
White also points out that this idea has been used in other cities:
Actually, such civilian forces are fairly common. In Seattle, civilian parking enforcement officers are sometimes used for traffic duties, and New York has long had a volunteer auxiliary force that patrols neighborhood streets in city-issued uniforms with radios, batons and handcuffs but no guns.
So there you have it: two policy ideas for fighting crime, two sides to each idea... no answer. That's up to the candidates to figure out.
Comments (7)
Criminals can not purchase handguns. Legal handgun owners don't commit crimes. Why limit legal law abiding citizens from owning guns for protection from criminals who can get guns off the streets.
These laws do not target criminals and do not prevent criminals from getting guns. Criminals do not buy guns legally.
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