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Las Vegas Shooting Leaves at Least 50 Dead, More Than 200 Wounded (wsj.com)
Readers share a report: At least 50 people are dead and more than 200 wounded after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Police said they were first alerted to reports of an incident at 10:08 p.m. and then determined there was a shooter on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino who was targeting the nearby Route 91 Harvest Festival. Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a briefing that officers responded and shot dead the suspect. He said the suspect was a local resident but declined to identify him, citing the ongoing investigation. Police are also trying to locate a female companion, who they named as Marilou Danley, who was traveling with the suspect.
"Europe" is a continent made up of many countries - many European countries ban guns.
Many non-Europeans seem to have a problem understanding that Europe is not a single political entity - not even the European Union spans the entirety of Europe, and the EU doesn't regulate guns, that's down to member states at an individual level.
The NRA has fought multiple lawsuits so that blind people could buy guns. And not "legally blind" where they just have very bad eyesight. People who can't even see light and dark.
On the mental health front, the NRA has fought to prevent any restrictions until the person is institutionalized or legally declared insane. Therapist is concerned about a patient's suicidal ideation and repeated statements that the patient want to "take out" people with their arsenal? The NRA has fought very hard against efforts to do anything with that arsenal. Including fighting against being able to go to a court in an attempt to get that arsenal away from the crazy person.
The NRA tells a story about keeping guns away from crazy people, and then fights very hard to prevent people from being declared crazy. You've only listened to the first part, and haven't looked at their actions surrounding the second.
I think the problem with most laws that have been put forth for removing a person's 2nd amendment right, for reasons of such things as mental illness, spousal abuse, etc....is that they are set up such that it immediately removes the rights from the accused, and leaves little if no rights to due process for that person to either defend themselves against the charges or have those rights restored once remediation steps have been made.
But they way most of these laws have been written, mere accusation by a disgruntled spouse or any party that may have a grudge against the accused, causes the accused to immediately have their rights revoked and allow to have their property confiscated. Basically they laws proposed have made you guilty until proven innocent.
We don't like that with any other of the amendments in the constitution, why should we be so willing to allow it for the 2nd?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The ranking you have given Chicago is based on its membership in an arbitrary set of cities chosen for a wikipedia table. If you include *all* municipalities with a population of at least 25,000 (e.g. large enough that a small spate of murders doesn't have a big statistical effect) then Chicago does *not* crack the top 30.
Here are the top ten using the 25,000 cutoff:
10 Camden, NJ: 42/100,000
9 New Orleans, LA 42/100,000
8 Detroit, MI: 44/100,000
7 Flint, MI : 47/100,000
6 Petersburg, VA: 49/100,000
5 Baltimore, MD: 55/100,000
4 St. Louis, MO: 60/100,000
3 Gary, IN: 65/100,000
2 Chester, PA: 67/100,000
1 East St. Louis, IL: 71/100,000
Chicago, at 18 murders / 100,000 population isn't even close. However, while Chester PA is an extremely dangerous place to live, you can't maintain a media narrative of a murder epidemic with a city of only 34,000 people.
What sets Chicago aside from all the cities on this top ten list is that is larger; not only larger, but massively larger, 2.72 million. If you choose a large enough population it will generate a regular stream of murders, relatively consistently from year to year. It's like comparing the absolute number of murders in California to those in Louisiana; Louisiana is much, much more dangerous, but it has about 10% of the population. Some years will be more murder-y than others there, whereas California is statistically large enough it will produce over 2000 murders/year like clockwork.
Now Chicago has the highest murder rate among the largest cities in the US, but not by much:
New York 8.5 million 3/100,000
Los Angeles 3.97 million 7/100,000
Chicago pop 2.72 million 15/100,000
Houston pop 2.29 million, 13/100,000
Phoenix pop 1.56 million, 7/100,000
Now the interesting thing here is that the murder rate and absolute number of murders in Houston are very, very close to that of Chicago, but you never hear about the murder epidemic in Houston. It's because this is a narrative being pushed by Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and Houston is in a red state.
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