“95% of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25.”
He continues: “That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed.”
Bloomberg’s idea of a solution? Flooding minority neighborhoods with law enforcement.
“People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them,” Bloomberg says...
Keeping in mind
Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, let’s try to walk through the different types of shootings in reverse order of how much space they take up in the brains of media consumers:
– Total murders: According to FBI statistics, in 2020 92% of gun murders in which the gun type is known were committed with a handgun. Also, according to FBI statistics, 56.5% of all known murder offenders (gun and non-gun) in 2020 were black. The percentage of known gun murderers was likely higher, and, judging from the lower clearance rates in black neighborhoods, the percentage of all gun murderers, known and unknown, who were was likely up around 5/8ths.
– Total mass shootings: The US is averaging about a dozen mass shootings per week in which four or more victims are killed and/or wounded. Almost certainly, a large majority of these Saturday Night in South-Central mass shootings are carried out with hand guns.
– Mediagenic mass killing shootings: Leftist
Mother Jones magazine keeps a carefully curated “I Know It When I See It”
list of mass shootings with only 128 over the last 40 years using criteria such as 3 dead (before 2012, 4 dead), not gang or crime related, not domestics, and the killer is identified. They cover virtually all the famous mass shootings. In their
database, half of these celebrated mass shootings were carried out only with handguns. In a fraction of the other half, shooters carried handguns as well as long guns.
Long guns aren’t useful for the typical Saturday Night in South-Central mass wounding shooting, because the shooter/s intend to get away. Carrying a long gun into the scene of your crime is likely to cause passerby witnesses to notice your face — “Hey, that 6’3″ guy with the scar on his left cheek is carrying a rifle!” So a concealed handgun is preferable.
On the other hand, mass killing shooters have typically made up their mind ahead of time that they aren’t ever coming home. They intend to hang around to finish off the wounded, then be killed or arrested. They want everybody to know their names. So, a long gun isn’t a problem to them. (Fortunately, there aren’t many of them.)...
...Any conceivable type of gun control, even Australian-style mass confiscation, would likely leave tens of millions of guns and could generate a huge black market. If you’ve been planning for a long time to die or go to prison forever for your carefully plotted mass killing shooting, how much of a deterrence would it be to have to get a gun on the black market? I don’t know.
What about waiting periods for legal gun purchases? Some states have them, others don’t.
For example, the crazy man who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and a lot of other people (which was blamed, wholly wrongly. on Sarah Palin) bought the guns he used on a Walmart on the way to his crime. I call this, from
The Onion, a No-I-Won’t-Be-Needing-A-Bag-For-My-Gun-Purchase shooter. Are there many of them? Somebody could go through the
Mother Jones list and check.
Offhand, my guess would be that more domestic murders are facilitated by a spur of the moment gun purchase. Domestic murders are bad, too, but they don’t get much publicity.
Lots of Democrats are talking right now about “common sense gun control,” but they tend not to be trusted because of their tendency to use each incremental change as a launching pad for another one, with the ultimate goal of shutting down all legal hunting and gun culture in the U.S. For example, in 2013-15, the liberal establishment moved with incredible rapidity from winning on gay marriage to encouraging your moody daughter to have herself poisoned, mutilated, and sterilized in the name of transgenderism.
My impression from this is that handguns are somewhat substitutable for long guns in the sick minds of mass killing shooters.