The Rise of Guns on MA Streets
For many years now, Interstate 95 was considered the primary route for illegal handgun trafficking into Massachusetts. Someone would buy a bunch of guns from a dealer in Virginia, drive them up 95, and sell them to criminals in states like MA and cities like NYC. Now, however, Boston is looking to the North in an effort to blame the rise in gun crime on anyone but themselves. See, Massachusetts has the same reaction to the problem of gun crime that the federal government has about the war on drugs: when told that their war is unwinnable, they close their eyes, cover their ears with their hands, shake their heads and yell, “NANANANANANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU NANANANANANANANA”.
Unwinnable? Dare I utter such heresies? The simple fact remains: criminals will find ways to get guns. If you want proof of this, just check out this quote from the Boston.com article that spawned this blog entry:
Boston police officials have said that there are more guns on city streets now than at any time in at least six years and that many of them are being brought in illegally from out of state.
Massachusetts blames other states for this fact:
”The proximity of New England states with less restrictive [gun laws] makes firearms more accessible to people here in Massachusetts,” said Sergeant Thomas Sexton, a Boston Police Department spokesman. He said illegal guns are still coming from other states.
What we’re seeing here is that a criminal who wants a gun can get a gun, just like someone who wants drugs can get drugs. These have been facts of life for years and years and years. What worries me is that Massachusetts lawmakers are going to try and find some way to twist this story into another attack on law-abiding gun owners.
The problem this state has with guns is that they’re scared of them. Many residents, and the state officials who pander to them, believe that guns are somehow resonsible for the violence on their streets, personifying guns and transferring all responsibility for crime upon them. This logic leads them to believe that if they could only outlaw guns entirely, the streets would be safe and gun crime would disappear. I suppose it would be too much to hope that these people would look at a city like Washington D.C., where private ownership of handguns is outlawed, to see just how safe that city has become. It would also be illogical to assume that they would look at states where gun laws have been reduced in order to see how crime rates have dropped.
The logic that guns cause crime also reduces the complexity of the problem of crime, refusing to address the influence of drugs, gangs, poverty and a general breakdown in families and moral values on violence and instead laying all the blame on an inanimate object. Perhaps this is easier for people to deal with, allowing them to shift blame on something they feel they can easily control? Instead of focusing on a multi-layered problem that will require gargantuan efforts to solve, if it’s solvable at all, those looking for a cheap fix instead focus on blaming the noisiest component of street crime, namely the thing that goes bang.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but at least I can tell when a particular plan of attack is flawed. If Massachusetts, and any state, wants to stem the flow of illegal guns onto its streets and reduce crime, then they’re going to have to start addressing the root causes of crime instead of taking pot-shots at obvious and illogical targets.
