Tag Archive: Northeastern University


What Every Legislator – And Citizen – Needs to Know

” No one wants to ever again see anything like the senseless slaughter of 26 people – including 20 children – at a school. But as legislators turn toward creating new gun laws, here are five facts they need to know.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years.

The violent crime rate - which includes murder, rape, and beatings – is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.

Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. “There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.”

 

 

 

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500 Murders In Chicago Show Gun Bans Don’t Work

 

 

 

 

” Guns: The mayor of what is at once America’s most gun-controlled city and its murder capital wants an assault weapons ban like the one he pushed in 1994. Except it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

Nathaniel T. Jackson, 40, an alleged gang member with a long arrest record, was gunned down last week outside a store in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, becoming the Windy City’s 500th murder victim in 2012.

Up to 80% of Chicago’s murders and shootings are gang-related, according to police. By one estimate, the city has almost 70,000 gang members. A police audit last spring identified 59 gangs and 625 factions; most were on the South and West sides.

Yet, in the view of Chicago’s mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the answer to violence by crazies and criminals in his city and nationally is more gun control, not more gang and goon control. “

No Measurable Effect

 

” Statistics compiled by a Northeastern University professor, the Census Bureau and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel show the number of mass shootings and victims from 1976 to 2010 has fluctuated annually, but without any major upward or downward trend.

Some 2,956 people have been killed in 646 mass shootings over this 35-year period, with a mass shooting defined by the FBI as one in which four or more people (not including the shooter) are killed in a single incident and typically in a single location. FBI homicide data show no discernible trend in the number of mass shootings or victims during that time.

A chart using these data and published in the Journal Sentinel does show that while the Clinton/Emanuel assault weapons ban was in place, from 1994 to 2004, mass shootings actually rose slightly and that after its repeal there was no precipitous rise, as supporters had warned. “

So Let’s Do More Of The Same

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