Solving Crime, Violence Issues Possible With Serious Effort

Johnstown is not alone in facing rising crime rates and increased gun violence. It is instructive to look at the issues with an open mind.

For example, the default position of the anti-gun types around the United States is to seize on gun violence as an opportunity and excuse to disarm legal gun owners, despite protections specified in the Constitution.

These anti-gun types love to cite statistics, but selectively. For example, go to gunviolencearchive.org and you will see 6,703 gun deaths in the United States so far in 2023.

That’s the kind of number you will see quoted by the “guns bad” types. But if you take the time to delve deeper on the site, you will find that 3,828 of those gun deaths were suicides.

Repeat, a tick over 57 percent of the gun deaths were self-inflicted, not random violence by some gun-wielding thug. If you took away all legal rights to own guns, there still would be illegal guns a person contemplating suicide likely could acquire.

Even without guns, someone intent on committing suicide will find a way. As my late, terribly politically incorrect father used to observe: There is no such thing as attempted suicide. Either you want to do it, or you want attention.

Regardless, I personally know of people who have killed themselves using wet blankets and an electrical cord, or by jumping off a high bridge. It’s not pretty, but it is the reality.

For them, and others like them, it’s no guns, no problem. They’ll get it done.

Pills, ropes for hanging, jumping in front of moving vehicles, bodies of water for non-swimmers, knives, all are suicide alternatives to guns.

This is more a mental health issue than a gun issue and increasingly mental health advocates don’t seem to see the need for strong intervention regarding those with serious mental issues.

When you are more into protecting so-called rights than demanding responsibility, this sort of thing happens.

The mentally ill also often are on the trigger-pulling end of a gun when innocents are killed or hurt. Again, it’s a breakdown of our mental health and legal system that disarming the law-abiding citizenry won’t fix.

More thoughts on gun deaths: Some are legitimate use of deadly force by law enforcement. Some are accidental shootings. All of these ameliorate the harshness of the total.

Also, consider that in 2021 (statistics tend to lag in timeliness) 42,915 people in the U.S. died as a result of motor vehicle accidents. That’s drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Yet the default solution is not to ban cars, trucks or motorcycles.

Another story I saw recently dealt with Omaha, Neb., halving gun violence.

That’s been accomplished through police and community interaction under the name Omaha 360, with regular meetings to address current problems and head off future incidents.

Nowhere in the story was disarming the law-abiding populace cited as contributing to the decline.

If we want to get serious about reducing crime, there also is the time-tested solution – prisons.

The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world in 2015. Fast-forward to today and that rate is down 97 percent.

This was accomplished because President Nayib Bukele built big prisons and put criminals in them, without quick paroles.

Just last week, Bukele posted a video of 2,000 or so gang members being rounded up and put behind bars. In the post, Bukele noted this is “where they will live for decades, mixed up, unable to do any more harm to the population.”

Our liberals in charge never would tolerate long-term incarceration for criminals, or confinement for the dangerously mentally ill. They’d rather trample the rights of the law-abiding instead under the guise of addressing the problem.

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