Police brutality and police reform (US)

The ones above this post, a handful posts above. You serious?

Do you mean this? You dont give much data here.

I mean are violent criminals locked up forever like they should be under NORMAL, not draconian, laws? Uinder draconian laws they are shot in the head after torture, but that horrible human beings should be guaranteed to never again re enter society under any circumstances isn't draconia, that's what normal human beings believes to be the only way to deal with them for 99.99% of human history.

And the USA fails at that disastrously.

If you are repeatedly violent you should have life no parole every time. Removed from society for good. GG, **** you, you are done forever. That's normality. Less than that, the left corrupted our societies.

You torture them for weeks that's draconian

i never said i thought it was isolated. i was a prosecutor i know how shitty the system is.

Nothing to do with what I said. None of my examples included violent crimes.

There is one kind of gun crime that has gone up a lot since then - young men, usually with no criminal records and who legally bought weapons, committing mass shootings.

These still don't make up a large percentage of gun violence, but they get a ton of publicity, and rightfully so, IMO. These incidents scare normal law abiding citizens (especially those who don't own guns). They scare me, because that is the only kind of gun violence which is likely to directly affect me or those I care most about.

I'm not in a gang, and I stay out of neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity, so I'm not going to be killed in gang related violence. I don't have a firearm in my home so I'm not going to be killed by accident or anger by a roommate, family member, or romantic partner.

However, I do go out to nightclubs, where some mass shootings have happened. I occasionally go to large outdoor festivals, where mass shootings have happened. I go to supermarkets, where some mass shootings have happened. I gamble in a small casino with very little security, where several people actually got shot by a disgruntled gambler just about a year ago.

These mass shootings are the reason I think legal gun purchases should be much more difficult to make than they are now, even if it means criminals still have them. Criminals are not who I'm worried about.

Columbine was in 1999. An acquaintance bought the guns for the kids.

Guns
In the months prior to the attacks, Harris and Klebold acquired two 9mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns. Harris had a Hi-Point 995 Carbine with thirteen 10-round magazines and a Savage-Springfield 67H pump-action shotgun. Klebold used a 9mm Intratec TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun with one 52-, one 32-, and one 28-round magazine and a Stevens 311D double-barreled shotgun. Harris's shotgun was sawed-off to around 26 inches (0.66 m) and Klebold shortened his shotgun's length to 23 inches (0.58 m), a felony under the National Firearms Act.[70][71] On November 22, 1998, their friend Robyn Anderson purchased a carbine rifle and the two shotguns for the pair at the Tanner Gun Show, as they were too young to legally purchase the guns themselves. After the attack, she told investigators that she had believed the pair wanted the weapons for target shooting and denied that she had prior knowledge of their plans.[19] Anderson was not charged

So let's keep 2 things separated.

On one side you want guns to be exceptionally harder to buy than *they were in 1999*. I get it, it's a take, we can discuss it if you want.

On another side here i am claiming that all the so called "very rightwing" decisions by SCOTUS from 2008 on, those takes on the 2a which some people consider absurd, overstretched and so on, didn't increase gun violence.

Do you have data showing that Columbine like events became more frequent following Heller and the other decisions, and that in most of those cases pre Heller the shooters wouldn't have been able to access guns?

Half of gun violence data isn’t violent , it’s people ending their own lives, as all Americans have the right to do

Mass shootings now include shootings where 3 people got shot, that’s not a mass shooting imo and most of those are done by people who are involved in lives of crime

and 100% by people with guns

In more than 99% of those cases they had shoes or boots as well.

I don't follow you around so I can't say for sure, but I would suspect you are far more likely to be killed by a criminal with a gun than someone who has never been charged with a crime, just bought a gun to shoot up a nightclub, grocery store or some other public place you are in. There are more gas station, bank, convenient store and other retail store holdups than you think plus you could get held up walking down the street or while idle in your car - each one of those seems more likely than someone who never committed a crime going crazy in public.

100%

I don't know, aren't most armed robbers hoping to get away with money without killing anyone? I don't hear about many customers getting killed in robberies of businesses. And in an individual holdup I don't think anyone not putting up a fight is likely to get shot. And as a larger than average middle aged man I'm not exactly the target most likely to be chosen.

I haven't heard of any mass boot killings, though.

I'm not saying that there wouldn't be downsides to drugs being legal but do you really think there are people who aren't doing crack just because it's illegal?

All (literally ALL) the money being spent on drug enforcement should be funneled to rehabilitation. Of course that would never happen and our corrupt politicians would just steal it somehow but I think it's the clear way to approach our drug issue as a society.

There are definitely people who would try more drugs if they were legal. Maybe mostly because they could get it easily and safely instead of hoping to find it somewhere.

I live in Portland where small quantities of drugs have been decriminalized, but I still have no idea where I could go to buy crack. I know where I would easily buy MJ because there are stores on every street with large billboards pointing out it is sold there.

Well, I can't argue with the first paragraph as there certainly would be more people who would try crack. My counter would be that number is not very high.

As for you not knowing where to buy crack. I think if you wanted to do crack you would indeed be able to find it. As a matter of fact if I were to offer you say 100k to go and buy street crack within 24 hours you would succeed. Well, you might get robbed at first but eventually you would succeed.

I'm a former addict. I was clean for ten years when I relapsed in a new city where I knew zero addicts. Upon making the decision to start using again, within two hours I had secured both heroin and cocaine off the street at seven in the morning.

Granted, I can spot a user a mile away but it's really not hard at all.

However, for all Americans, there's about a 1-in-18,989 chance of being murdered. For comparison, an American has a 1-in-517 chance of dying from heart disease.May 17, 2021

It's not the same people, murder kills working age people, young even more often than not, heart disease either kills very old people, or very fragile people who already know am have a very short straw in life for several reasons.

What's the heart disease death rate for people with 0 heart problems or correlated health problems at 35?

This is the COVID debate 2.0, framing deaths all the same as if the life of a demented 88y old with 4 chronical health problems was the same as that of a 29y old in normal health.

It isn't, and the latter life is worth hundreds or thousands of times the former.

I agree it probably wouldn't be a lot of people for crack. It depends on the drug. There are plenty of people who have tried MJ and its derivatives in places where it is now on every street corner. I even got some THC gummies myself! (I tried the minimum dose recommended for new users, didn't feel anything).

Until a few years ago I was always on the side of legalized drugs. Have had second thoughts now that I've seen some of the results of decriminalization here in Portland.
Of course, it's still not the same as full legalization, and unfortunately coincided with the coming of Covid, making it very difficult to know what exactly resulted from what causes.

Okay compare with car accidents instead.

There are nearly 43,000 fatal crashes a year in the U.S., but there's at least a glimmer of hope: The actual deadly car crash rate is less than 1%. Let's dive into the numbers: In 2021, there were an estimated 6,102,936 police-reported vehicle accidents in the United States. Of those, 39,508 were fatal.

Is there a drug thread?

Just curious what results you're seeing? It would seem that people are using out in the open and not concealing it like before but that the use hasn't gotten higher but appears as it has.

use in areas that legalize can get higher if other areas don't legalize, because people who want to use might move there (see the Netherlands in Europe when it was the only place to decriminalize).

even in that case it isn't causing more people to use, but it might appear as such from outside

Yeah, but there are no crack and heroin coffeeshops in Portland. However, that was the case when Colorado first legalized cannabis recreationally. All of a sudden with weed shops around people found Colorado as a more attractive vacation spot.

Not only public drug use, but there definitely has been lots more homeless people on the streets as well as more garbage everywhere vandalism, shoplifting, car (and car parts) theft, small businesses being robbed, etc.

In the last year things have improved somewhat, but downtown/inner city Portland is still not as inviting a place as it was before 2020, and it's tough to get lots of people who live in the suburbs to even be willing to go into the city for cultural events; what they saw a few years ago will stick in their minds for a long time.