the crime report

Writing in the New York Times, columnist Clyde Haberman notes that gun violence in New York City has helped create a gender gap in life expectancy. A female born in the city in 2008 has a life expectancy of 82 years years, while the typical male will live to 76. Haberman says the difference comes in “the tendency of all too many young men, defined as those 18 to 34, to settle disputes with guns. In that age group, men are nine times likelier than women to become homicide victims. They account for half of all such victims in the city, though they make up only 12 percent of the population.” He adds, “Whenever someone dies really young, life expectancy for the entire city dips.” (more…)

(more…)

(more…)

The Bergen Record says the jumble of contradictory state gun laws on the East Coast allows cheap firearms to funnel into New Jersey along I-95, nicknamed the “Iron Pipeline.” New Jersey has strict gun laws, but the ease of firearms purchases in states with lax laws make it difficult to keep illegal guns off the streets of Paterson and other communities in the state. In 2009, illegal firearms killed 13 people in Paterson and injured 54. Most of the shootings involved gang members or drug dealers, but on at least two occasions a young person was accidentally shot dead with an illegally obtained gun. (more…)

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has long insisted that the city’s restrictive gun laws — including the handgun ban that was essentially nullified recently by the U.S. Supreme Court — have been a key crime-fighting tool. But court records show that relatively few people were convicted of violating the laws, and even top city officials have questioned how useful they are in deterring crime, reports the New York Times. Since 1982, when the city tightened its gun ordinances to include the handgun ban, there have been just 2,201 convictions under the laws, according to data from the office of the Cook County Circuit Court clerk. That works out to an average of about 79 convictions a year. (more…)

(more…)

(more…)

The nation’s banks lost $46 million last year in holdups. What are they doing wrong?

At a time when bank surveillance cameras produce portrait-quality images and tellers can attach GPS tracking devices to stolen money, you might think robbing a bank offers slim hope of success.

Think again. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tallied almost 6,000 bank heists around the U.S. last year—more than 16 a day―with robbers making off with a total of $46 million. Worse still, only about half the perpetrators have been caught, and about $8 million was recovered. In just over half of the cases, robbers wrote a threatening note demanding money but didn’t display a weapon.

(more…)

From the gun culture of the American West, Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) want to sweep away overly stringent regulations imposed by the Washington, D.C., Council after the Supreme Court struck down the city’s 32-year ban on handguns, reports the Washington Post. Washington City Council member Phil Mendelson complains that McCain and Tester are trying to impose the culture of their areas on the nation’s capital. “The national debate about guns just misses that they are very different cultures,” Mendelson said. “It’s like a psychology, a mind-set, as to how people as a group think about guns.” (more…)

(more…)