Mr Mayor - I've had enough of the W.I. Day parade through Crown Heights North

While some may believe that Brooklynian is the website with the most readers in Crown Heights, a far larger blog (crownheights.info) caters to the Lubavitch of Crown Heights.

Here is the site's coverage of this weekend's parade violence, with lots of reader comments:

http://www.crownheights.info/index.php?itemid=37481#c

http://www.crownheights.info/index.php?itemid=37470#c

Please note: One should not perceive CrownHeights.info as representing all of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights, nor does it represent itself as such.

Nor should one infer that by linking said articles, that I share the viewpoints of their writers or commenters.

haters gonna hate

i'm betting 90% of these shootings were because of existing beef (i thought it fitting that the one i came closest to was right across the street from western BEEF). so a lot of things came to a head this weekend, but how do we know a lot of these shootings wouldn't have happened over any long weekend? if not now then in the coming months. yeah, 1 innocent bystander died, which is awful and scary. but 99.9% of the people attending these things don't have to worry about getting shot. you know, as long as they don't have an existing beef with somebody...

and otherwise, just be careful who you're wining with...

bobbybrummel said:

new york needs even stricter gun laws. more social programs. more jobs. maybe crack down on nutcracker sales or something.

There was, of course, some coverage on MSN.com. In that article, Mayor Mike calls for tougher gun control. I thought that it was interesting (and scary) that the majority of comments on the article, from those in other parts of the country, were of the, "no! This is what happens when you strip the good people of their protection! An armed population is a safe population!" Yes, more guns is what NYC needs. Jezuz H.

CHCA with Council Member James will be holding a press conference to address the violence yesterday. We are just pulling things together now and will post an announcement later today.

If anyone would like to work directly with us on the issue of gun violence please email us or PM here

thank you

bobbybrummel said:

new york needs even stricter gun laws.

Because the progenitors of the weekend gun violence had any concerns about what laws they were breaking?

eastbloc said:

Sounds truthy for sure, but where do you get your data from?

The UK banned handguns completely in 1997 and violent crime has only increased since.

gun crime or violent crime?

bobbybrummel said:

haters gonna hate

but 99.9% of the people attending these things don't have to worry about getting shot.

I do not like these shooting reports at all. What's up with a cultural event and celebration where people have to wonder if they'll be shot by attending? What's up with a community that sees that kind of risk as acceptable? That is nowhere I want to be.

Serious question: what is they typical position of the NYPD on an event like this? My neighborhood was swarming with cops yesterday (and, a very sincere thank you to the NYPD for making me feel safe, it was reassuring seeing all of you, and I appreciated it.)

Seems like the NYPD union might look at these events as a way to put their members at additional (unnecessary?) risk and seek to curtail them.

Boygabriel said:

If anything, it makes the criminals more brazen knowing they are unlikely to face a significant deterrent.

This seems like a pretty big assumption.

It's not an assumption.

A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:

• 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"

• 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun"

• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"[22]

Source:

Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (Expanded Edition). By James D. Wright and Peter D. Rossi. Aldine De Gruyter, 1986 (Expanded edition published in 1994).

And I'm not necessarily against legal, sane gun ownership. But ownership laws in this country are a joke.

I tend to agree, though perhaps not for the same reasons. There are very few laws regulating ownership at a federal level. They're very loose in some states, and overly strict in others. That's a dichotomy that lends itself to the situation we have in New York, where illegal guns are easy to get, while legal possession is highly restricted.

I'm not opposed to gun registration or a federally-consistent set of rules that makes it universally straightforward for citizens to have guns for sport and self-defense while making it difficult for them to be obtained by felons.

There really isn't a solution to illegal gun ownership. Even if Constitutional rights concerning Search & Seizure were null & void, guns will still find their way in. And as much asI support gun ownership and self-defense, the Second Amendment is not right for citizens to own firearms. If anything, it gives state governors the authority, if not the duty, to form national guards to act against insurrections by said armed citizens.

Unfortunately y'all are trying to analyze this problem from the perspective of sane and rational decision-making. But clearly, someone that would walk into his home and grab a weapon (making it very easy to identify who he was), walk outside and fire multiple shots into a crowd of people (making it very likely he would hit someone other than his intended target), and do all of that with scores of police standing within several hundred yards(making his capture an almost certainty) isn't exactly the poster child for rational thought.

You should instead look at this through the lens of insanity. So if its your intention to shoot that M'fer in front of your home with your illegal handgun no matter who is around and what the consequenses to yourself or others are, how do you deter that crime?

spnder said:

"The UK banned handguns completely in 1997 and violent crime has only increased since."

I don't think you can even compare the US and UK in this regard. It's a different country with a markedly different gun culture and vastly different levels of gun violence. Gun violence still remains far, far below that of the US. I don't know what is making it continue to grow, but you can't just look at the ban and definitively say it's been a failure there, much less extrapolate those effects to here.

Well, I can look at evidence of places which have instituted gun bans, or I can blithely equivocate based on no evidence at all.

I didn't use the statistics derived from the DC and Chicago gun bans or the concealed-carry programs in many US states because the varying laws in neighboring areas can be construed as having an influence that can't be controlled for easily in studies.

Suffice it to say that I'm not aware of any contemporary gun control program anywhere that has effectively reduced gun crime, let alone violent crime.

bkChickie: Serious question: what is they typical position of the NYPD on an event like this? My neighborhood was swarming with cops yesterday (and, a very sincere thank you to the NYPD for making me feel safe, it was reassuring seeing all of you, and I appreciated it.)

based on the above mentioned (somewhere on this site) blog for only cops, what the cops think isn't very nice.

http://theerant.yuku.com/topic/44047/Cop-Shot-w-in-confines-77pct?page=1

homeowner said:

Unfortunately y'all are trying to analyze this problem from the perspective of sane and rational decision-making. But clearly, someone that would walk into his home and grab a weapon (making it very easy to identify who he was), walk outside and fire multiple shots into a crowd of people (making it very likely he would hit someone other than his intended target), and do all of that with scores of police standing within several hundred yards(making his capture an almost certainty) isn't exactly the poster child for rational thought.

You should instead look at this through the lens of insanity. So if its your intention to shoot that M'fer in front of your home with your illegal handgun no matter who is around and what the consequenses to yourself or others are, how do you deter that crime?

That's a question probably more for economists, psychologists, and sociologists than it is for legislators and police.

A committed murderer will just as soon resort to a steak knife. I see no evidence that the mere presence of a gun leads people to commit brazen daylight homicides.

whynot_31 said:

eastbloc wrote: Suffice it to say that I'm not aware of any contemporary gun control program anywhere that has effectively reduced gun crime, let alone violent crime.

I believe the research on places that now allow regular citizens to carry pistols to be similarly inconclusive.

I don't disagree, but if there is not a demonstrable effect on safety and crime in either case, why the push more government control and less personal freedom? Seems far more political than practical to me.