Real-estate listings should include prevalence of gun-ownership in a 50-mile radius and number of annual mass shootings in the region.
Time to change what a “bad neighborhood” is.
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
…and introduce a meaningful tax on guns and gun violence.
No one should say “this is a great place to raise kids” about neighborhoods where even one person has an assault rifle.
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
The metric would be simple.
Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m).
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
If that reads as safer or more frer to some people, Staten Island is for them. If not, maybe time for the Bronx. Take race, class, politics out of the real-estate equation.
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
By “those people” I mean “law-abiding gun owners.”
The funny thing is that the correlation between law-abiding gun owners and crime in a neighborhood is generally inverted, i.e., more law-abiding gun owners, less violent gun crime.
Mass shootings and violent crimes are generally not carried out by law-abiding gun owners.
The areas of Chicago with the most shootings are not areas filled with residents with FOIDs.
Moreover, exactly how does she intend to determine this?
Poll the residents, or does she want to dig through ATF paperwork and match up 4473s to addressed?
What this will most likely do is create maps of good neighborhoods to burglarize based on the likelihood of the burglar getting shot for his troubles. Her “good neighborhoods” will quickly turn bad as they become targeted by criminals.
Let’s be honest, her motivation isn’t based on safety, it’s based on the Left’s most powerful motivation, bigotry and discrimination.
She doesn’t want people who are part of gun culture anywhere near her and wants to make sure gun culture people stay in their own part of town, the “bad part” far away from her.
This is fundamentally no different than the old bigotry of redlining against blacks or refusing to sell to Jews, the only difference is the category she chooses to discriminate against. She’s still a segregationist bigot, through and through.
How does she deal with the cognitive dissonance of her “metric” having nothing to do (or being inversely proportional to) crime?
I dunno how many of the neighbors have guns, but it sounds like several of them have backyard shooting ranges. (I haven’t heard them lately, but maybe the gunfire is being drowned out by the cicadas.)
That 50-mile radius is insane. From here, it includes at least one inner-city hotspot in this state, and comes close to one in the next state over. Neither of those has anything to do with this neighborhood, except when some enterprising city boys come to prowl the subdivisions with U-Hauls looking for garage doors that have been left open.
My take is she knows it’s BS, for reasons both scrappycrow and Eric mention, among others. She’s using hyperbole to try to set the tone, as it were, for demanding national firearm registration, without which her little suggestion couldn’t be implemented.
So you could do it right now in, say, California or New York, but a national registry would be needed for a “real” implementation.
If you start debating the 50 mile radius, you’ve already implicitly agreed to her demand for registration as something worth considering.
BTW, Cam Edwards covered this the other day at Bearing Arms, worth a read and a listen.
Notice to liberal bigots: The whole state of Idaho meets her criteria for 50 mile radius of majority gun owing neighbors, although we are a little light on “Mass Shootings.” Just stay the ‘F’ in the “good” neighborhoods of South Central L.A. or Oakland/San Francisco.
This has been a PSA to preserve your sanity, and my peace of mind.
Most of NH, VT, and ME as well.
Um…what happened to my comment?
Ignore the 50 mile radius thing, inverse correlation with crime, etc.
You couldn’t do this without gun registration. If you debate the details you’ve already agreed implicitly that registration would be acceptable.
I asked the same thing yesterday. Apparently, some of our comments are being locked up in some sort of moderation queue by some algorithm. Not GFZ’s doing.
Her logic breaks when you consider she’s counting “known” gun owners.
You can’t count the ones that have guns in her city, because they are legion.
Except for the issue of how to get the data, I really am tempted to support her idea. As Niven & Pournelle said, “Think of it as evolution in action”. If she prefers living in dangerous areas and avoiding safe ones, fine, that sort of attitude is how the species improves over time.