Let's Address the Cause of Violence not the Symptoms: Drugs Incentivizing Gangs. Forget Guns!

As a follow up to an earlier piece about the misrepresentation of crime statistics by gun control advocates in comparing, namely, the United States to Great Britain, these are two well-paired pieces of research that make the case together better than separately for the need to address the true reasons for violence in the United States.

The first, published on December 31, 2012, written by Daniel Greenfield, demonstrates the disparity of the violent crime and murder rate between urban and rural/suburban America, highlighting the fact that Chicago has a murder rate (15.65/100,000) almost 400% higher than the nation at large (4.2/100,000). Even worse is New Orleans, with an almost unbelievable 72.8/100,000, which is about 18 times the national average.

He tends to drift a bit when discussing how the areas with the highest murder rates voted for Obama, whereas those with the fewest actually voted for Romney (interesting, but not completely relevant, in my opinion). But he sums it up nicely by stating that "The gangs who drive up America's murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm" [my emphasis].

And that's as far as he goes. It really is a good read and his damnation of the "broken cities full of broken homes" dragging down the rest of America appeals to my libertarian lens, but while he does a good job talking about why it's idiotic to worry about keeping guns out of the hands of future Lanza's, he doesn't really address the underlying cause of the gang violence that really IS driving up the statistics.

The next piece, published January 4, 2013, written by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, completes the proof: America's failed war on drugs has fueled a black market in which the more successful the government is at stopping drug trafficking, the higher the prices get to compensate for the increased risk of delivery, and the more we entice, especially inner city youth, to abandon school and legitimate jobs in favor of the chance to get rich quick. The higher prices leads to a higher desire for dealers to maintain both their suppliers and their customers, which leads to inevitable turf wars that cause a significant amount of bloodshed. 

The authors also point out that high school dropout rates tend to be highest for black and hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods and while many factors contribute, the temptation for inner-city youth to make so much money on a product whose price is artificially inflated contributes substantially. 

There is a link here between the war on drugs, which costs us billions every year in law enforcement, courtroom costs, public defenders, and incarceration (and that's only the calculable costs), the high school dropout rates among minorities in areas over 250,000 people, and the high violent crime rate within population areas over 250,000 people, but not necessarily with the crime rate of the entire country.

Do you really want to lower the rate of violent crime in the country? Abolish the vast majority of our drug laws, allow the free market to equalize supply and demand, which will remove the incentive to kill over customers (think post-prohibition era; how many liquor vendors were killing each other over the sale of alcohol? How many were during prohibition?). The problem is staring you in the face; to try to avoid the blatant and keep attacking guns is either ignorant or morally deceitful in that you don't truly care about lowering the rate of violent crime.