Ban on Gitmo military trials to end

[Uraniun235]

Yet it seems that keeping a suspected terrorist in prison is more important than trying to lower your stagerring murder rates.

It's easier. Duh.

Combating that murder rate would require way more police, social programs that might curb poverty and not pay off for a decade, or gun control. There's no easy answers there.

The only one of those that's going to be truly effective is bringing down the poverty rate. It's the same problem as with bad school performance: nobody wants to admit or deal with the actual underlying cause (poverty), so instead, an aggressive campaign against 'wrongdoers' (criminals) or 'incompetents' (teachers) is proposed. With crime rates, it's actually counterproductive to just try and throw more force at the problem because you're only going to have more people in jail and prison convicted of felonies who are then effectively ostracized from society and fall into a feedback loop of poverty and crime.

Why doesn't anyone want to confront poverty? Well, because poor people obviously deserve it, and if they want better lives they need to work and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, so there's no sense in suggesting that we create another BIG GOV'T ~*~entitlement~*~ to try and do anything about it, now, is there? SARCASM. SARCASM.


Out of curiosity, how many people have died from inner city gang murders in the past year? That's not an area I'm really familiar with.

[PeZook]

In Los Angeles alone, about 40% of all homicides are gang-related. Assuming a uniform 9,6 per 100k murder rate (it was higher throughout the decade), that's about 150 gang-related murders each year in los angeles alone, so since 2001 LA alone racked up about 1350 dead from gang violence.

Add up other American cities, like Chicago (which has similar murder rates). And that's an estimate from the city of LA alone, not counting its urban sprawl.

Detroit had 361 murders in 2009, Baltimore 238...it quickly adds up.

Also, I disagree that more police funding would not go a long way to reducing crime: with the sheer amount of cash spent on the WoT, you could fund more officers, better equipment, universal health care and educational and outreach programs to control poverty. They'd all work in synnergy.

Just bringing the average murder rate down to European levels would save hundreds of US citizens per year. I know the US isn't Europe, has issues with population density, widespread gun ownership, gangs, poverty etc. but it seems that a War On Murder (since we're fighting abstract concepts here... ) is more worthwhile than the war on terror.