re: #178 sagehen

Throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, NYC used to have more than 2000 murders a year (with maybe 30% solve rate). Bratton (starting under Dinkens, continuing under Giuliani) started doing serious gun control in 91… the murder rate has gone down every year since. Nowadays it’s around 500 a year, with a better than 70% solve rate.

And if anybody did try a mumbai… are you aware we’ve got more than 30,000 cops? That’s an army. Plus a bunch of FBI, and there’s more licensed weapons in civilian hands than you might think — we’re just fussy about making people pass a safety test and a marksmanship test before handing out the licenses. Hotel security, office building security, banks, couriers, bodyguards, etc.

We like it this way. We’d rather not have every random yahoo packing.

I don’t know about NYC standards for success in criminal affairs, but by any standard that I can imagine, roughly 150 unsolved murders annually is an abysmal failure. I don’t think the entire state of Colorado has that many in the history of the state.

Are you sure about the 70% figure? That means that 3 of 10 murderers are remaining on the street annually. I don’t know how that could be considered successful in any community.