Jacology: St. Louis City Murder Rate

(KPLR) – In Tuesday’s Jacology, Charles Jaco examines St. Louis city’s murder rate for the first few weeks of the year and hopes to draw attention to the gun control debate.

So far, St. Louis has had sixteen murders in January. Sixteen isn’t a huge number. But for a city with a population of 315,000 it’s pretty high. How high? So far in January St. Louis has a murder rate four times that of Chicago and 21 times that of New York; which makes it a pretty good place to talk about the debate over guns.

Number one, law abiding gun owners don’t kill people. Psychos with guns or street criminals with guns, kill people. Almost none of the thirty thousand gun deaths a year in this country involve the rural hunters and sportsmen who worry the most about gun control.

Number two, most of the murders committed in this country involve handguns, not military-style rifles. Not that assault weapons shouldn’t be controlled. They should be. But if we’re going to talk about that, we should be talking even more urgently about tighter control of handguns, since they do the most damage.

Number three, tougher sentences against gun criminals are a must. Recently a convict who shot at St. Louis police with an AR-15 military-style rifle, was given four years in jail. Prosecutors wanted him to get twenty. That’s nonsense. Each state should be passing laws putting people in jail for a minimum of twenty years for being anywhere near a gun in the commission of a crime.

And number four, grownups should do time if kids get guns, any adult whose gun is used by a child to accidentally wound or kill, needs to go to prison for a very long time. It should be a felony for an adult to allow a child to get a gun and hurt or kill someone.

I’m Charles Jaco and that’s Jacology.