These Are the Changes Community Leaders Say They Need

By Josiah Bates @ Time.com, July 27

[....] Pastor Price and community activists in cities across America that are currently facing high levels of gun violence say the issue has been ignored — and stigmatized — for too long. Buoyed by the groundswell of support for some high-profile victims of police violence, and for larger societal reforms, they say now is the time for action.

“This should be a wake-up call. We’ve been pressing the snooze button on this issue for too long and we’re at the point where we can’t press it anymore,” Pastor Price says. “We should have a handle on this by now.”

Since Memorial Day — the day Floyd was killed — more than 113 people have been shot in Minneapolis. New York City has had over 800 shooting victims in 2020, compared to 481 in the same period last year.

Philadelphia has seen a 33% increase in shooting incidents this year, with more than 990 people shot. And as of July 24, Chicago has had 414 murders this year and 1,637 shooting incidents, up from 275 murders and 1,110 shooting incidents year-on-year. In the last month, at least nine children have been killed across the city [....]

One common law enforcement strategy to counter such violence is the seizure of illegal weapons, through police raids, individual and vehicle searches, buyback or amnesty programs as well as the collection of discarded weapons at crime scenes. In 2019, Chicago police seized more than 10,000 illegal weapons from the streets. But while many gun violence experts agree that inner-city shootings often come from unregistered firearms, community leaders and experts question the value of confiscations in the grander scheme of gun violence prevention [....]