That makes eight people shot on the same block in four days

(Sorry - meant DC, not anon. I am agreeing with anon.)

Alex...when I posted my original post over 24 hours ago I was frustrated and very heated by 2 seperate issues and it came across in my tone.
The first issue that bothered me is that 8 people got shot up the street from where I live, even closer to where loved ones live and I also feel the 4 years I've been in JP I've witnessed, heard about first hand or researched ALOT of crime. I'm just really sick of all the crime so close to home.
You're correct..I haven't witnessed ALL the crime I'm talking about...but I do research what goes on around..look at the Boston Police website...read the Gazzette...talk to my neighbors...read this site, etc. I feel I am very informed on whats going on in JP in terms of crime, major and petty. I'm the guy that sends all my JP friends news on local crime, etc out of concern. Just because I don't see it with my own eyes doesn't mean it's not happening. There is plenty of stuff that goes on that doesn't even make this page...plenty of assaults and muggings listed in the Gazzette police log you never even here about. just like the lack of info by the BPD about the recent shootings.

The second issue I was angry about is the fact that Boston is denying me and thousands of other previously legal, safe responsible firearms owners our right to renew (or apply for) a new Class A license. I've had one for 20 years. I'm have a responible professional career, no desire to hurt anyone, never accidentally shot anyone and thankfully never had to pull it on anyone. But it's my right to bear arms and protect myself and my loved ones, yours too. I don't neccessarily want to walk around JP packing all the time. Thats not the idea....the concept is (whether you personally like firearms or not) that one of my rights as an American citizen is being taken from me on a local level based on where I live, in the city..which to me makes no sense because the city is where it's the most dangerous to be a law abiding citizen.
So I am frustrated about it (obviously)..I'm certainly not looking to play Dirty harry as someone had put it.

In terms of my attitude about people being oblivious...I think alot of people in JP are simply just that..oblivious to whats going on around them. And some are foolish, in denial, like "oh, that could never happen to me."

I live in what most would consider a really nice, green, cute, unique, cool, "safe" part of town. If you read my original post you'll see that even there I've noticed alot of crime since being here in JP...the most close to home being my downstairs neighbor robbed at gunpoint at our front stairs one night...another was when I was walking home from the bella luna complex last fall and suddenly a couple of "thuggish" looking guys started creeping up on me and I felt like I was about to be mugged. I actually turned around right as they got up on me and started walking the other way confusing them..took a turn and lost them pretty quick retreating to my house. The next day i found out 5 people where robbed at gunpoint on that street within the hour of when I was being cased by those 2 guys. Or the kid playing basketball a couple of blocks from my house who was shot point blank in the head @ 4:30 in the afternoon on Monday, @ a place I frequent to relax...where kids play. Or the several occassions I've been watching tv and heard gunshots and then police cars flying around the neighborhood. Or the business man who got beaten and robbed a couple of streets over from me by a group of thugs...or the 25 yr old girl who got tackled and roughed up by 2 men walking home on the next street over at 9:30 on Saturday...or the shooting up in front of the Taco shop a couple of weeks ago in Hyde Sq where I walk through frequently...or the guys shot several times in the back in middle of the day running from a rival up a busy Centre St in front of Stop & Shop where I tend to buy my food alot...the guy walked into 99 cent stop and collapsed dead. I could keep going on and on...not to mention the annoyance of the constant smash n grabs in our area. I seriously really wonder if alot of people in JP are actually in tune with whats going on around them. it's easy to forget where you are. JP is very nice and beautiful and all...but it's the city,the people who would do you harm are there too.
And when I said I'm moving out of the "kill-zone"...well if you bring up all the murders and violent crime on the Universal Hub crime map of Boston you'll see plain as day that JP lies right in the middle of all the major violent crime. Ok so...even if I live in a "safe" neighborhood in JP...chances are I have to cut through the bad areas and Roxbury to get anywhere.
Anywhere you're more likely than most to get hit by a stray bullet in the middle of the day is not what I consider a safe place to live.
Just because you haven't personally been affected by it Alex doesn't mean it's not there and there aren't countless victims who would disagree when people say JP is "safe". It's just my opinion. You have yours. I can move...you can stay. It does make me laugh though when people get so pissed and take it so personally when you say anything negative about JP. Feirce loyalty...thats for sure.

There are multiple anons here.

I was the anon who suggested moving gangbangers to the genteel cul de sacs, to mug rich people's sons and ogle their daughters, in hopes of motivating the people who actually run this place to care about fixing the slums. It's better than forcing only the decent poor people to suffer from the savage poor people. Spread the joy around.

My first week in Boston, years ago, some guy stabbed another guy literally within a few feet of my door. Dozens of black people, teen to middle-aged, suddenly flooded into the street as a mob. I still don't know where they all came from so quickly. I think any white people were thinking "oh shit" and hiding indoors like me. Some black girl was yelling "Kill him!" Then it must've been that enough tribal justice was administered, and they dispersed before police arrived, with some people carrying away a guy. I don't actually live in the slums, there is just a lot of subsidized housing mixed in with the middle-class and students. Have a stabbing and mob like that just once in Newton, and the wealthy would be calling in the National Guard on their way out the door to take last-minute flights to the French Riviera until all the black people were out of their neighborhood again and the projects were entombed in concrete like Chernobyl. Though they wouldn't say it that way (not PC), just do it that way.

Here you go....

According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year -- one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds.
Among 15.7% of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey, the defender believed that someone "almost certainly" would have died had the gun not been used for protection -- a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes. (In another 14.2% cases, the defender believed someone "probably" would have died if the gun hadn't been used in defense.)

In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first -- disproving the myth that having a gun available for defense wouldn't make any difference.

In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker (and the gun defense wouldn't be called "newsworthy" by newspaper or TV news editors). In 64.2% of these gun-defense cases, the police learned of the defense, which means that the media could also find out and report on them if they chose to.

In 73.4% of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victim. (Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare -- well under 10%.) This disproves the myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love.

In over half of these gun defense incidents, the defender was facing two or more attackers -- and three or more attackers in over a quarter of these cases. (No means of defense other than a firearm -- martial arts, pepper spray, or stun guns -- gives a potential victim a decent chance of getting away uninjured when facing multiple attackers.)

In 79.7% of these gun defenses, the defender used a concealable handgun. A quarter of the gun defenses occured in places away from the defender's home.

Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995

and another source reports...

A. Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict

* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2
* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.3
* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.4
* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.5
* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).6 And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."7
* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year.8 Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."
B. Concealed carry laws help reduce crime

* Nationwide: one-half million self-defense uses. Every year, as many as one-half million citizens defend themselves with a firearm away from home.9
* Concealed carry laws are dropping crime rates across the country. A comprehensive national study determined in 1996 that violent crime fell after states made it legal to carry concealed firearms. The results of the study showed:
* States which passed concealed carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3%;10 and
* If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and over 11,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly.11
* Vermont: one of the safest five states in the country. In Vermont, citizens can carry a firearm without getting permission... without paying a fee... or without going through any kind of government-imposed waiting period. And yet for ten years in a row, Vermont has remained one of the top-five, safest states in the union -- having three times received the "Safest State Award."12
* Florida: concealed carry helps slash the murder rates in the state. In the fifteen years following the passage of Florida's concealed carry law in 1987, over 800,000 permits to carry firearms were issued to people in the state.13 FBI reports show that the homicide rate in Florida, which in 1987 was much higher than the national average, fell 52% during that 15-year period -- thus putting the Florida rate below the national average. 14
* Do firearms carry laws result in chaos? No. Consider the case of Florida. A citizen in the Sunshine State is far more likely to be attacked by an alligator than to be assaulted by a concealed carry holder.
1. During the first fifteen years that the Florida law was in effect, alligator attacks outpaced the number of crimes committed by carry holders by a 229 to 155 margin.
2. And even the 155 "crimes" committed by concealed carry permit holders are somewhat misleading as most of these infractions resulted from Floridians who accidentally carried their firearms into restricted areas, such as an airport.15
C. Criminals avoid armed citizens

* Kennesaw, GA. In 1982, this suburb of Atlanta passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89% in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4% drop in Georgia as a whole.16
* Ten years later (1991), the residential burglary rate in Kennesaw was still 72% lower than it had been in 1981, before the law was passed.17
* Nationwide. Statistical comparisons with other countries show that burglars in the United States are far less apt to enter an occupied home than their foreign counterparts who live in countries where fewer civilians own firearms. Consider the following rates showing how often a homeowner is present when a burglar strikes:
* Homeowner occupancy rate in the gun control countries of Great Britain, Canada and Netherlands: 45% (average of the three countries); and,
* Homeowner occupancy rate in the United States: 12.7%.18
Rapes averted when women carry or use firearms for protection
* Orlando, FL. In 1966-67, the media highly publicized a safety course which taught Orlando women how to use guns. The result: Orlando's rape rate dropped 88% in 1967, whereas the rape rate remained constant in the rest of Florida and the nation.19
* Nationwide. In 1979, the Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful.20
Justice Department study:
* 3/5 of felons polled agreed that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun."21
* 74% of felons polled agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime."22
* 57% of felons polled agreed that "criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police."23

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164.
Dr. Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has researched extensively and published several essays on the gun control issue. His book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has become a widely cited source in the gun control debate. In fact, this book earned Dr. Kleck the prestigious American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang award for 1993. This award is given for the book published in the past two to three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to criminology.
Even those who don't like the conclusions Dr. Kleck reaches, cannot argue with his impeccable research and methodology. In "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," Marvin E. Wolfgang writes that, "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator.... I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence." Wolfgang, "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, at 188.
Wolfgang says there is no "contrary evidence." Indeed, there are more than a dozen national polls -- one of which was conducted by The Los Angeles Times -- that have found figures comparable to the Kleck-Gertz study. Even the Clinton Justice Department (through the National Institute of Justice) found there were as many as 1.5 million defensive users of firearms every year. See National Institute of Justice, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," Research in Brief (May 1997).
As for Dr. Kleck, readers of his materials may be interested to know that he is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to any advocacy group on either side of the gun control debate.
2 According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 30,000 deaths per year. See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois.
3Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 173, 185.
4Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 185.
5 Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997); available at http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt on the internet. The finding of 1.5 million yearly self-defense cases did not sit well with the anti-gun bias of the study's authors, who attempted to explain why there could not possibly be one and a half million cases of self-defense every year. Nevertheless, the 1.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies -- nearly a dozen -- are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. See also Kleck and Gertz, supra note 1, pp. 182-183.
6Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.
7George F. Will, "Are We 'a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15 November 1993):93.
8Id. at 164, 185.
9Dr. Gary Kleck, interview with J. Neil Schulman, "Q and A: Guns, crime and self-defense," The Orange County Register (19 September 1993). In the interview with Schulman, Dr. Kleck reports on findings from a national survey which he and Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993 -- a survey which findings were reported in Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime." br>10 One of the authors of the University of Chicago study reported on the study's findings in John R. Lott, Jr., "More Guns, Less Violent Crime," The Wall Street Journal (28 August 1996). See also John R. Lott, Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," University of Chicago (15 August 1996); and Lott, More Guns, Less Crime (1998, 2000).
11Lott and Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns."
12Kathleen O'Leary Morgan, Scott Morgan and Neal Quitno, "Rankings of States in Most Dangerous/Safest State Awards 1994 to 2003," Morgan Quitno Press (2004) at http://www.statestats.com/dang9403.htm. Morgan Quitno Press is an independent private research and publishing company which was founded in 1989. The company specializes in reference books and monthly reports that compare states and cities in several different subject areas. In the first 10 years in which they published their Safest State Award, Vermont has consistently remained one of the top five safest states.
13Memo by Jim Smith, Secretary of State, Florida Department of State, Division of Licensing, Concealed Weapons/Firearms License Statistical Report (October 1, 2002).
14Florida's murder rate was 11.4 per 100,000 in 1987, but only 5.5 in 2002. Compare Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Crime in the United States," Uniform Crime Reports, (1988): 7, 53; and FBI, (2003):19, 79.
15 John R. Lott, Jr., "Right to carry would disprove horror stories," Kansas City Star, (July 12, 2003).
16Gary Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force," Social Problems 35 (February 1988):15.
17Compare Kleck, "Crime Control," at 15, and Chief Dwaine L. Wilson, City of Kennesaw Police Department, "Month to Month Statistics: 1991." (Residential burglary rates from 1981-1991 are based on statistics for the months of March - October.)
18Kleck, Point Blank, at 140.
19Kleck, "Crime Control," at 13.
20U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Rape Victimization in 26 American Cities (1979), p. 31.
21U.S., Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, "The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons," Research Report (July 1985): 27.
22Id.
23Id.