Reply #73: not really

[iverglas]

How realistic is it to expect that there be cops driving down any given block when somebody decides to engage in a little stick-up action?

So your post is clearly a matter of diversionary grooming and straw-person baiting.

The real issue here is: where did the kid get the gun?

I can tell you to an absolute certainty that in the crappy neighbourhood I live in, in a largish Canadian city, there is not one single 15-yr-old with a gun. Not one. I doubt that there is one in the city. At that age they're a little too young for serious gang action, and nobody's going to be wasting the very scarce supply of handguns on one of them.

And the plain fact in this case is: no gun, no crime.

No 15-year-old kid and his two buddies are going to walk up to two grown men in front of their own home and try to rob them, unless they have a weapon. And a knife just isn't going to cut it, really, if you'll excuse the wordplay. Two men at their own home on a residential street, three teenagers with knives, nah, those odds aren't really in the teenagers' favour. Although it's unlikely that the robbery victim would have been injured more seriously than he was, had the robbers had a knife and he'd had no weapon at all.

If the kid had not had a gun, there would have been no crime, and nobody would have got shot.

So how come nobody's asking that question?

Why did that kid have a gun?

It's one great big question, to be sure; but nobody claiming to be oh so very concerned about the attempted robbery victim here can really think they can get away with just dancing over it.