A 27-year-old man was killed and 24 other people were shot after gunfire erupted early Sunday morning in Akron, Ohio, during what a police official said was a big birthday party.
Officers responded to 911 calls shortly after midnight, reporting shots fired and multiple victims struck in the area of Kelly Ave. and 8th Ave., according to a statement from the city’s mayor and police chief.
The shooting took place during a “large birthday party” that earlier in the night had more than 200 people in attendance, Akron Police Chief Brian Harding said in a Sunday evening news conference.
In the shooting’s aftermath, authorities found the scene “littered” with spent shell casings that stretched down a whole block, the police chief said.
I know that people hate hearing it, but the violence–specifically gun violence–is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
This was likely gang activity. Gang activity is driven by a lot of socioeconomic factors; long-term fixes are things like community reinvestment, properly funded education, reducing income inequality, criminal justice reform, and so on. Even things like reproductive rights and access to birth control and abortion help rather significantly here. If you fix the underlying issues that drive gang activity in the first place, then you eliminate most of the violence problem without also affecting civil rights.
Unfortunately, in the US, one side appears to only have the political will to remove a particular civil right, and the other side wants to obstruct everything and blame it on all “personal responsibility”.
I’m not sure that makes sense, you’re arguing that gangs, not guns are the problem when every country has gangs but not every country has guns so readily available.