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.

  • @HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    1910 months ago

    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”.

    • @PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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      1210 months ago

      Doctors treat symptoms while they treat the problem, they don’t just offer you thoughts and prayers. Even if the problem isn’t treatable, they still do everything in their power to control your symptoms.

      Imagine you turned up to a doctor with every bone in your hand broken, only to have them claim “Sorry, we refuse to give you painkillers because the pain is just a symptom. If someone just spends 12 months reconstructing your hand, the symptoms should be mostly gone. I won’t do it (and I’ll staunchly oppose anyone that tries), but that’s the real solution”.

      They wouldn’t just be considered a dogshit doctor, they’d be considered a genuinely evil person.

      So stop with the apologist bullshit. No gun control advocates are stopping you from building your violence-free utopia that you insist will solve everything. The society we have today is fucked up and you need to stop selling them guns.

    • @Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      210 months ago

      blame it on all “personal responsibility”.

      As I get older I think the mistake is thinking this is a black or white issue. I think instead its more like a mix of personal responsibility and other factors all come together and all sides argue about it being either or only.

      And in a case where a decision like this is made, I feel personal responsibilities are a huge factor.

    • @cmbabul@lemmy.world
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      110 months ago

      It’s not just you either, even as recently as 2022 there used to be at minimum a full day of non stop news coverage every time there was a mass shooting. These days it takes multiple fatalities to get that

  • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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    -2510 months ago

    Sounds gang-related. Gun control alone isn’t going to solve this, unfortunately, it’s a socioeconomic problem.

    • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yeah. It will. Just not the gun control you think of.

      Socioeconomic? Ok, let’s give everyone free education and adequate individual or familial financial means to exercise upward social mobility, that includes everything from child care so parents can go to school and work to health care so they aren’t slaved to the job in fear of losing everything.

      • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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        210 months ago

        Yes please.

        No kind or amount of gun control will fix people turning to crime because of a lack of opportunities. You take your magic wand and make all guns disappear, people who want to harm others will turn to knives. Take those away and they’ll turn to baseball bats, brass knuckles, chains, and metal pipes.

        Social programs are far more effective, and far more achievable too. The gun genie is out of the bottle, taking them away is near impossible. But giving people opportunities is not.

        • @otp@sh.itjust.works
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          310 months ago

          You take your magic wand and make all guns disappear, people who want to harm others will turn to knives. Take those away and they’ll turn to baseball bats, brass knuckles, chains, and metal pipes.

          Ok, let’s do it.

          Guns are a lot more dangerous than anything else you mentioned.

          Also, how many children are killed in knife accidents every year?..

        • @PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          You take your magic wand and make all guns disappear, people who want to harm others will turn to knives.

          Which would instantly be a massive improvement. Americas crime rates are functionally identical to other wealthy countries, only with a massively inflated homicide rate thanks to sick, stupid and desperate people being able to buy all the guns they want.

          When people try to raise money for cancer research, do you spit in their face and tell them “you’ll never cure all cancer and even if you do people will still have heart attacks and if you cure those too they’ll just die in car crashes”?

          You don’t think it will ever be your life it saves, so you don’t give a shit.

        • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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          010 months ago

          I disagree that guns are comparable to knives or baseball bats.

          The only thing I agree with is that humans will still engage in violence and use whatever tools are available.

          And for the record, I’m not for “making all guns disappear.”

    • @deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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      -1210 months ago

      So what you’re saying is the killers are poor, so high taxes on bullets could have prevented this.

      • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        -610 months ago

        You think drug dealers in some of the largest criminal gangs around are poor? What, you checking their tax records? They don’t report black market cocaine sales to the IRS and even if they did the money would have to be laundered. Guarantee at least half those dudes are richer than me with my menial “not crack selling” job.

        Furthermore, “self defense only for rich whities who can afford the tax” isn’t the win you seem to think it is.

          • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            -110 months ago

            Half of em are doing it wrong then, I was nowhere near “the top” and I was making more than I do now legally. You just mean highschool dealers, or are we talking like, actual drug dealers that aren’t just smoking for free because the allowance mommy gives them doesn’t cover their need for weed?

            • @HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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              410 months ago

              Most of the street-level dealers that I saw in Chicago were not making a lot. I can’t guarantee that they weren’t dipping into their own supply, but they still lived in the same shitty, working-class neighborhood, and they were renting rather than owning. I’m sure someone was making a fair amount of money, but they guys on the corners, or the guys that fetched the drugs for the transaction, they weren’t making bank. AFAIK, they were mostly dealing pot and heroin; probably mostly heroin, based on the baggie sizes.

              • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                110 months ago

                Well you have to live where the customers are and where the neighbors don’t ask questions, depending on what you sell and how much will of course vary that. Still, drug dealers have enough money that “tax bullets” isn’t going to stop them.

                • @HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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                  210 months ago

                  You might have to live near your customers, but you don’t have to live in exactly the same shitty circumstances. Based on the places they lived, they weren’t doing a lot better than the people around them that were working shitty minimum wage jobs.

        • NoIWontPickAName
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          110 months ago

          You actually don’t have to launder it and you are supposed to report it.

          You just send them a check and then all your taxes are paid

          • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            110 months ago

            I feel like if you say “yes this is from all the cocaine I’ve sold” it might cause other legal problems, even though you won’t get Al Caponed there are also plenty of people in prison for trafficking.

            • NoIWontPickAName
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              510 months ago

              You don’t have to say where it came from, you just pay the taxes, I shit you not there is a place for it

              • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                110 months ago

                …wait…really?! You can just report things as unspecified income? I didn’t know that.

                Still though, drug dealers aren’t exactly poor unless they’re bottom rung. I can’t speak for all gangs (though they do kinda all work this way) but the Bloods for instance get great prices on drugs in my area between members and sell to “civilians” at a huge markup, like a ball of coke for them is around $80 but they sell it for $150. I’ve sold drugs myself in the past, I actually currently have friends that bang though I never did, none of them are hurting for cash and I wasn’t back then either (but what I do now involves less prison, so it’s risk/reward.) Guess I didn’t have to tax evade, though I did lol. TIL!

                • @HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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                  110 months ago

                  It’s a catch-all category on your 1040 for ‘income from illegal sources’. I do know that you can’t take deductions for business expenses related to illegally gained income though, so you don’t get any kind of write-offs or deductions. (E.g., you can’t depreciate any of the durable equipment that you need to buy to conduct your illegal business, you can’t claim travel expenses, etc.) Plus, I think that it gets counted as ‘self-employed’ income, which means that you have to pay the full share of social security and medicare/medicaid that would normally be covered by an employer.

                  It’s pretty simple to do, honestly. But I don’t know if that kind of declaration can be turned over to another three-letter agency to start a criminal investigation into you, so ???