Reddit reviews Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago
We found 2 Reddit comments about Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
It's a mix of gang culture that does not exist in other countries along a lack of social welfare saftey nets, the problem is not legal gun ownership.
Poverty begets criminals. If you can't make the money to survive on your own, and the government isn't giving you enough (foodstamps are good and all, but what if your kid needs to go to the hospital for surgery and you can't afford it?) A common way to get that money is mugging, usually with an illegally acquired gun, which in itself is a crime, and will eventually lead to a murder somewhere down the road.
Gang culture is something I'm not super familiar with, I had incidents as a kid where my families car windows were smashed in or graffiti was all over our school/house, but I was not old enough to remember it a lot by the time my family moved out of that area of where we lived. I can't really comment on it too much, but I do know it relates to a lack of family and the need to belong. It also leads to a lot of gang on gang violence and murders (with illegally acquired guns) and apparently even desensitized these gangs to the idea of killing children (according to the book Our America.) The police will often ignore these areas because they are incredibly dangerous. Poverty and gang culture is most found in the black community, although there are whites and other minorities in gangs, because of the legalized racial oppression found in certain parts of the country and social racial oppression in other parts of the country until the 60s/70s, it still continues to this day to a smaller extent.
It is actually not a big problem for most people in the country, as most states and cities are comparable to other first world countries when it comes to murder or other violent crime. The violence skyrockets because of the ghettos in a few big cities, which is caused by a lack of safety nets and the slow recovery of the black community and not because of the legal ownership of guns by many citizens.
There's this one, too.