I agree, tax the fuck out of the church. Those pricks are making a fortune being PR people for God.
That said, old Supreme Court addage, that which you can tax you can destroy applies here. So the churches don't get taxed because of the danger of their destruction.
That said, I think this bullshit. NGOs and non-profits have to prove that they contribute a public benefit to get tax exempt status, and they are limited in certain activities that compete with business. So if a Christian TV station sells commercial airtime, or sells condos that compete iwth private condos, then they should be taxed.
As for the guns and crime- Wikipedia actually has a few nice charts on this that are worth checking out-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
Check out this map-
Are not a lot of the states in the red state that also have pretty easy gun control laws?
Overall, Dammitboy is right- violent crime has gone down or stayed normal despite gun sales. Guns alone are not the problem.
Still, some states clearly have more problems with gun violence than others.
If you look a bit further, the problem is the disparity of who is getting murdered. If you look at the data, victims and criminals of homicide are largely black. So a lot of the gun crime is inner city and related to poverty.
A lot of the gun advocates are white middle class or rural folks.
Thus the problem is cultural and is part of the "culture wars" in the US.
If you want to reduce homicide rates, then you have to figure out how to deal with that inner city homicide rate. That, in turn, has more to do with the limited economic opportunities and development in US cities, a problem we've had since the recessions of the 1970s, compounded with spread of drugs and criminal gangs. Legalizing hard drugs isn't the answer, because then people would just kill themselves with drugs than guns while at the same time the otherwise investable capital that drugs consumes would still flow out of the city.
Does that mean guns don't matter? Of course they matter. But they matter in different ways depending on the population.
White folks generally don't suffer too much homicide. When there is homicide that is gun related, its usually acquaintance related. Victims are often males but relations of violence are often males killing females. To put it another way, women are often the victims and men often the victimizers.
(A good reason for having a heavily armed female population is the potential for more dead wife abusers).
In the inner city, Black folks getting shot are either involved in or victims of drug related crimes or ancillary crimes that result from the poverty of that community. Sure many of these urban areas regulate guns and thus make it easier to arrest criminals who carry illegal guns. But a lot of those guns come from out of state sources or out of city sources. SOme guns are stolen, but that just begs the question of how much regulation should exist to stop guns from getting stolen.
When you have gangs looking through cars with detectors searching for weapons, than its kind of stupid for people to keep guns in their cars.
Guns and drug dealing (at least hard drugs) go together. Guns are essential to the drug business because of the need for self-help on matters of security. You need them. And because of the nature of competition, there is a likelihood of easy violence. This is, essentially, the politics of the feud.
It used to be that folks would have disagreement would settle it with fists or, if it was really bad, a knife. Now its guns. The result is that guns make such violence more lethal.
That's not to say that there are other ways of killing a person, or if a person wanted to kill you and they didn't have a gun, they'd find a different way. All it suggests is that guns make violence more lethal.
Dammitboy will say, "What about Kennesaw" but we've had that discussion before. There are plenty of cities with the same demographics and different gun control regimes. That guns purchased in Kennesaw (an easy to buy place) find themselves in hard to buy guns places (like New York) suggests that in a country with extensive trade across state lines, individual state regulations of guns won't stop guns themselves.
That said, the map is interesting. A lot of easy gun owning states have a lot of violence.
The question isn't so much that homicide rates and crime rates have gone down. The question can be also be- do guns make any difference? Would homicide rates go further down with fewer guns on the market.
And yes, regulation increases the costs of getting guns to drug dealing gangs. They don't like to spend money on guns if they don't have to. Drug gang lords usually don't like to go to war if they don't have too. Its bad business. But if gangstas had to pay $600 for a pistol rather than $50 for a pistol, we might have less homicide. If gangstas were likely to go to jail for longer terms if they were caught with guns than if they didn't carry, then we might see greater reluctance among dealers.
Note also that the victimizers are often black. So are the victims. Often whites will get guns to protect themselves from criminals. The criminals they imagine are probably black. That said, the level of victimization of whites by blacks is pretty low, but perhaps that has more to do with the divisions between black and white communities.
As for Mexico getting guns. Yes, they get guns from border dealers. But would stopping the flow of guns from the US to Mexico change things in Mexico? Doubtful. The Mexicans can get guns from other sources. If you can get an AK-47 in parts of Africa for $45 or a few bags of rice, then how are you going to stop the flow of guns into Mexico?
As for US weapon sales- I would be careful with those figures. US sells a lot of guns, but I am not sure about small arms or even how often those small arms are regulated. We also sell a lot of big ticket items too= tanks, airplanes, advanced systems.
One thing for sure, there is a surplus of small arms in the global market. Organized criminals, insurgents and other specialists in violence are not without alternative sources of supply.
