Guns & Criminals

Unfortunately, they are as congruent as students and books, and this story from the Denver Post offers a good look from a study by three professors about the criminal’s perspective on guns.

It also notes the fallacy that gun control laws keep guns from criminals, whereas the only sustainable strategy to see guns and the other artifacts of the criminal life be voluntarily given up by individual criminals, is through an internal transformation from being a part of the criminal world to becoming part of the communal world.

An excerpt.

“Guns offer protection, redress grievances, give power and status and are a ticket to a culture where violence is an acceptable fact of life.

“So say 67 men and six women who were in Colorado prisons in 2003 and 2004 serving time for gun crimes. They were interviewed by three Colorado professors who tell the inmates' stories in a book arriving in July called "Guns, Violence, and Criminal Behavior: The Offender's Perspective."

“The book — underwritten by the U.S. Justice Department's Project Safe Neighborhoods program — offers an often-overlooked perspective on the motivations behind gun crime, said Mark Pogrebin, professor of criminal justice at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

"It's an explanation really of what happened before, during and after the crime has been committed," Pogrebin said.

“Pogrebin's team included Paul Stretesky, also at the School of Public Affairs at UC Denver, and Prabha Unnithan, professor of sociology at Colorado State University.

“No other alternatives

“Most of the inmates were more than willing to tell their stories, Pogrebin said. They considered themselves average, ordinary people who reacted to circumstances beyond their control, he said.

"Many inmates claimed that they believe that (they) had no other choice in the situation but to use their gun to harm, murder or intimidate another person," said the authors. "To them, it was the only possible choice they could have made at the moment."

“While some were steeped in gang or criminal culture, others who used their guns to kill were not, Pogrebin said….

“The interviews indicated that gun-control laws would have had little effect on the study subjects' criminal behavior. Most got their guns through a variety of ways, including borrowing, stealing and taking them by force, the professor said.”