Orlando police chief’s top goal for 2009 is to take guns away from criminals

The article doesn’t explain how the police chief is going to go about accomplishing this, and I am sure the devil is in the details:

“It’s going to take a whole lot of people to help us do that,” said Demings, who pledged to work closely with the public, prosecutors and legislators for stricter gun control.

“It’s not about keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens who have every right to possess them,” she said. “Our initiative will focus on the people who are not supposed to have them.”

The most interesting bit of the article is here:

Data released Wednesday show the male murder victims and suspects share a common background of repeated arrests without imprisonment.

At least 95 percent of the victims and suspects had criminal histories. One-third of the suspects had been arrested at least 20 times. One quarter of the victims had been arrested at least 10 times. And about 40 percent of the suspects and victims had been busted for dealing drugs.

If 95% of the people getting murdered are actually criminals then taking guns away from them has a very good chance of increasing other types of crime. The sample size is pretty small here, but it would be interesting to know how many people killed by firearms (other than suicides) are in fact criminals.