Been a long time since I went to Baltimore, but everyone I knew there had a gun. Teachers in elementary schools, people working in the Inner Harbor, folks living in Camden and Germantown, liberals up on Charles Street, doctors working at Mercy and Loyola, they were either carrying or had a piece in their house. You could buy a pre-ban full auto assault weapon on the campus of Johns Hopkins, there are literal armories in every building. The stories I could tell.
That city drove me nuts. Would never live there because law enforcement is all a dance, you have legitimate homicidal maniacs on the streets and no one can agree very long on whether or not to deal them. The Baltimore PD is being sent into a warzone every single day and the FOP is mostly there to keep them from going to jail for doing what everyone is begging for. That culture makes its way to State Troopers and gets carried over to the most podunk communities in the middle of nowhere.
That said - all this focus on victims rights reminds me there's 2 sides to every story. What happened to Freddie Gray was absolutely wrong, but the environment where those officers operated was wronger. I think that's what people figured out in the end, despite all the social justice types screaming about the humanity. Every time I see a police take down video that looks abominable, I just want to know more about what was going on in that neighborhood. That's usually the real story.
Sounds a bit more strapped than my experience with the city (I'm only ~30), but fair enough.
In the past decade or two, Baltimore in general is about as safe as anywhere else I've been in the country, when you account for socio-economic situations.
That is, there are rich areas of Baltimore, poor areas of Baltimore, and they're more or less as safe as you'd expect compared to other places in the US, economically appropriately. I lived in a low income neighborhood of the city for a bit a few years ago. I would distinguish like... idk, 8-mile/bombed-out warzone crackhouse tier neighborhoods from merely "low income" neighborhoods, because the low income neighborhoods still have families and neighborhood community attitudes where people look out for each other. Crime is higher there, but not by much. You probably won't get murdered, just robbed, and even then neighbors keep an eye out for each other. It's only when you're in the neighborhoods with abandoned buildings when you should be seriously afraid, and those types of neighborhoods are the same anywhere in the US.
Funny you should bring up Freddie Gray. I agree that a national media trial isn't fair to those police, but I would respond with that a national media trial wasn't enough for
the Gun Trace Task Force scandal (
https://archive.is/jkWCU), where cops intentionally carried BB guns to plant on people they shot.
I still think it's fucked that the general idea is that we can trust basically postal worker tier state employees with firearms and lethal force without a tenth of the scrutiny we give to any other governmental group.
Like, I don't even care as much about the legal/moral aspect (I do but) so much as where my money is going. Fuck it, disarm the police, I'll buy a gun and shoot the motherfucker myself and call y'all to clean up. Shit, I had situations where I could've ordered a pizza and had better service than my police (actual serious situations where they had a warrant out on the guy). Fuck it, I just wanna arm pizza guys. At least if they don't come quickly enough, I get a free pizza.
