In 2006 a drug addict (with a drug-related disability check $768 a month) was arrested for beating a couple to death with a baseball bat in their home; evidence brought to light in that case linked him to the stabbing death of a woman in a boarding house in 2004 (just one block from where I was living in 2004). Two drug dealers with connections to the Baltimore-NYC axis shot and killed two local drug dealers operating a "candle shop" one block from my wife's business office. Also locally two guys killed a disabled Iraq war vet with hammer and knife to steal his money and gun collection to buy/trade for drugs. And over in Scott County a group of druggies beat a "friend" to death with a rock and left her body in the woods. Reckless people likely to do violence are also likley to do drugs is my take away on that. People with a history of violence need to be put away from the rest of us.
Crimes like that do terrorize me: violent crimes by heartless people. The gun control crowd though would focus on the shooting deaths of the bunch, and call for the wrath of government on the heads of 65 to 80 million American gun owners. Apparently the non-gun violence is not on their radar.
There is more in common between gun violence offenders and non-gun violence offenders than there is between violent offenders and gun owners, and identfying violent offender characteristics would do more about violent crime prevention than a crusade to make guns illegal or make
malum prohibitum criminals out of gun owners.
Malum in se overt acts and actors need punishment. In my book, concentrating on the means rather than on the actor with bad motives is a form of voodoo criminology.
My home county (Sullivan County, Tennessee) death rate from drug overdose was listed in a recent newspaper article as 14 per 100,000 per year, about five times our typical homicide rate.* OD deaths in Hawkins County went down after a drug ring operating a fake pain clinic in Georgia was shut down by a joint task force operation DEA-ATF. Problems at the ER and in the news with bath salts abuse went down after legal sale of synthetic drugs at smoke shops and head shops was outlawed.
I supported the interdiction of hydrocodone smuggling from Georgia and Florida and I supported the campaign to shutdown the bath salts, K2, etc. synthetic drug traffick. Locally I do not see a lot of media reports of people getting twenty years for personal use quantities of drugs absent a connection to violent crime. Off the record I have heard from former-teenagers then in their twenties that local officers who caught them first time smoking pot made them throw it in the river and gave them a lecture. I don't buy the meme of high school kids serving life over a single joint, unless law enforcement in other jurisdictions is bat guano crazy. Nationally, though, I believe the "War on Drugs" is a self-perpetuating problem and not much of a a solution to anything, which is why I believe we must nip the "War on Guns" in the bud and not go any further down that path. (There is no long term career in government for real problem solving, but perpetuate a problem and you got a life-time sine cura position.)
__________________________
*(I remember 1999 as the year we had no murders county-wide (pop. ~150,000) and a NYC magazine editor who was in town on business the weekend of a gun show editorialized in the newspaper he would grandly allow us to keep our rifles and shotguns if we would allow adoption of federal Sullivan Law restrictions on our handguns.) Published locally as "A Northerner's fear and loathing in Kingsport": John R. MacArthur, "My compromise in the gun debate", The Providence Journal, July 5, 2000, (c) 1999 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. [old link dead; live link:]
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-63162862.html