Why St. Louis Should Move To Illinois

Why St. Louis Should Move To Illinois
The Gateway arch is seen with the downtown St. Louis skyline in this aerial photo taken Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
The Gateway arch is seen with the downtown St. Louis skyline in this aerial photo taken Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

The great city of St. Louis has a major problem with gun violence. Even as homicide rates have continued to decline elsewhere in the country, they have surged in St. Louis, which last year saw a 33 percent rise in killing, to 159 in a city of 318,000. (Note: this does not include the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which is in St. Louis County, a separate jurisdiction with 1 million people.) Criminologists point to all the usual reasons for the violence: a thriving drug trade, high unemployment among young men, and so on. But a New York Times article on Tuesday noted that St. Louis police are contending with a factor that their counterparts in many other high-crime cities are not: exceedingly lax gun laws.

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