No Gish-gallop and no tantrum either. It's simply that I have limited time to post, and so have to write many posts at once when I get a chance. Like today.
Much of it is, but at the same time there is no indication this particular firefight was about drugs.
And even if it was, it does not justify Pat Pat's behavior. Alcohol should be legal, but that doesn't make St. Valentine's Day massacre ok either.
There would be no disagreements rising to the point of violence between those two groups if they weren't forced to compete over shares of a zero-sum client base in an industry where the only available means of arbitration for such disputes is violence.
Even if we legalized all drugs, these bangers would not become your friendly neighborhood dispensary workers. They would seek other ways to use their skill set - extortion, loan sharking, human trafficking etc.
And yet I do not hear you or your fellow fauxgressives calling for legalizing sex work to undercut gangs.
or "protection" turf may also factor into it, but those aren't core moneymakers. In fact the profitability of gangs almost entirely relies on drug sales. No drug wars = no turf conflicts over said drug sales, because there are then legal routes rather than violent routes for conflict resolution.
Again - if drugs were legal they'd be run by actual licensed businesses. It doesn't matter these other illegal gang businesses have smaller profit margins. If drugs were taken away from them, they'd have to shift more of their activities to other avenues.
And street gang violence is not always about illegal businesses anyway. Crips and Bloods are not Mafia or the Mexican Cartels or Yakuza. Often it's violence for the sake of it.
