Initiative Focuses on Young People Who Commit ‘Gun Crimes’

The term “gun crime” is incredibly common, but most gun rights advocates hate it. After all, it’s predicated on the gun being the problem. There’s little to no discussion of “knife crimes” or “bat crimes” or even “car crimes.” Those are just crimes or, at most, violent crimes.

But the term is here and it’s not going away, no matter how much we might wish it, at least not anytime soon.

In Florida, though, an initiative that looks at so-called gun crime might well be the kind of thing that isn’t so bad at reducing those so-called gun crimes.

Because while it’s about “gun crime,” its focus is on younger criminals who commit those crimes.

State Attorney R.J. Larizza announced “Operation Young Guns” in December 2022 during a press conference in Bunnell where he discussed using a database to track guns used by juveniles during crimes. Larizza said in a recent interview he decided to create the Young Guns initiative after seeing rising number of violent crimes by youth in the 7th Circuit, which covers Volusia, Flagler, St. Johns and Putnam counties.

Despite the State Attorney’s social media post, some are unaware of the effort, including a retired circuit judge who was still serving in 2022 and Nazien’s attorney.

The Young Guns who get the publicity on the State Attorney’s social media sites are usually involved in murders. But Larizza said the operation can include any juvenile or youthful offender up to the age of 26 in a crime involving a gun, whether it’s a young kid who took his or her parent’s firearm to show it off or an older teenager who used it in a robbery.

Larizza said in a recent interview that as of July, the 7th Circuit State Attorney’s Office had more than 600 defendants identified as Young Guns in the four counties. Of those, he said about 120 had been sentenced to prison.

“We seek hefty prison sentences for them, and get them out of the community, so they can’t hurt anybody else,” Larizza said. “And when you get enough of these folks out of the community, the community settles down, and you have less violence and it gives the opportunity for community resources to come in and then work with the kids in those communities.”

This sounds like a pretty smart approach.

Yes, I’m not a fan of the focus being on guns versus anything else, and would rather see this expand to violent crime in general, but the idea is sound in that it focuses on bad guys, not guns.

There’s no registry, no restrictions, just the determination to seek longer sentences for these people because of their own actions. I also appreciate Larizza not talking about deterrence, because it seems that’s not really a thing with criminal penalties. However, harsher penalties remove dangerous people from society due to their own actions for a longer time, thus making the community safer.

If it also sucks so badly that these folks decide to walk the straight and narrow from here on out, so much the better.

But if it doesn’t, it still yields positive results and, ultimately, it leaves our gun rights alone.