Damn. The best essay I've read on gun control. From Kevin Williamson at NRO
Please read the whole thing. And read it again.
The gun control debate is deeply dishonest, almost comically so. The very demagogues who peddle restrictions on gun rights are the same hacks whose idiot corrupt governance has given us our crime problems to begin with.
The obsession with gun control has a purpose, which is not idiot at all. The purpose for gun control hysteria is to shift blame away from the corrupt liberal Democrat hacks who misgovern our crime-infested inner cities.
Never forget: nearly all gun crime in the U.S. is committed by Democrats against Democrats in cities governed by Democrats.
It's not the guns we need to stop.
The gun-control debate is one of the most dishonest arguments we have in American politics. It is dishonest in its particulars, of course, but it is in an important sense dishonest in general: The United States does not suffer from an inflated rate of homicides perpetrated with guns; it suffers from an inflated rate of homicides. The argument about gun control is at its root a way to put conservatives on the defensive about liberal failures, from schools that do not teach to police departments that do not police and criminal-justice systems that do not bring criminals to justice. The gun-control debate is an exercise in changing the subject...
[There are] various inflated statistical claims about the effects of gun-control policies made by both sides of the debate. You will not, in the end, find much correlation. There are some places with very strict gun laws and lots of crime, some places with very liberal gun laws and very little crime, some places with strict guns laws and little crime, and some places with liberal gun laws and lots of crime. Given the variation between countries, the variation within other countries, and the variation within the United States, the most reasonable conclusion is that the most important variable in violent crime is not the regulation of firearms. There are many reasons that Zurich does not much resemble Havana, and many reasons San Diego does not resemble Detroit.
The Left, of course, very strongly desires not to discuss those reasons, because those reasons often point to the failure of progressive policies. For this reason, statistical and logical legerdemain is the order of the day when it comes to the gun debate...
But if you want to find large concentrations of violent crime in the United States, what you are looking for is a liberal-dominated city: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Oakland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark — all excellent places to get robbed or killed. By way of comparison, when Republican Jerry Sanders handed the mayoralty of San Diego over to Bob Filner in December, it was pretty well down toward the bottom of the rape-and-murder charts. The same can be said of New York. I agree with every word of criticism my fellow conservatives have heaped upon nanny-in-chief Michael Bloomberg, but would add this caveat: When he gets replaced by some cookie-cutter Democratic-machine liberal, we are going to miss his ridiculous, smug face. I lived for years in what once was one of the most infamously crime-ridden parts of New York, the section of the South Bronx near where the action of Bonfire of the Vanities is set in motion, and the worst consequences I ever experienced from wandering its streets at night were a hangover and the after-effects of an ill-considered order of cheese fries...
By way of comparison, Chicago is populated by uncontrolled criminals, and not infrequently governed by them. The state of Illinois has long failed to put career criminals away before they commit murder, as we can see from the rap sheets of those whom the state does manage to convict for homicide. Even Rahm Emanuel can see that. But still, nothing happens. Like those in Chicago, Detroits’ liberals and Philadelphia’s are plum out of excuses: They’ve been in charge for a long, long time now, and their cities are what they have made of them...
You can chicken-and-egg this stuff all day, of course: It may be that Detroit is poor, ignorant, and backward because it is run by liberals, or it may be run by liberals because it is poor, ignorant, and backward. You can point the accusatory vector of causation whichever direction you like, but the correlation between municipal liberalism and violent crime remains stronger than that of violent crime and gun restriction...
Please read the whole thing. And read it again.
The gun control debate is deeply dishonest, almost comically so. The very demagogues who peddle restrictions on gun rights are the same hacks whose idiot corrupt governance has given us our crime problems to begin with.
The obsession with gun control has a purpose, which is not idiot at all. The purpose for gun control hysteria is to shift blame away from the corrupt liberal Democrat hacks who misgovern our crime-infested inner cities.
Never forget: nearly all gun crime in the U.S. is committed by Democrats against Democrats in cities governed by Democrats.
It's not the guns we need to stop.
Never forget: nearly all gun crime in the U.S. is committed by Christians against Christians in cities governed by Christians.
ReplyDeleteMegnor,
DeleteAnd maybe if you're poor, stupid and criminal, you pick crimes of violence (and use a weapon possibly including a gun).
And maybe if you're rich, smart and criminal, you pick white collar crimes (not using weapons but possibly using computers or 'inspired' accounting).
Possibly, the victims and perpetrators of crimes of violence may tend to be Democrats (Republicans tend to live in smaller communities, with a lower incidence of crime, or can afford to purchase security for themselves). And possibly the victims and perpetrators of white collar crime may tend to be Republicans, because to paraphrase Willie Sutton, Republicans tend to be rich and that's where the money is.
But of course, I'm just telling a story, just as you are, to reach an answer you wanted to justify from the word go.
A perfect example of Williamson's thesis is shown in the video link I posted here the other day:
ReplyDeleteProgressoville street action
The action takes place in Oakland CA. Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the US, sandwiched in between Detroit and Cleveland (source: CNN), both Progressive Paradises.
The last three mayors of Oakland have been Mayor "Moonbeam" Jerry Brown, Ron Dellums (loony-left Democrat), and Jean Quan (D). Quan attributes crime in Oakland to a "lack of employment opportunities in the city" (source: SF Chronicle)
As noted before, Oakland City Councilman, Noel Gallo said this in an interview after watching the CBS video footage of a running gunfight in broad daylight in Oakland's streets:
We need to take these guns off their hands, and the only way to do it, you gotta stop, you know, question and search people and remove their guns...
I'm all in favor of stop-and-frisk policing combined with street confiscation of illegally carried weapons (of any type), but observe that Councilman Gallo did not mention arrest, prosecution, and perhaps incarceration. Nevertheless, I'll bet that Councilman Gallo is in favor of more "gun laws". This level of imbecility is quite typical of Progressives.
Chicago, for example, famous for bloody gunfights in South Chicago on a daily (should that be Daley?) basis, is dead last among all US urban jurisdictions on enforcement of federal gun laws. (source: Investor's Business Daily) Yet Chicago's Mayor, Rahm "Twinkletoes" Emanuel, routinely clamors for more federal gun laws not to enforce. That's what happens when you elect a left-wing ballerina as mayor.
Obviously, the push for more gun laws or more punitive gun laws is not intended to have better, broader, or more punitive laws to enforce. That's obviously true because the gun laws we have are not even being prosecuted. And one of the typical reasons the gun laws are not enforced by prosecutors is the claim they are too harsh, too punitive, for humane, caring treatment of violent armed street thugs, aka "vulnerable youth".
No, the purpose of the push for gun confiscation is to reify Progressive dreams. In the dream world of the gun control freaks, who could just as accurately be called "control freaks" with no loss of information, all private citizens would be disarmed and only government-approved enforcers will possess weapons. Under those conditions, the social engineering experiments can begin in earnest. Experiments like this:
Vincent Cooke, 39, was arrested after the incident at his home in Bramhall, Stockport, on Saturday night, during which Raymond Jacob, 37, was stabbed, apparently with his own knife... Cooke was at home at around 7.50pm on Saturday when the two men knocked at his door. When he opened it, the raiders are understood to have pulled out at least one knife, threatened him and tried to force their way into the house.
-- The Guardian
The Progressives want to conduct a social experiment on the backs of private citizens to support the hypothesis that private property is the real crime ("You didn't build that") and thugs are actually victims of private property crime who can be rehabilitated with better-designed redistributionist government policy.
"The gun-control debate is one of the most dishonest arguments we have in American politics."
ReplyDeleteOf course, that's true about *all* the "arguments we have in American politics" in which the leftists are involved.
You know, maybe I've been wrong. Maybe the Proglodytes are right. Maybe there should be more stringent gun laws. Get a load of this:
ReplyDeleteParents came in numbers to pick up their children from Westside Elementary after word spread about a five year old boy who brought a gun to school. The gun accidentally fired early Thursday morning while in the student’s backpack according to officials.
-- Memphis Commercial Appeal (5/22)
There oughta be a LAW against five-year olds carrying guns!!!! He probably bought it through the Gun Show Loophole.