James Carville, one of former President Bill Clinton’s chief strategists, once explained President Clinton’s political and electoral successes with a memorable quip: “It’s the economy stupid.” With respect to the current wave of violent crime afflicting the US, a similar quip applies: “It’s the criminal stupid.” If criminals stab fellow citizens, shoot them, punch them as they walk by, push them in front of trains, drive vehicles over them, rape them, or otherwise victimize them, America wants those horrible people in prison, regardless of their excuses, or their color or ethnicity, or irrelevant attacks against law enforcement, or unrealistic notions of social justice and equity, Americans want people who do horrible things to fellow citizens to be in prison for a long, long time. It is not about guns. It is not about racial discrimination. It is about locking up evil people. A person who deliberately pushes someone in front of a speeding train or kicks an old woman in the head or drives over parade marchers in an SUV needs to be in jail for decades or the rest of their lives, regardless of any sympathetic stories their attorneys can muster. “It’s the criminal stupid,” and it’s suitable and appropriate jail time for each criminal’s ugly offenses. That is what the American people believe regardless of any fantasy social engineering by far left agitators.
Most Americans are aware that violent crime has increased during the past year or so in virtually all major American cities, the overwhelming majority of which have been controlled by the Democrat Party for several decades. The homicide rate in Chicago more than doubled in the past two years. New York saw a 19% increase in murders during 2021, adding to the prior year’s 45% increase in homicides. In 2021 Baltimore witnessed a 55% increase in murders, making it the murder capital of the US. 16 cities set new homicide records in 2021, including Atlanta, Austin, Philadelphia, Portland, Milwaukee, and St. Paul – all strongly liberal. As an aside, about 50% of all the homicides in the country were committed by black men, mostly against other black men. Overall in 2021, the violent crime wave went up more than one third.
While most Americans know that US cities have gotten more violent in the last couple years, they are not generally aware that criminal prosecutions are way down since arrival of the Biden administration. In Baltimore, the new murder capital of the US, for example, there were only approximately 10 convictions for murder in 2021, although almost 200 people were slain. Prosecutions in Los Angeles are lower than in 2020 and dramatically lower than five years ago. This downward trend in criminal prosecutions in cities is at least partly due to the efforts of billionaire America-hater George Soros, who has donated vast sums both to support fringe groups like BLM and to elect far left prosecutors. Oxymoronically, these progressive prosecutors do not believe in prosecuting criminals in many cases. The solution to the current crime wave turns out to be simple. We need to do what we did with the 1990s crime wave – prosecute more aggressively and stick criminals in jail for longer periods of time. It is that simple. Liberal proposals that do not involve locking up the actual criminal are generally unworkable deflections.
President Biden spoke recently about the current crime wave. Rambling, discursive, and misleading, Biden embraced the liberal red herring of blaming guns, without even briefly condemning the criminals themselves, who are plainly responsible for their criminal conduct and frankly belong in prison. Blaming guns is one of the strongest liberal prejudices at work in American politics. In general, liberals do not like the simple, hard-working, family-oriented people who live in red state flyover country. They don’t like the people, they don’t like the way they talk, they don’t like the food they eat, they don’t like their music, and they don’t like the fact that these people own guns – lots of guns. Unacknowledged by liberals, however, very few people are murdered by all the gun owning rural citizens in flyover country. Liberals spend vast amounts of time talking about and attacking so called assault weapons – a complete misnomer referring to nothing more than a standard semi-automatic rifle – not fully automatic, which has been illegal for decades – which just happens to be accessorized with various “military looking” gear, such as a forward grip, a folding stock, and other features having very little to do with the semi-automatic functioning of the rifle. A semi-automatic rifle that looks military does not shoot in anyway differently than a rifle that looks more like a traditional hunting rifle: they both require the user to pull the trigger each time he wants a bullet to come out. That is how the majority of firearms work. In contrast, a fully automatic weapon, almost never even found at crime scenes, allows the user to pull the trigger back and hold it, spraying bullets until the magazine is empty or the trigger is released. Again, such fully automatic weapons have been illegal for decades, many banned as early as 1935, such as the “Tommy Gun” seen in gangster movies. When did liberals last see a Tommy Gun shooting except on television?
So-called assault weapons are thus very much like the boogey man – intended to scare the audience and completely fictional. In any case, very few Americans are killed each year by the kinds of weapons that liberals wrongly dub “assault weapons.” Approximately 600 persons a year are killed by long guns of all kinds. So called assault rifles, such as the AR-15, and SKS, are used to kill fewer than 300 persons a year – about the same rough numbers of persons who die falling off ladders or being beaten to death by hammers and baseball bats. Significantly more people die in the US each year from knife attacks or from attacks with hands and feet. Yet, we constantly hear from liberals about assault rifles, which kill very few people. In his speech, Biden also chased another red herring, the so called “ghost gun,” a gun that is relatively untraceable because the parts lack serial numbers and are often made at the users home by 3-D printing or other methods. This is a complete non issue. Have you even ever heard of any US citizen being killed by a ghost gun?
Why do liberals spend so much time talking about guns – particularly phantom concepts like assault rifles and ghost guns. As noted, approximately 58% of all murders in the US are caused by black men usually murdering other black men. These black men are not using assault rifles or ghost guns. Many of the other murders are caused by illegal aliens and Hispanic gang activity near the US southern border. Illegal aliens kill 4000 US citizens a year. The fentanyl being dumped in America through joint Chinese and Mexican cartel efforts, kills perhaps as many as 100,000 people a year. So, why are liberals obsessed about the 200 Americans killed by assault rifles each year most of which are owned by rural citizens stereotyped as having names like “Bubba.” There are two answers. First liberals hate people like Bubba. They hate hard-working rural white and black Americans. This is the “root cause” (to borrow from the Vice President) of characterizations such as the “deplorables,” “smelly Walmart shoppers,” “people clinging to their guns and bible,”” unwashed and illiterate citizens of West Virginia,” and “white supremacists.” All of these nasty and unfair characterizations reflect, not the truth about the persons being vilified, but the liberal hatred for real Americans – Americans who founded the country, Americans who pushed hard through the wilderness, Americans who fought in many wars to help other people – all of which own guns. America is a gun-loving country. It is estimated that over 80 Million Americans own guns. The average number of guns in a household is 4. We own more than twice as many guns as cars in the US. The overwhelming majority of those guns will never be used to shoot a person.
Second, liberals know that such widespread gun ownership, coupled with the Second Amendment, which guarantees to the people an individual right to keep and bear arms, acts as the ultimate fire break against the communist tyranny the far left hopes to enshrine. This is the second reason liberals hate guns: gun ownership constrains their ability to take extreme action beyond a certain point. Democrats such as Obama and Biden are being deliberately misleading when they say things like, “no one is trying to take away your hunting rifle” or “why do you need a semi-automatic weapon with a large magazine; deer do not wear Kevlar vests.” Such comments reflect a deliberate distortion of the 2nd Amendment, which has very little to do with hunting. The reason the 2nd Amendment is the 2nd amendment in the Bill of Rights is that the Amendment is vital to protecting liberty. It is intended to secure to all Americans, not a right to eat venison, but a right to defend themselves against criminals, rioters, and any attempted tyrannical overthrow by the government. The US Constitution was intended to protect “we the people.” One of many ways it does that is by allowing the people to arm themselves. Yet, look at how liberals rage when US citizens actually use their 2nd Amendment rights against violent rioters, whether you are talking about Rittenhouse or about the McCloskey couple in Missouri, who defended their residence from rioters who broke through the front gate of their community. Liberals hate firearms (unless wielded by armed guards under their control) and the independent Americans with the will to defend themselves. They look for any excuse to regulate lawful gun ownership.
Criminals will always be able to get firearms. Even in France, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, Muslim terrorists were able to get fully-automatic weapons and kill hundreds of people, with no armed citizens to stop them. Moreover, evil men, which many criminals are, will always find some means of murdering people. As noted above, over 1300 Americans are stabbed with knifes each year. Muslim terrorist groups instruct their hateful followers to use cars and trucks as weapons, and criminals have used such vehicles to kill scores of people in the US and Europe, including the recent episode of a rageful black man being let out on a token bond after trying to run over the mother of his child and then driving through a happy parade of citizens during the holiday season.
Gun control legislation is not a means to combat criminal activity. If it were, then liberals would vigorously prosecute every crime with a fire arm and seek sentencing enhancements for use of a firearm in other crimes. By definition criminals do not obey laws. That is was makes them criminals. So, logically passing still more gun control laws will mainly effect the law abiding citizen, which is exactly what liberals intend. If liberals wanted to protect Americans of all races and colors, especially young black men, then they would go back to stop and frisk, prosecute all episodes of illegal possession of firearms, and vigorously prosecute all violent crimes on the books, including immigration crimes. More gun control laws are nothing more than liberal efforts at misdirection to hide the true intent of disarming the citizenry. It is not the gun, or the knife, or the baseball bat, or the SUV that is committing the current epidemic of criminal activity. It’s the criminal stupid!
Copyright 2022 in Paul H. Beattie. All rights reserved.
Notes from the Secular Right 