It’s Not the Guns, Stupid
Monday 31 December 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized
Frontpagemag.com with a damning, statistics driven editorial on gun violence in America:
Chicago’s murder rate has hit that magic 500 number. Baltimore’s murder rate has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.
Washington, D.C., home of the boys and girls who can solve it all, is nearing its own big 100.
Those 12 cities alone account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all murders in the United States. And we haven’t even visited sunny Atlanta or chilly Cleveland.
These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.
[. . .]
America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.
[. . .]
America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.
Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.
We do not need to have a conversation about the NRA. We need to have a conversation about Chicago.
The idea that the tens of millions of gun owners in the US need to somehow compromise so that a very small percentage of people, most with extensive criminal backgrounds, who live in inner cities might have a chance at not killing each other is asinine.
We don’t have a mental health issue, or a “gun problem” or anything of the sort. We have cultural problems where guns are legitimate tools in settling disputes. Unfortunately many of those cultural issues are the direct result of official government policy. The incentive to use violence in order to secure profits from the very lucrative drug trade, and a source of a very large portion of gun violence in the US, is a direct consequence of government prohibition. Government is the source of gun violence. Not guns.
Get rid of prohibition, and you take positive steps towards greatly reducing gun violence. Don’t, and you can ban all the guns you want; it won’t matter.
2012-12-31 » madlibertarianguy