There has been a rise in gun violence in the United States recently. Mostly in the big cities, the murder stats speak for themselves:
I live out in the suburbs and there has not been an increase in “gun violence” here. Much of the rest of the country can say the same.
It is in the place that always struggled with gangs, murders, etc. Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Washington D.C., etc.
President Biden has publicly decried this outbreak of “gun violence,” as if it were the same as an outbreak of “viral flu.”
It is strange the language Democratic politicians and “social justice warriors” use when it comes to people killing each other with guns in the United States.
If a cop is involved in even a somewhat shady shooting, they are up in arms at the officer involved. “The police officer should be held strictly responsible for shooting Suspect X!” they scream. The cop is to blame. Nobody much blames the firearm in that case.
But if some gang member — or whoever — shoots up a party or at rival gangsters, the approach is different. The blame is not placed on any particular person as much as on “gun violence.” It is as if the gun itself is the problem, not the criminal shooting it. The problem is the proliferation of guns, not the proliferation of thugs who use guns to hurt others. Liberals blame the gun, as if the piece of steel somehow managed to influence an otherwise law abiding-citizen to shoot someone unlawfully. Look at the following cartoon —
— blame the murder rate on easily accessible guns, not rampant gang violence and lawlessness. Unexamined in this worldview is the reality that there are even more guns in rural America than in the ghettos of Baltimore and Chicago, but very few murders occur around the cornfields of Leesville, Ohio or in the foothills of Tamworth, New Hampshire. But they kill each other in the tens of thousands in the high-crime areas of the big cities, and it has gotten worse recently— rampant “gun violence,” as President Biden claims.
Why exactly do we suffer this “gun violence”? What is invoked? Who is to blame and why? Is the mindless hunk of steel the prime mover in all this? Is the gun itself the problem? Or is it the criminal? Or is it guns in the hands of criminals?
In the past 18 months I have seen a certain narrative crafted by “progressive” lilberal press members who blame the looting and increase in murder to the pandemic specifically and poverty generally. “Defund the police” activists then claim that if you take a certain amount of money away from police budgets and put it into anti-poverty programs, the gun violence will go away. That has not happened where it has been tried. The center of all the Floyd George mess, the city of Minneapolis, sought to defund their police department. But the cities streets rung out with gunfire and the murder rate skyrocketed. Many of the local residents who actually lived in these neighborhoods clamored for more police, not less. That is understandable.
The way I looked at it was this: if Minneapolis or Los Angeles or Portland or New York or Seattle or San Antonio wanted to “defund” — or even get rid of — their police departments, that was their business. (But they at least should allow their citizens to get CCW licenses.) They are not about to defund the police where I live. Probably not where you live either, dear reader. But if you get rid of the cops in your city don’t come complaining to anyone about skyrocketing murder rates, is how I see it. And don’t expect many to want to visit the mean streets of your struggling communities plagued by high rates of murder. Don’t be surprised when few others want to work or live there; and don’t be surprised when almost everyone with anything to offer moves away. Don’t be surprised when you live in a dump.
Gun control activists have sought to tie this huge increase in gun violence to the fact that some seven million Americans have bought guns since the beginning of the pandemic. Most of these are reported to be new gun owners. Have these people, scared at the thought of civil society breaking down during a “global pandemic,” used their newly acquired firearms to act unlawfully? Did they kill anyone with that new Glock 19 they barely know how to operate? No. Sell it illegally to a criminal? Doubtful. I suspect almost all these guns will sit in people’s closets and hardly ever be taken even to the local shooting range.
Who then is doing all this murder? Where did they get the guns? Why are killings way up in the violent areas of big American cities?
I strongly suspect it is the usual suspects. The felons, the gang members, persons involved in the drug trade (any combination of these). And the vast majority of them didn’t purchase their firearms legally in gun stores and pass background checks.
Criminologists have supposedly found that some 50% of all crime in the United States is committed by 5% of the population, and a bit larger 10% slice of the American population is responsible for ⅔ of all crime. What does this mean? The felons, the gang members, persons involved in the drug trade (any combination of these). That is what that 10% consists of. The usual suspects.
Those people are kept in check, in large part, by the police and fear of the police. Those people never respected the law, but they no longer fear the police. The cops are back on their heels and have absented the scene as gunplay runs rampant in too many Democratic Party-run big cities in the United States.
For example, look at the unfortunate scene at the baseball stadium in Washington D.C. last night. During the fourth inning gunshots rang out just outside the ballpark, and the game was cancelled and 40,000 frightened fans were escorted out of the stadium.
Was this yet another random outbreak of “gun violence”? Sort of similar to the arrival of a spell of hot and humid weather? An unfortunate stretch of unhappiness which is nobody’s fault yet must be endured?
Or, more accurately, was this “gun violence” two groups of persons in two cars near the Washington DC stadium who came into contact, did not like each other, and got into a gunfight. Were those involved in last night’s shooting carrying guns illegally? Did any of them have criminal records? Were they known gang members? Was this a clash between two groups of criminals who recognized each other? Have they engaged in this kind of shooting before? Will they be in some kind of shooting again in the future?
I don’t know. But I suspect the answer to at least some of these questions is “yes.”
So does America have a “gun problem”?
Yes, I think it does.
But more accurately, I think the United States has a problem in some areas with too many tough guys acting the fool with guns which are too easily accessible to criminals. Multigenerational gangs and entrenched gang conflict, and criminals doing whatever to make a buck — not everywhere in the country, but localized in certain places, marinated in a stew of poverty, fermented by a lack of education and opportunity.
That ain’t gonna change anytime soon.
President Biden threatened to enact unilateral “Executive Action” towards marginally stronger gun regulations, but that ain’t gonna change things. Do you think criminals buy firearms in stores? Fill out the government paperwork in front of a gun store clerk who is paid minimum wage and endure a background check? Criminals by their nature don’t follow the law. For all his preaching in front of the camera, Joe Biden is not going to reduce violent crime in those places which have suffered it since before he went into government service almost fifty years ago. It just isn’t that easy. If it were, the problem would have been solved long ago.
Anti-poverty programs might trim around the edges of the problem, but they have been tried before (LBJ and the “War on Poverty”) and crime only got worse.
You give someone a gun, and they get used to using it to get their way — to intimidate others, to demand respect, and to make money — that changes a person. Do it enough, and you are never going to make a living working a 9-5 job. Do some time in prison and make it a lifestyle, and probably your kids (if you have any) will follow in your footsteps. They will follow your example. Whether it is in the favelas of São Paulo or the slums of Oakland or the barrios of Ciudad Juarez, it is much the same.
I don’t have any easy answers.
Nor do you.
But come back in a decade and I suspect the level of violence will still be high in the same old neighborhoods — for the same old reasons.
I have not seen anything in my life to suggest otherwise.
Have you?
I taught Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to high school students twenty times over twenty years. There is a powerful scene where the sheriff explains to Atticus Finch why a neighbor was correct in stabbing homicidal maniac Bob Ewell to death to prevent the murder of Finch’s own children by Ewell:
“Mr. Finch, there’s just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to ’em. Even then, they ain’t worth the bullet it takes to shoot ’em. Ewell ‘as one of ’em.”
True enough.
Some people are just evil. A lot of people are evil. The older I get, the more I think this.
But these relatively rare “evil” individuals hell bent on running wild are out and about in the USA — not everywhere, but in certain places, in the big cities. The police are cowed; they are sitting back and watching. (Maybe not so much in my city: the police shot this guy dead. Well done, VPD!) The media will describe it thusly: “Americans are falling victim to gun violence.” To be more accurate: thugs with guns are killing people, innocent and otherwise. And the “progressive” Democratic politicians who run the cities where that happens are helpless to stop it, or so it seems. Not unlike how it has been for decades, although it seems worse now than before.
So this is how liberal American journalists (a tautology?) will try to spin it: “A stretch of hot and humid ‘gun violence’ has arrived this summer to plague urban America.” This is what they mean: Tough guys on scooters stopping to open up on a crowd in Queens before driving off, wounding ten persons (all of whom miraculously survived). Gang members shooting into a Miami danceclub and killing three and wounding twenty for some stupid reason — like being “disrespected” and wanting revenge, or whatever. A whole baseball stadium full of fans is evacuated in Washington DC because of a drive by shooting right outside it. Who is responsible? Young men. Hotheads. Thugs. With guns. Probably they will be dead or in prison themselves within a few years — unfortunate souls unable to rise above the poverty and violence most of them were born into. Good riddance.
Such persons are relatively few in number and don’t make up even a large minority in the streets where they live, but they drag all their neighbors down. “High crime neighborhoods,” they call them.
I would care more if I lived in one, but I don’t.
I did live in such a place for over a decade, but I long since moved away for obvious reasons. I would not mourn if Los Angeles were to fall off the coast into the ocean. Good riddance!
But let’s check back in ten years with the crime stats and we shall see how things have changed.
Or how they haven’t.
SHOOTERS OFF THEIR SCOOTERS FROM QUEENS, NEW YORK ON JULY 31, 2021
FANS FLEE SHOOTING AT WASHINGTON DC BASEBALL GAME ON JULY 17, 2021
