Tag Archives: Crime

News

Joe Biden promises to confiscate all multi-round magazines, disarm church-goers

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Gun ownership up, gun violence down
Gun ownership up, gun violence down

In the wake of mass shootings by people who don’t obey the law, Democrat presidential candidates are vowing to confiscate ALL semi-automatic pistols and rifles, as well as ban magazines with more than one bullet. They believe that by taking weapons from law-abiding Americans, they will be able to stop violence committed by those who don’t care about laws. Will that work?

First, let’s get the news from the Daily Wire:

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden went far to the left on the issue of guns on Monday, telling reporters that he wants to ban magazines that hold “multiple bullets” — which means all magazines.

Biden, who made the remarks while talking to the press during a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said there should be “no compromise” on guns as he also voiced his anger at the state of Texas for allowing people to carry firearms in places of worship to defend themselves from those who seek to harm others.

“And we’re talking about loosening access, to have guns, to be able to take them into places of worship, I mean, it is absolutely irrational. It’s totally irrational,” Biden said. “The idea that we don’t have elimination of assault-type weapons, magazines that can hold multiple bullets in them, it’s absolutely mindless.”

“It’s no violation of the Second Amendment,” Biden falsely claimed.

Biden’s extreme gun control push, if ever enacted, would effectively ban the overwhelming majority of handguns, all semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, and many hunting rifles which use magazines.

We’ve actually had a number of mass shootings where left-wing atheists attacked Christians during worship. I guess Joe Biden has an alternative plan for protecting Christians from far-left atheist Democrats. Maybe he plans to show up at the mass shootings in churches, and have a talk with the shooters about following gun laws.

Not to be outdone, here’s another candidate promising to ban all semi-automatic weapons, pistols AND rifles.

The Daily Wire reports:

Far-left Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke announced over the weekend that if he is elected president, he intends to confiscate tens of millions of semi-automatic firearms from law-abiding Americans.

O’Rourke made the remarks while campaigning in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday when he was asked by a reporter how he plans to address peoples’ fears that the government is going to come and take many of their semi-automatic firearms.

O’Rourke responded: “I want to be really clear, that’s exactly what we are going to do. Americans who own [the technically undefinable sub-class of semi-automatic firearms referred to as “assault weapons”] will have to sell them to the government.”

It’s amazing to me that there is so much evidence that gun violence is caused by fatherlessness, but Democrats don’t want to do anything about it. If we stopped giving women welfare money for having babies before they are married, gun violence would dry up in a second. We’ve always had access to guns in this country, but it was wasn’t a problem when every child had a mother and father.

If strict laws were effective, then why do we see such high rates of gun violence precisely in Democrat-run areas where law-abiding people are prohibited from owning weapons to defend themselves from criminals? Mass shootings get a lot of press, but the truth is that more people died in Chicago last week in ordinary crimes than died in the most recent mass shooting in Odessa, TX.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

News

New study: white police officers not more likely to shoot black suspects

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Murder rates in major U.S. cities - all run by Democrats
Murder rates in major U.S. cities – all run by Democrats

Whenever people disagree about controversial things, the best way to proceed is to look at what the evidence says. In this case, we’ve got a new PNAS study authored by professors at several different universities which concludes that white officers are not more likely to shoot black civilians than black or Hispanic police officers.

Heather McDonald writes about it in the centrist National Review:

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

This study builds on previous work, which also showed that white police officers were not more biased than other officers to shoot black civilians.

McDonald notes that progressive policy of hiring more minority police officers won’t reduce the rates of shootings of minority civilians, since all races fire their weapons at minority civilians at roughly the same rate.

The real problem with outrage at white police officers is that it doesn’t address the problem of black-on-black crime, which is a FAR greater threat to black victims of crime.

A recent editorial by George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams explains:

Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94-percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks.

Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites.

Coupled with being most of the nation’s homicide victims, blacks are most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.

[…]It’s a tragic commentary to be able to say that young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities.

And all those cities are run by Democrats. And they have been run by Democrats for decades. Democrat policies don’t work to solve the problem how making cities safer for blacks.

The real root cause behind crime is, of course, fatherlessness, as this interview about fatherless boys in the Daily Signal with Warren Farrell makes clear:

They’re far more likely to be the mass shooters. About 90% of the mass shooters that I studied since Columbine have been boys brought up in homes that have minimal or no father involvement or products of divorce or so on. And so that really shocked me to see that common denominator.

I then looked beyond that and went to ISIS recruits. There was a big study of ISIS recruits that found that the common denominator among ISIS recruits was dad deprivation, but not only among the boys, but also the female ISIS recruits as well, which, of course, are in much smaller numbers.

Then I started looking at prisoners and the prison population. We all know that 93% of the prisoners are male, but what very few people know is that about 90% of those 93% are dad-deprived boys.

Kay Cole James, the president of the Heritage Foundation (my favorite think tank), wrote about some of her ideas on how to solve the problem for Fox News.

She writes:

First, we must ensure that we’re encouraging families to stay together and that fathers and mothers raise their children together. Decades of studies have shown that children raised in single-parent homes are statistically more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, exhibit poor social behaviors, and commit violent crimes. They’re also more likely to drop out of school, which often leaves them struggling to find good-paying jobs as adults.

We could go a long way toward strengthening inner-city families by changing the system of government assistance that routinely weakens them.

A child of welfare, I can tell you that an overreliance on government assistance has deprived millions of children of the love and security they would have gotten from a family with two parents.

In the rest of the article, she explains how she was able to put that into practice, and what results she obtained by doing it.

Welfare “frees” women to try to start relationships with men who demonstrate no ability or willingness to commit. She doesn’t have to care about whether he is chaste, sober, drug-free, loyal, educated, a hard worker, etc. because the government is taking over the role of provider. The side effect of this is the high inner-city crime rates that we observe in cities that reward women for making fatherless children with men they never vetted for commitment ability.

News

Why did European countries import millions of unskilled Muslim immigrants?

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

I am currently reading a book recommended to me by Dina, my wise advisor. The book is amazing. I want to put it in the hands of all the naive, leftist Christian leaders and Republicans who favor amnesty, and not building a border wall. If I can’t convince you to read the book right now, at least take a look at this review of it in The Federalist.

Excerpt:

“The Strange Death of Europe” is a polemical but perceptive book culled from Murray’s extended sojourns across Europe’s frontiers – from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a flyspeck in the Mediterranean closer to the shores of North Africa than it is to Sicily, and to Greek islands that sit within sight of the Turkish coastline. These places have borne the brunt of the recent exodus from the Middle East and North Africa, but the author has also ventured to the remote suburbs of Scandinavia and Germany and France where many of these ­migrants end up. The resulting portrait is not a happy one.

[…]The distinguishing feature of modern Europe is its persistent ennui, shown in the inability or unwillingness “to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument.” What’s more, Europeans seem less stirred to face these unpleasant facts than they are fearful of interpreting them too precisely.

The book analyzes how the secular left “argued” for more immigration of low-skilled Muslims from countries that do not accept Western views on things like the respectful treatment of women.

The never-slacking thirst among Europe’s political class for more immigration has rested on two flawed assumptions, one economic and the other normative (and usually in that order). The economic assumption cites the benefits of immigration without accounting for its costs, and seldom acknowledges that benefits accrue chiefly to the migrants themselves and to highly compensated native inhabitants. Most of the rest of society is left to foot the bill for this immense regressive redistribution of wealth from the poor (who are squeezed out of the labor force) to the rich (who benefit from cheap labor).

Any public concerns about the financial downsides of this immigration – from increased pressure on housing markets to depressed wages – have been swept aside in deference to Europe’s dwindling fertility rates. (In a classic instance of one erroneous public policy begetting another, Murray shrewdly notes that the political left encouraged a “one-child policy” in order to attain an “optimum global population” only later to demand mass immigration in order to lift birthrates back to replacement levels.) The problem of Europe’s birth dearth is very real. The working-age population of Western Europe peaked in 2012 at 308 million – and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060.

So how will immigration schemes alleviate Europe’s fertility-driven strain on the welfare state? It is not clear that they will. Advocates of the rejuvenating effects of immigration are seldom obliged to spell out the wisdom of importing the poor and dispossessed of the world who generally lack the skills required for success in an advanced market economy. Can these migrants reliably be expected to contribute more in taxes than they consume in state aid? (They wouldn’t be alone in their dependence on government largesse: plenty of native workers, too, are struggling mightily to cope with the creative destruction unleashed by the march of globalization and technology.)

When advocates of open borders are pressed on these points, they generally repair to the normative argument. It has been claimed that when a flood of migrants started to pile up at Europe’s frontiers in 2015, the issue ceased to be economic and instead became moral: tending to the needs of beleaguered strangers. Thus Europe’s longstanding debate over immigration suddenly transformed into a contest between head and heart, and in a stampede of sanctimony it was decided that soft-heartedness was better hard-headedness.

What was amazing to me, is that people from these Islamic countries were able to just walk in to Europe and claim asylum. This put them on an immediate path to citizenship. Since there were so many people coming, their claims were not vetted. The immigrants would destroy their own identity documents after arriving in Europe, and then claim to be coming from whatever nation had a war going on, e.g. from Syria. Even if they could not speak any Syrian, they would still be let in and put on a path to citizenship! Incredible.

I have to include this:

After the 7/7 bombings in London, polls revealed that 68 percent of British Muslims believe that British citizens who “insult Islam” should be arrested and prosecuted.

See, no problem at all integrating into Western civilization. It’s not like their just going to start raping and murdering 14-year-old Jewish girls, or start up underage sex-trafficking rings. But the people making the immigration policy don’t care about public safety. They want to appear compassionate. And they do it by spending other people’s money and by risking other people’s safety. There is no concern for the money and safety of taxpayers, the important thing is that the politicians feel good about themselves. They’re better than the people who they stick with the bill. Or the people they stick with the machete. I know that compassionate leftists like Russell Moore want me to think that they are good people, but I don’t. Because I always think of the victims of their compassion. Anyone who votes for more immigration without oversight and accountability is responsible for the harm.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was not about why secular leftist politicians decided to open up the borders, how many Muslim immigrants commit crimes against their welcoming hosts, how European activists subvert the law to welcome in more immigrants (including lying about their own rapes at the hands of Muslim refugees, to cover for the rapist), or how the police cover up crimes committed by Muslim refugees and immigrants. The most interesting part was how anyone who tries to make public safety or fiscal arguments against the mass importation of low-skilled Muslims was vilified. Careers were ended. Reputations were ruined. And then the Muslims themselves would launch lawsuits or take more violent, and even murderous, measures to silence their critics.