Tag Archives: Crime

News

Man uses his own legally-owned handgun to foil carjacking attempt

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Here’s the story from WSB local news.

Excerpt:

An East Point man held a would-be carjacker at gunpoint until police arrived and arrested the suspect, according to Atlanta police.

Hashim Fannin, the car owner, says the attempted carjacking occurred just after he had pulled into a parking spot at the Family Dollar on Marietta Boulevard in northwest Atlanta earlier this month.

Fannin says the man slipped into the passenger’s seat when his doors automatically unlocked.

“He told me, ‘You know what this is,’” Fannin said.  That is when Fannin says he pulled his gun out.

“I asked him to get out the car, probably not in those exact words,” Fannin said.

“I told him no, there’s no leaving, leaving was before you hopped into my car … at this point there is not leaving,” Fannin said.

The car owner kept the suspect, Edgar Horn, 61, at gunpoint face down in the parking lot for several minutes until police arrived.

“You were not trying to rob me,”  Fannin said to the man on cellphone video of the incident.  “Do you just get into random people’s cars … you thought I was your friend …  you thought I was your friend … so you woke up stupid this morning?”

When police arrived, you can see Fannin wave them over, and put his gun down.  The police officer shakes his hand, before putting the suspect in handcuffs.

“Honestly, I look at it like this. That is one less guy I got to worry about bothering my mom when she’s out grocery shopping,” Fannin said.

According to a police report, the suspect was arrested for attempted robbery and entering an automobile.

I keep running into people (mostly women) who don’t understand why it is that law-abiding taxpayers need to be able to carry their own weapons in order to protect themselves and their families. The reason is that there is no time for the police to arrive when you are the victim of a crime. You are on your own. Or, as in the case of Baltimore, the mayor will just instruct the police to give the criminals space to destroy, i.e. – to commit crimes. That actually happens more often than you think in different times and places.

Black with gun holds white criminal for cops
Black guy with gun holds white criminal for cops

I like that the cop shook his hand, too. That would only happen in America.

Meanwhile, in the socialist, feminist United Kingdom, there is not only a ban on handguns, (with a consequent doubling of violent crime in the years following the ban), there is also a ban on righteous masculinity of any kind.

Look at this story from the UK Telegraph:

Police reprimanded a nine-year-old boy for using a broken ruler as a sword in a playground games of “knights and dragons”.

Kyron Bradley was spoken to by officers at George’s Bickley CE Primary School, Bromley, Kent.

His mother Natasha, 27, is reported to have burst into tears when she learned the news.

Two days earlier, she’d gone into school to meet with the head teacher following complaints Kyron had used a broken ruler in the playground as a weapon.

During the meeting, Ms Bradley, a carer, said her son, a Year 4 pupil, explained he had been playing a chasing game with two other boys involving pretend swords.

[…]Ms Bradley said she thought the matter was closed following the initial meeting with the headteacher until she was told the police had been asked to speak with Kyron on April 29.

That story is hat-tip Dina, who does encourage boys and men of all ages to fight against evil with force. And good for her, that’s getting increasingly rare among women these days.

Polemics

Economist Walter Williams explains how to not be poor

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Economist Walter Williams
Economist Walter Williams

Here is his article on wealth and poverty on Creators.

First, there is no real poverty in the United States:

There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor”, report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.

Second, the “poverty” is not caused by racism, but by poor choices:

The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is 72 percent, and among whites it’s 30 percent. A statistic that one doesn’t hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it’s 5 percent. Now the politically incorrect questions: Whose fault is it to have children without the benefit of marriage and risk a life of dependency? Do people have free will, or are they governed by instincts?

There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data “going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery … showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940”? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?

Third, avoiding poverty is the result of good choices:

No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault.

If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. It turns out that a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, would earn an annual combined income of $30,000. The Census Bureau poverty line for a family of two is $15,500, and for a family of four, it’s $23,000. By the way, no adult who starts out earning the minimum wage does so for very long.

Fourth, what stops people from making good choices is big government:

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the “need” to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, “you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what’s left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet. If you’re still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation”. Today’s total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.

Walter Williams is one of my two favorite economists, the other being Thomas Sowell. By sheer coincidence, they both happen to have grown up poor, and they both happen to be black. They understand what causes poverty very well. I recommend their books to you if you want to understand poverty, too.

News

Thomas Sowell: if we care about poverty and crime, then we should encourage marriage

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Economist Thomas Sowell
Economist Thomas Sowell

My favorite economist Thomas Sowell writes about poverty and crime in National Review.

Excerpt:

The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

So skin color has nothing to do with it, the real problem is that social programs encourage people to make poor choices – including more poverty and crime. We reward failure, and we are surprised when we get more failure.

The book he mentioned – Life at the Bottom – is one of my favorite books. It really shows how social programs that redistribute wealth actually teach poor people to make poor choices, and then refuse to take responsibility for their own poor choices. I posted links to the full text of the book here.