Tag Archives: Crime

News

19 facts about illegal immigration

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From Doug Ross’ blog.

Excerpt: (links to mainstream sources removed)

The following are 19 very disturbing facts about illegal immigration that every American should know…

#157 percent of all households that are led by an immigrant (legal or illegal) are enrolled in at least one welfare program.

#2 According to one study, the cost to U.S. taxpayers of legalizing current illegal immigrants would be approximately 6.3 trillion dollars over the next 50 years.

#3 The Obama administration has distributed flyers that tell illegal immigrants that their immigration status will not be checked when they apply for food stamps.

#4 The Department of Homeland Security says that it has lost track of a million people that have entered this country but that appear never to have left.

#5One out of every five children living in Los Angeles County has a parent that is in the country illegally.

#6 In one recent year, taxpayers in Los Angeles County spent 600 million dollars on welfare for children of illegal immigrants.

#7 Thanks to illegal immigration, California’s overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse. Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the past decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving. As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded. This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths. At this point, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.

#8 It has been estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend $12,000,000,000 a year on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.

#9 It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.

#10 The federal government actually has a website that teaches immigrants how to sign up for welfare programsonce they arrive in the United States.

#11 The Obama administration recently introduced the very first “unmanned” border station along the Texas-Mexico border.

#12 The Obama administration has sued individual states such as Arizona that have tried to crack down on illegal immigration.

#13 According to the FBI, there are approximately 1.4 million gang members living in our cities. Illegal immigration has been one of the primary factors that has fueled the growth of these gangs.

#14 As I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago’s Gang Enforcement Unit to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.

#15 Mexican drug cartels make approximately 6.6 billion dollars a year “exporting” illegal drugs to the United States.

#16 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States. The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.

#17 According to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006. By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.

#18 Overall, more than 55,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006. That same level of violence will eventually show up in major U.S. cities unless something dramatic is done about illegal immigration.

#19 It is being projected that the Senate immigration bill will bring 33 million more people to the United States over the next decade.

Please click through to Doug’s blog post to get the links if any of these surprise you. They shouldn’t.

As always, I am in favor of increasing legal immigration by skilled immigrants. But illegal immigration is something else entirely. It is infuriating to me that the costs for all of this Democrat “generosity” to law-breaking illegal immigrants is going to be paid for by our children, who are on the hook for a $17 trillion national debt. Not only that, but it’s the poorest of the poor who have to face the problem of the drug cartels and pay the costs for the schools, hospitals and social programs that support illegal immigration.

News

Virginia crime rate dropping after post-Obama gun buying spree

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Dad sent me this article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Excerpt:

Gun-related violent crime continues to drop in Virginia as the sales of firearms continue to soar, a pattern that one local criminologist finds interesting “given the current rhetoric about strengthening gun laws.”

Major gun crime collectively dropped for a fourth consecutive year statewide, while firearms sales climbed to a new record in 2012 with 490,119 guns purchased in 444,844 transactions — a 16 percent rise over 2011, according to federally licensed gun dealer sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The proliferation of guns occurred as the total number of major reported crimes committed with all types of firearms in Virginia dropped 5 percent, from 4,618 offenses in 2011 to 4,378 last year, according to Virginia State Police data.

Looking back over seven years, total firearm sales in Virginia have risen a staggering 101 percent from 2006 to 2012, while gun-related crime has dropped 28 percent during that period.

The one really good thing about the Obama Presidency is that it’s caused a lot of law-abiding Americans to purchase firearms out of fear that the government would ban them. Increased firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens is very bad for criminals, who now face a stronger deterrent to their criminal ambitions.

Previously, I had blogged about what the Bible says about self-defense, with some help from famous sytematic theologian Wayne Grudem. Dr. Gudem, whose PhD is from Cambridge University, concluded that the Bible was consistent with self-defense and firearm ownership. Now let’s take a look at the peer-reviewed data and see how we can explain why self-defense is a good idea to others.

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).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

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

Planned Parenthood must pay $1.4 million in Medicaid fraud settlement

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The Heritage Foundation reports.

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, which serves southeast Texas and Louisiana, agreed this week to pay $1.4 million to the state of Texas, settling claims that one of the largest abortion providers in the Southeast had fraudulently overbilled the state’s Medicaid program.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office stated that its investigation into the fraud allegations “revealed that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program.”

The Texas Planned Parenthood allegedly “falsified material information in patients’ medical records” to bolster fraudulent claims for reimbursement.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s recent analysis of state and federal audits of family planning programs suggests that in 12 states, Planned Parenthood affiliates overbilled Medicaid for more than $8 million. One federal audit of New York’s Medicaid family planning program reported that certain providers, “especially Planned Parenthoods,” had engaged in improper practices resulting in overpayment.

Despite mounting accusations of fraud, the organization that performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the U.S. has continued to ride the waves of taxpayer funding to annual surpluses. During its last reporting year alone, Planned Parenthood received over half a billion dollars in taxpayer government funding, all the while performing a record 333,964 abortions. To solidify its place as the top abortion provider in the country, Planned Parenthood announced that all local affiliates would have to begin providing abortion services starting in 2013.

A one million dollar fine doesn’t seem like much, compared to over $500 million in taxpayer subsidies. But it’s a start. Abortion is a for-profit business. If we make abortion unprofitable, then abortion will go away.

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