Tag Archives: Crime

News

Great grandmother fires at mugger with legally-owned, legally-carried handgun

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Story from the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

A 56-year-old great-grandmother from Detroit has a permit to carry her 9 mm handgun, and when she was assaulted on a city bus, she used it.

Ramona Taylor Kamate, 56, boarded a bus Thursday at Northland Mallin Southfield, Mich., Click on Detroit reports. It was there she came face to face with her attacker.

“He was saying ‘you smell good, looks like you have money’ and I said no I don’t,” Ms. Kamate said. “He grabbed my book bag and I grabbed it back and we started tussling, I bit him on his left hand. When he struck me in my head we started fighting.”

No one tried to help her.

“It’s sad you have all those men on the bus, and no one helped me,” she added.

The assailant ran off the bus with Ms. Kamate’s purse, and the grandmother ran after him.

“Somebody said he had a gun, and when he turned and faced me he went down, and when he went down I just pulled my 9 out and started shooting him,” she said.

Ms. Kamate said she fired 11 shots, but he still got away. Her purse was later found, minus the cash in her wallet.

“At first, I felt remorse because I have grandchildren,” she told Click on Detroit. “If my grandchildren are out here doing what these punks are doing, they need to get the same thing.”

The local Fox channel, Fox 2 Detroit, has a video of the lady explaining what happened. She seems like a normal, old-fashioned law-abiding person who has had it with young punks. Her handgun is an H&K USP9 – an excellent handgun. I was surprised that she missed him with it.

Whenever we see stories like this it is important to ask what the Democrats would do with this woman after they banned all guns, which is what they want. Guns like Romona’s H&K USP9 are banned in the far-left UK and effectively banned in Australia. In Canada, certain pistols can be owned, but not carried concealed by law-abiding citizens for self-defense. Criminals, of course, can and do own and carry guns of any type. Imagine what would happen if the Democrats got through gun bans similar to what other left-leaning countries have done? Without a gun, that woman would not be able to defend herself against a younger, stronger attacker. All women should own firearms and have concealed-carry permits. But if it were up to Democrats, women like that great grandmother would always be the victims of stronger, more aggressive, men. And sometimes men don’t just want money alone.

News

Milwaukee police urge residents to arm themselves after law enforcement cuts

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From Fox News.

Excerpt:

A sheriff who released a radio ad urging Milwaukee-area residents to learn to handle firearms so they can defend themselves while waiting for police said Friday that law enforcement cutbacks have changed the way police can respond to crime.

In the 30-second commercial, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. says personal safety is no longer a spectator sport.

“I need you in the game,” he says.

“With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option,” he adds. “You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back. … Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there.”

[…]But he also said he wanted to call on residents to be law enforcement “partners.” He said he could either whine about budget cuts that forced him to lay off 48 deputies last year or he could get creative.

“People are responsible to play a role in their own safety, with the help of law enforcement,” Clarke said. “I’m here to do my part, but we have fewer and fewer resources. We’re not omnipresent, and we have to stop giving people that impression.”

The mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett, is against arming law-abiding citizens who want to prevent the redistribution of their wealth to criminals. He is a Democrat, so criminals are one of his main voting groups.

News

Does abortion produce fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates?

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Here’s an article that commenter Scott sent me from the Public Discourse.

Topic snippet:

In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion advocates used a variety of arguments to advance their cause. Some emphasized women’s liberty and autonomy. Others tried to persuade people that easy access to abortion would benefit society as a whole. Consider just two representative quotations:

“A policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our country.” (NARAL, 1978)

“The impact of the abortion revolution may be too vast to assess immediately. It should usher in an era when every child will be wanted, loved, and properly cared for.” (NARAL co-founder Larry Lader, 1974)

Legal abortion, advocates argued, would result in fewer out-of-wedlock births and less child abuse, and would ensure that every child was wanted. Over time, these arguments lost credibility because neither out-of-wedlock births nor child abuse was decreasing.

In the early 2000s, academics Steven Levitt (University of Chicago) and John Donohue (Yale University) published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, titled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” claiming that legal abortion unexpectedly lowered crime rates in many American cities during the 1990s. Groups supporting abortion rights generally distanced themselves from this argument, fearing its eugenic implications. Though the findings have received some widespread credibility because of Levitt’s popular book Freakonomics, they have been much criticized by other academics.

In this essay I show that easy access to abortion during the past forty years has not benefited society as a whole. Legal abortion has not reduced out-of-wedlock births, child abuse, or crime rates.

And here’s a sample: (I chose one that I haven’t posted about before)

Abortion advocates frequently argued that legal abortion would decrease child abuse. Children who were wanted, they claimed, would be less likely to suffer from abuse than those who were unwanted. But social science data suggest that this logic is flawed. A landmark study of 674 abused children by Edward Lenoski (University of Southern California) found that 91 percent of the parents admitted that they wanted the child they had abused.  A 2005 study by Priscilla Coleman (Bowling Green University) showed that women who obtained abortions were 144 percent more likely to abuse their own children.

At a more theoretical level, Dr. Philip G. Ney, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Canada, has outlined why abortion can lead directly to child abuse.

  1. Abortion decreases an individual’s instinctual restraint against the occasional rage felt toward those dependent on his or her care.
  2. Permissive abortion diminishes the taboo against aggressing [against] the defenseless.
  3. Abortion increases the hostility between the generations.
  4. Abortion has devalued children, thus diminishing the value of caring for children.
  5. Abortion increases guilt and self-hatred, which the parent takes out on the child.
  6. Abortion increases hostile frustration, intensifying the battle of the sexes, for which children are scapegoated.
  7. Abortion cuts the developing mother-infant bond, thereby diminishing her future mothering capability.

Overall, American statistics paint a clear picture. Legal abortion did not reduce child abuse. In fact, the exact opposite happened. The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has reported that child abuse has increased more than 1,000 percent since the legalization of abortion in 1973. According to data from the US Statistical Abstract, deaths due to child abuse continued to rise after the Roe v. Wade decision and increased by 400 percent between 1972 and 1990. Obviously, child abuse is caused by a variety of complicated factors. Still, our experience in the United States provides no evidence that legal abortion reduces child abuse.

This is a good one to bookmark, I’ll bet you will be able to use it in a debate. By the way, if you want more of a rebuttal of Freaknomics, you can check out John Lott’s book “Freedomnomics“. It has a whole section on abortion and crime.