A lot of the big urban areas of the Northeast have turned into war zones. Virtually, without exception, they place the blame on lax “gun control” (really, people control) laws for their sky-high murder rates. I wonder if their voters have ever asked themselves why their mayors are so obsessed?
I think the answer is simple: It give the mayors external actors to blame so they don’t have to answer for their own incompetence.
Think about it. What is every one of those mayors really saying when they talk about disarming the citizenry? They’re really saying, “Hey, it’s not my fault our city has become a shooting gallery, it’s the fault of those rednecks three states over! You can’t blame me because I can’t control what those rednecks do! Oh, if only we could overturn two centuries of Constitutional law we would have safe streets! Until that happens, don’t even think of voting me out! It wouldn’t be fair!”
Apparently, the urbanites’ regional, racial and class bigotries make them more willing to blame people outside of their communities than to accept responsibility for the safety of those very same communities. The mayors and the rest of the failing big-city pols have figured out that the age-old practice of blaming outsiders is the sure path to political job security.
The problem in the big cities of the Northeast isn’t guns. If guns caused problems, it’s rural America and pro-gun states like Texas that would be murder horror shows, not the Northeast cities crammed with people too self-righteously moral to accept the responsibility of protecting their loved ones and their communities. When young black men are safer in small, gun-packed southern towns than they are in northeastern urban areas, you know something has gone seriously wrong in the big city.
No, the problem in the Northeast’s urban areas is an unusually large population of individuals who chose to kill and a political and criminal-justice system that cannot or will not contain them. It is ineffective law enforcement that drives high murder rates, not access to guns.
So, here it is. How about Daley and all the other mayors get their own houses in order before they demand that the rest of us surrender our basic Constitutional and human rights to defend our loved ones and our communities?
It’s time for them to cowboy up and accept responsibility for their own failures before they lash out at the rest of us.
The problem in DC, Chicago, and so on is that they’ve got a large population of young men who think that running around trying to kill each other is their best bet as a career path. THAT is the problem: We have god knows how many ambitious, energetic young men raised in an environment that prepares them for nothing but starring in The Road Warrior. Their lives are wasted.
The left thinks if you could take the guns away, you’d “solve the problem”. That’s because cities full of poor kids killing each other with knives and clubs at arm’s length isn’t a problem for the left.
It’s not merely that gun control won’t remove guns from the hands of criminals. Even if you actually could remove guns from the hands of criminals, that wouldn’t have the slightest effect on what’s actually wrong here.
Giuliani in NYC proved it could be done and even gave everyone else a model. Interesting how few followed it.
Exactly. Remove the guns from the hands of the law abiding, and what do you have? Victims. Remove the guns from the hands of the criminals, and what do you have? Criminals. Criminals disposed to murder, rob, rape, whatever. They’ll still do it. It’ll just be even more messy, and the victims will still have no protection.
One reason I love the Old Dominion, Virginia. We still have too many gun laws, but open carry is legal.
Ever notice how liberal politicians have a litany of excuses about not cracking down on crime? But when citizens call for the right to protect and/or arm themselves, they’re answered with a curt “NO”? And how such citizens are then (usually) cowed into docility? Since (esp. liberal) politicians are essentially smooth criminals in decent suits, I’ve decided to connect the dots. I hold that liberal politicians view their own middle class as the enemy and criminals as their natural allies.
I really wished some intrepid reporter asked Daley if he was going to ban 2×4’s last year. Or baseball bats last month.
“A 19-year-old man was seriously injured when he was shot late Monday in a gang-related incident in Lincoln Park on the North Side.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2313582,lincoln-park-shooting-052510.article
Maybe if we spent less time running after the Olympics, we could have spent that money on more cops or something.
Incompetence is not a strong enough word.
– Madhu
Sorry – forgot to sign in.
– Madhu
The thing that bothers me is the open hypocrisy of people like Dick Daily and Rosie O’Donnell. Having a heavily armed protection squad is good enough for them, but not for a loser like me.
Having a heavily armed protection squad is good enough for them, but not for a loser like me.
I think they would argue that as public figures they are more at risk than you are. However, this is a weak argument, since 1) ordinary people are victimized all the time and 2) these public figures do not explain why the decision to arm oneself (or not) should be anything other than a matter of individual choice . They are essentially asserting that this issue is beyond discussion, and the media do not press them on it. Perhaps if they were subjected to frequent questions about their behavior on this issue they would at least shut up about it.
North Avenue Beach, and to some extent, the entire lakefront have turned into a freefire zone in the last couple of weeks. The gangbangers have absolutely NOTHING to fear with the citizenry disarmed and the police hopelessly undermanned.
If any of you ever doubt that putting out arguments can change minds, I’d like to observe that not so many years I was for gun control and joining this group, reading Instapundit, etc. has slowly and dramatically changed my mind. I had known people who were accidentally killed and maimed – and I’m pretty sure it was an accident. (Of course, I’ve also known, anecdotally, some incidents that probably weren’t accidental – gun cleaning by angry wives, etc.) Some of those were children, killing children. Sure, the parents should have secured any weapons, but people are not perfect in all sorts of ways.
In Nebraska, I’d known of kids shooting siblings accidentally and was shocked by the level of murders and suicides in my husband’s small home town. I’ve never thought the division between the good and bad guys was sharply drawn and had heard enough marital battles (and of marital battles) to know that terrible passions can lead to actions we have trouble crediting to someone we admire. I never say when someone describes the horrors of a divorce battle that I think it was impossible – but I also am not willing to make one the only villain. The passions that move in that circular and reinforcing way are powerfully destructive. So I thought that a too-available gun for that and depression could too easily lead to murder and suicide.
I don’t think I was wrong – I don’t think the bad & the good are not in all of us, albeit in quite different proportions.
But I’ve begun to see it much more as defense issue. And become more and more aware that the right to speech, religion, press, etc. aren’t much good without a right to property and a right to property isn’t much good if chaos descends without a right to guns. And that taking the guns from New Orleans residents or Chicago ones leaves them vulnerable rather than safe. The when and how of projects to bring in all the guns indicate not that society has been purified so only the extreme emotional familial argument leads to gun fire but rather that the everyday life of ordinary people in a city is at risk.
Ginny,
If you protect people’s freedoms, it is inevitable that some will abuse that freedom. Freedom of speech lets people attack the reputation of others, distort history etc. Freedom of religion means you get murderous cults. Freedom of assembly leads to riots. Protections for the accused mean that people guilty of horrible crimes walk free. In the end, freedom boils down to the ability to choose. Inevitably, some will choose selfishly and harm themselves or others.
When we argue the first or second amendments on the grounds of pragmatism, we abandon them as rights. When we say, “you can have free speech as long at it serves the interest of the collective,” you do not have the true right of free speech. When we say, “you have freedom of religion as long as it serves the interest of the collective,” you do not have true freedom of religion.
Rights adhere to individuals for the benefit of the individual. Rights are not a pragmatic tool of the collective. Indeed, rights are the resistance of the individual against the will of the collective.
One can make pragmatic arguments for rights but in the end, we have rights because they make life worth living for us individually, not because they empower the collective through the state. Even if the pragmatic argument for the right of self-defense was false, it wouldn’t matter. You can’t take one individuals right of self-defense away because another person abuses that right anymore than you take one persons freedom of speech or religion away because another abuses those same rights.