Blame Shifting Indicates Incompetent Mayors

With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.

In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.

Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”

Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.

It is extremely amusing to see the oh-so sophisticated New Yorkers falling for such a naked appeal to their bigotries against rural people and southerners. All that money, elite education and cosmopolitanism doesn’t make them wise enough to see through such a crude trick.

Bloomberg is hardly alone. Many big-city mayors in the Northeast are trying to shift blame for crime in their jurisdictions to people in other states. It’s sad and ridiculous that so many people in the big urban cores are apparently falling for it. All the more so because many cities in the Northeast don’t have severe crime and many are right next door to those that do.

History is clear that the sole cause of runaway crime is political dysfunction. Every community has its bad actors and every community must figure out how to deter and control those bad actors. When communities are politically functional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime is low. When communities are politically dysfunctional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime spirals out of control. When the citizens of a jurisdiction see crime running rampant, it means their politicians need replacing in mass.

Let us hope that the people of New York stop and think about what Bloomberg is really saying when he blames Virginia for New York violence. By claiming that the actions of law-abiding Virginians are the controlling factor driving violent crime in New York, Bloomberg is saying that his administration and his police force are incapable of protecting the citizens of the city. When Bloomberg shifts blame to Virginia, Bloomberg is saying he is useless.

Frankly, I agree. Wake up, New York.