Steve Sailer writes: At a ceremony for some of the various policemen recently shot by his fellow Black Lives Matter advocates, President Barack Obama described the postapocalyptic hellscape of gun violence that is America today:
We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book…
In contrast, Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech was widely criticized as “dark.” … Pundits who, only days before, had been vociferously lamenting the gun crisis rushed to denounce Trump for fearmongering about crime.
After all, law and order is not supposed to be on the agenda for 2016. … You are supposed to be worrying about guns, not crime.
COMMENTS:
* Of course we can’t focus on crime – that would require acknowledgement of the fact that we have an incredibly violent subset of the population that is willing to use deadly force to resolve minor and petty disputes, and that would cast the left’s favorite class of victims in a negative light. Better to focus on the mechanism used to mete out punishment to one’s transgressors rather than ask why such a noble group of people are so quick to go to Defcon 1 over matters most people would let go.
* It’s incredible that the president would make such an absurd statement of it being easier to obtain a Glock, a higher end pistol, than a book. It’s as if he were to start babbling about UFOs on national television. The increase in homicide is a black thing but because of that they have to dance all around the subject without ever really spelling it out. Quite simply, the black population has to be sat upon by the police to keep their murder rate down. Without that they just revert back to their original state of tribalism and tribal warfare. Lighten up the police presence and they go out of control much as when power outages automatically lead to looting. It’s just the way they are and they haven’t changed much in all these years.
* David Dinkins always likes to pipe up and claim that the policies that reduced crime actually began in his administration. I forget whether he began stop-and-frisk or whether he hired Bratton and started Compstat. But he invariably writes into newspapers and points that out every time they ran a story about Giuliani cleaning up crime.
Anyway, the Dems used to use gun control like the Repubs use abortion: an issue they knew they couldn’t win in Congress or the courts, but by screaming about it could rile up the base for cash and votes.
Except now gun owners are beginning to talk about race again, thanks to the BLM movement trying to blame cops and rational people realizing it’s not that once they get the counter argument. So now the Dems screams are just making more people realize they are the Black Party.
* Murder rates over time are irrelevant unless improvements in medical care are controlled for. If you held the level of violence the same and had the medical care of 50 years ago the murder rate would be 3-4 times higher.
* Lessons of Ferguson:
If you steal some cigarillos from a store, then don’t walk around holding them openly in your hand.
If you do walk around holding them openly in your hand, then don’t walk in the middle of the street.
If a police officer tells you to stop walking in the middle of the street, then don’t punch him in the face.
If you do punch a police officer in the face, then don’t try to grab his handgun.
If you do grab his handgun, then don’t put your thumb on the barrel opening, so that a bullet wounds your thumb.
If your thumb is wounded and if you also are fat, intoxicated and wearing flip-flops, then don’t try to run away.
If you do run away, then don’t stop and turn around to face the police officer.
If you do stop and turn around, then don’t yell, “You’re too much of a pussy to shoot me!”
If you do yell, “You’re too much of a pussy to shoot me,” then don’t charge at the police officer.
If you do charge at the police officer and he shoots you in your torso, then don’t keep charging until one of the bullets hits you in the forehead.
* Obama’s statement also continues the long (racist) Leftist tradition of not considering blacks as having moral agency. “We” (implicitly whitey) put in front of (black) teens a veritable buffet of low cost Glocks (while at the same time we deprive them of access to books and computers). Forget for a moment that these are all lies and assume their truth for purposes of argument. Apparently, blacks have no role to play – once they are presented with these cheap guns they have no choice but to buy them and pop caps in their bruthas (and the occasional whitey).
Isn’t this same buffet available to the teens of Bloomfield Hills and Bethesda, only a few short miles from nearby ghettos in Detroit and DC? And don’t white teens have even more access to cash? Why are the prep school boys not shooting each other at a similar rate (or at all)?
* Let’s put aside a trifling matter such as the Second Amendment for a moment (the Constitution after all is a living document and can be reinterpreted ) and consider gun control as a practical matter.
Most of the communities that “we” have flooded with guns are also flooded with drugs. These drugs are mostly illegal. Outlawing the manufacturing, importation, possession or sale of these drugs with a variety of state and federal laws, most of which impose penalties at the felony level (i.e. long prison terms) has done little to stop their use, despite a century long “War on Drugs”.
Drugs can be produced domestically in illegal laboratories and they can be smuggled across the border. Or drugs that are intended for legitimate purposes can be diverted to illicit use. So if you put your finger in the dike, a thousand other holes spring up, driven by the pressure of the public’s demand and willingness to pay for drugs.
So while this war has not done much to actually reduce the supply of drugs to addicts (while at the same time making it difficult for people in real pain to receive appropriate medication) it has however filled our prisons and created a lucrative black market economy. Prohibiting alcohol had similar “success”.
But, Obama and the Left want us to try yet another prohibition experiment. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
* The elites who run NYC don’t want, and have never wanted, low crime and a crackdown on Black crime that drives most crime.
This is because they are mostly transient renters. Sure Jay Z and Taylor Swift have multimillion penthouses, but most are either the Ezra Klein transient renters or various entertainment/info personalities moving from city to city. The real money is absentee — Chinese and Russian oligarchs putting money into hard -to-seize real estate. Meanwhile White Flight was a huge godsend to the creative people, who were able to live frankly degenerate lives without rebuke by a White middle class.
This is why various lower-tier celebrities are openly rooting for a return to Taxi Driver NYC — it made renting cheaper. And if crime gets too bad, they’ll just move — to DC, to London, to LA.
You IMHO are penciling in the dynamic of LA — where celebrities actually own (and often buy/sell) luxury properties and things like the attack on NCIS actress Pauly Perrette at her Hollywood Hills mansion by some homeless person creates a big city crackdown. While South Central is essentially a no-police zone.
Orwell had it right — the purpose of torture is torture, the purpose of power is power. The purpose of Gun Control is disarming Whites in rural places. Because they are the natural and eternal enemies of rich White urban liberals who make their money by hereditary government networks. After all there are plenty of means to disarm Blacks such as Stop and Frisk which the people who actually RUN NYC — Di Blasio, Al Sharpton, various Black/NuYoRican Gangs, the glitterati, the NYT, all detest. And ended. Rudy represented the revolt of the Outer Boroughs, but that’s over with demographic change and the Caribbean immavasion tidal wave.
Again, people who write for the NYT or form the lower tier infotainment/government sector, need high Black crime in NYC to keep rents low. The collision between absentee foreign oligarchs seeing their property investments drop in titanic ways vs. the US elites should be interesting. I am more and more convinced the Jefferson’s insight that property owners had a permanent interest in not degrading their nation was wise, vs. Hamilton’s nomadic urbanites with no skin in the property game. Because they move so much.
* Stirring up fake controversies by taking quotes out of context is a Leftist speciality but it doesn’t seem to work on Trump at all. But that doesn’t stop the Left from trying again and again. The NYTimes news pages no longer even pretend to be impartial.
Something you have to understand (and which the reporter surely understands but pretends not to) is that Hillary’s email server has been offline and scrubbed for a long time now. So the only way the Russians could leak the contents is if they hacked it when it was still on line. So, even taking Trump’s remarks in a serious light and not as a joke as clearly intended (according to the NYT readers, sarcasm and humor are not permitted in Presidential candidates) it’s not possible that Trump is appealing for the Russians to conduct FUTURE espionage on Hillary.
At worst, he is telling Putin to release what he already has “and he would be rewarded by the American press”. The latter is what REALLY drove the NYT into a frenzy. Traditionally, yes, juice revelations about a presidential candidate are exactly what the press wants – they would be orgasmic if someone were to leak something truly incriminating about Trump. Normally they would give their eye teeth to break a scandal – since Watergate this has been the dream of every political reporter. But, in this case, the LAST thing that they want is to be forced to print something that would torpedo Hillary’s candidacy. I would even bet that they would suddenly get ethical qualms and find some reason why they couldn’t even print these stories (but the cat would be out of the bag anyway – they no longer have the monopoly).
* He smacked the reporters around in that press conference. His instinct is to constantly attack. The debates will be very interesting. I don’t think Hillary’s AI decision tree can be programmed extensively enough to appear extemporaneous, and I suspect she’ll fall back to point and sputter mode.
