While this was a great interview, I believe it would have been even better had they discussed the third rail of gun control, that of the horrendous number of young black males who die each year from black on black gun murders.
I just pulled this factoid up from a Reuters article regarding the rise of gun deaths during 2020:
'Among African Americans, the rate was 26.6 deaths per 100,000, a 39.5% increase over 2019. For white Americans, the rate was 2.2 per 100,000.'
Do we actually have a national problem, or do we have an urban black on black murder problem? But dealing with the horrendous problem of gun murders for black male youth is too hard, and would involve lots of accusations of racism, so we tend to ignore the real progress that could be made if we isolated and concentrated on it.
I'm of the belief that the motivation for mentally ill people to carry out mass murders is the issue that needs to be dealt with more than the access to weapons, but that's just mho.
For the 2020 FBI crime states, 53% of US murders where the race of the offender was known were committed by blacks. Who comprise 13% of the US population (and most of these are committed by males, so 6.5% of the US population). This is a VASTLY disproportionate murder rate per capita. It is never spoken of. A problem not acknowledged cannot be solved.
"Who comprise 13% of the US population (and most of these are committed by males, so 6.5% of the US population)."
Yes, and considering that the vast majority of black people, including black males, are NOT crminals the number of black people committing the majority of crimes is really something more like 1-2%. There is a very small, incredibly violent group of gang bangersw commiting most of the gun violence in this country. Remove them and we are safer than Denmark when it comes to gun homicide stats.
Though eminently well-documented, this is not widely understood. Cops are doing their job (mostly) and making arrests. Prosecutors / DA's need to prosecute every violent crime, every gun law violation (and any sort of malfeasance one could possible do with a gun is already a crime). I wonder why big money leftists have taken such an interest in DA's (like the one in NYC and the recently removed one in San Francisco) who are soft on crime? They WANT chaos, it aids their march towards power.
Exactly. Prosecutors have, for decades now, been in the habit of dropping gun charges and any sentencing enhancement for using a gun to commit a crime. As a result, those who have demonstrated the propensity to shoot or threaten to shoot people end up back on the streets in a short time, instead of being locked up for a very long time.
I would be in favor of INTENSE sentencing enhancement for the use of a gun to commit a crime; say, for example, an automatic ten-year enhancement, on top of whatever penalty they get for the crime they committed. If the gun criminals were locked up for long periods, there would be fewer of them on the street.
But that can't happen for the same reason that prosecutors end up dropping gun charges: the results, in practice, appear to be too "racist."
The policies will NEVER change as long as those areas are run by Democrats. I'm not even convinced that Republicans have the cujones to make the necessary changes, should they somehow be elected in those cities. We need LEADERSHIP, and there is none to be found.
You're absolutely right! Do politicians and the academe think these young black men care about the second amendment; the NRA? Those arguments are a distraction from the real issues that (sshhh!) can not be discussed. We also have the disenfranchised white middle class overly medicated kids with mental disorders raised by parents and, in many cases, grandparents. These folks live in fear and denial and suddenly everyone is shocked when disaster strikes. It brings me very little solace to compare our stats with that of El Salvador and Guatemala.
I agree completely. Let out all the people who are locked up for merely possessing drugs (our utterly failed "War on Drugs" and put the violent criminals in there instead.
I'm with Celia with one exception. No life if committing a crime with a gun. Here in Los Angeles if I shot an intruder in my bedroom, I'd be in jail for life. Otherwise, there is a great deal of frankness on this issue with Celia and so many others.
T R...seems to be the sick part...buttered-up thru the Media. To be forthright, the media must ease-up on the " you have not advanced because of Whitey" proclivity. More MLK , Sen Scott and Walker. Less of the substance from the assembly fluttering "Racist".
I've posted this before but I think it is relevant: Every time there is a mass shooting like Sandy Hook or Columbine High School there is an outcry from the left to confiscate guns from law abiding citizens. In the majority of these shooting these victims are white and the nuts who shoot them are white. There is no doubt that these shootings are tragic and horrible.
However every week in the inner cities far more black people are murdered by black armed thugs than are these mass shootings. Yet I don’t hear outrage from the Democrats, who claim to be the party defending women and minorities,. To be fair you don’t hear it from the Republicans either. In fact the only thing you hear about these outrageous murders from either party is the sound of crickets chirping.
The point I am making is you never hear from the minority support party any outrage about the slaughter in black communities but you sure do hear it when there is a mass shooting in the white community.
Isn’t that one of the definitions of racism, outrage about white deaths but silent about black deaths?
Years ago after Sandy Hook Diane Feinstein called for the confiscation of all guns. Of course she meant confiscation of law abiding citizens guns. Not one person in the media or from the right asked Diane how she proposed to get the guns out of the hands of the gangs that have been terrorizing black communities for decades.
According to FBI statistics, in 2020 at least 9,713 blacks were murdered. In the past 30years tens of thousands of blacks were murdered in the inner city. Where is the outrage? Isn’t it racist to ignore these murders? Where is BLM, Antifa and the woke people when they are needed the most. More importantly, where are the Democrats who claim to be the party of the minorities? They control the House and the Senate. Why aren’t they screaming to stop these murders. Where is Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Oh, wait a minute! They make their livings off the misery of black people.
Yes. It is racist to ignore black-on-black murders, because the innocent people in those neighborhoods need help stemming the bloodshed. Like all of us, they want to be left in peace to live their lives and not have to throw their babies in the bathtub when gang gunfire breaks out.
Mass shootings in schools and workplaces seems to be a white phenomenon, and nobody has any qualms about saying so. Street murders by gun is largely (though not exclusively) a black phenomenon. That needs to be equally emphasized, because pretending otherwise does not help Americans of any color.
"Mass shootings in schools and workplaces seems to be a white phenomenon." Regardless of how the Media spins it, mass shootings seem to be becoming less exclusive to white people. The NYC subway shooter was black, as was the Tulsa hospital shooter. The Uvalde shooter was hispanic.
Workplace shootings at Hartford Distributors in Connecticut, at Rite Aid Distribution Center in Maryland, Henry Pratt Company in Aurora, Illinois, and at the Washington Navy Yard were committed by black shooters. Workplace shootings at Fort Hood and at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California were committed by Muslim Arabs (as was the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida and the grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado). A workplace shooting at the UPS facility in San Francisco was committed by a Thai man. The school shooting at Virginia Tech was committed by a South Korean.
So the Media's insistence that mass shootings are a white phenomenon is disingenuous.
The problem can be solved, although it will take a couple of generations. Eliminate policies that Democrats have established over the last 50+ years that are destroying families. Fatherless families are a HUGE problem, especially in urban areas.
That would help the woeful HS and college graduation rates, which would lead to natural resolution of the equity issues, and is far preferable to the ridiculous DEI programs.
Precisely. I’ve read that up to HALF of all gun deaths are suicides. No discussion about that by the panelists though. Not to be outdone, Bari asserts that, “As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children is guns” but neglects to mention that 18-year-old “child” gang bangers are included in that statistic and when it’s removed, the REAL leading cause of death among children is cars. How many gun offenders have been released with little more than a slap on the wrist? How many of them are repeat offenders? Where are the actual statistics? It seems the only statistics we get are phony, like the one peddled by Bari. I haven’t even touched on the malleable definition of “mass shootings” the gun grabbers employ to dupe the public.
It’s difficult to take seriously any discussion of gun violence when neither of the participating twits even bother to discuss what does work. I’m old enough to remember the rampant gun violence in New York City back in the 70s and 80s. When Giuliani implemented his “stop and frisk” policy, gun violence almost disappeared. Success be damned, the leftist gun grabbers shrieked for years that the policy was racist until finally it was abandoned with predictable results. The statistics are available but their exclusion from the discussion speaks volumes about the real goal, eliminating guns from law abiding citizens while letting armed criminals roam the streets until they get their way.
To top it all off, we get to hear Rajiv Sethi, an Indian immigrant patronizingly chastise we native born Americans for the “widespread belief that there's a sacred right to bear arms that's enshrined in our most cherished document through the Second Amendment” Someone should point out to him that the Second Amendment together with the rest of our cherished Constitution is what separates us from the cesspool he emigrated from.
More than half, I believe: suicides account for two-thirds of gun deaths, and murders the other third, with a tiny fraction left over for accidents and justifiable homicides.
Stop and frisk WAS racist, in that NYPD stopped and frisked black and brown people almost exclusively. They also found 99 percent of those stopped and frisked had no guns on them. I'd argue that stop and frisk didn't cause the plunge in homicides in New York City, it was coincidental. Murders, gun or not, rise and fall independent of most anything we think of as "the cure."
Agree that "child" in this case is disturbingly flawed. Take out the numbers of dead who belonged to gangs, and got caught up in that warfare, to get a more accurate number.
Rajiv Sethi is an idiot for having said that. I don't believe it's a "sacred" right as in religious, but it's as cherished a right (as you said) as anything else in the Constitution and thus worth defending to the max.
“I'd argue that stop and frisk didn't cause the plunge in homicides in New York City, it was coincidental”
Then, by your logic the staggering increase in homicides once stop and frisk was dropped is also coincidental. I’m no statistician but I’d say the probability of both being true is about nil. As someone who has been wrongfully stopped by police, I appreciate that abuses occur, but please, lets get over the racist trope. Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t most gun crimes committed by black and brown people? Frankly I find the whole argument against stop and frisk disingenuous when you consider that every time we board a flight we’re treated like would be terrorists by the TSA. We're scanned , frisked and have our belongings rummaged through yet 99.999…% of the time there is no gun, no explosive or threat of any kind. I'd argue that the absence of any hijackings since 9/11 can much more plausibly be considered coincidental.
People don't claim stop-and-frisk was racist because of the outcome of more young black men getting arrested for gun crimes, but because the policy was to presume that any given young black man was a criminal and search him without cause. Mayor Bloomberg was notoriously recorded saying essentially that (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/leaked-audio-bloomberg-aspen-institute-racial-profiling-stop-and-frisk-policing.html). It was immoral, and a gross violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Morality is a tricky thing. On the one hand you have a young black man briefly detained by police, then being sent on his way. On the other hand you have predominately black inner-city neighborhoods being ravaged by gang-related gun violence. It's not a tough call, really.
Jon, T. Reid, and Madjack all point to the actual problem which has nothing to do with "too many guns" and everything to do with social breakdown in the black urban communities, and lack of care for the mentally ill.
Unfortunately, some 30-40% of gun murders every year are unsolved, yet most of the victims are black, so clearly the black homicide participation is likely much higher than 53% (or 56% or whatever number for a given year, based on bjs.gov statistics). Let us say, 60% or 65%.
What's more, it's certainly not all black males who commit murder, but a small fraction thereof, age 16-39, in urban ghetto neighborhoods. Let us say, 10% of the black male population, or 0.6% of the U.S. population.
That's less than 1% of the country causing 60% or more of all the gun homicides. If you could somehow clamp down on this violent population, throw all the gang leaders in prison, intervene in at-risk families and incentivize more economic development in the cities thru lower taxes & regs... and of course better policing... then our gun murder rates would drop down to the level of Canada and Western Europe, or even lower. We would not even be having a debate on gun control, because relatively speaking, it would simply not be such a significant problem.
Trump did try, with his (and Sen. Tim Scott's) opportunity zones initiative, along with his "back the blue" rhetoric. One can hardly imagine a better approach. Unfortunately, the Democrats pulled him down from power, shut down all these initiatives, and have pushed the country ever further into anarchy and urban decay.
Accurate. Vermont allows license-free open and concealed carry of firearms. It has a Western Europe level of murder per capita. Chicago specifically, and Illinois in general, has a strict licensing scheme and areas of Chicago have per capita murder rates exceeding Brazil and South Africa.
Chicago's numbers aren't nearly that bad. St. Louis and New Orleans, however, are. A couple neighborhoods in St. Louis are one of the murder capitals of the world all by themselves.
Vermont's neighbor Maine, a state that is larger than all the other New England states has for many decades allowed open carry, and within recent times has made concealed carry legal for most of its citizens.
Folks in Maine can even carry a loaded hand gun in their car, or walk into a private business with a firearm (including restaurants and bars) if the owners allow it.
I spent most of my working life in Maine and did the paper work to get a concealed weapon permit. But within a few years, the Maine legislator made my permit redundant.
My wife and I now live in a rural area of north central Florida.
Within a few months of moving to Florida I got a concealed carry permit, but it also is now mostly redundant when I visit my friends up in Maine.
Seems I can never get a break from inconsistent firearm laws 😁
I believe it was Bill Barr who stated that most violent crime in cities is committed by a relatively small group of individuals that cycle through the system on a regular basis until they are removed from the streets when locked up for an extended length of time or die.
Consider the economic incentives of black markets. Violence in black markets is used routinely used to settle disputes and expand market share. This violent incentive created gangs and long standing drug war has encompassed multiple generations. Our drug policies are partly to blame for the culture of violence within these communities. To date we have militarized our police, spent >1 trillion and the addiction rate remains flat from 1980. We could lock up every potential murder based on the profile stated above and the murders will not stop because the incentives are still there.
Giuliani proved that smart policing in partnership with an enlightened city governance could reduce the problem.
Unfortunately, he was the exception. The woke racist fools running most of America's big cities are simply exacerbating the problems.
Of course, substance abuse is a huge problem. But there are ways to attack the gang violence and at least reduce the shootings. There are only so many men out there willing to commit murder. Lock up enough of them, and the problem starts to diminish.
Yes. Substance abuse in and of itself does not drive murders. San Francisco is so addicted that city sidewalks are littered with addicts mainlining themselves toward the grave. But murders there are low. They don't have the drug-related gang violence of other cities.
you best me to it . i know 100's of gun owners they have lots of weapons , not one has ever committed a crime why should they suffer for a few insane people with short fuses and no control over their emotions ?
I live in a town where there has been no murders in 50 years. Next door is another town where the last gun homicide was 80 years ago. Yet, there are people in these communities pushing to pass ordinances banning various types of firearms, and enact red flag laws and other restrictions on lawful gun ownership.
So far, they've been voted down, in part because the town governance is afraid of the expensive lawsuits that would result, should they enact one of these dumb laws such as was passed in that town in Illinois.
The most recent murders in our town were committed with a pillow (in one case) and an electric cord (in the other). The last gun murder (still unsolved), dates to 1999.
They can’t address that question. The left intentionally herds blacks into violent communities and fills their heads with messages of no opportunity, other people are the reason why you are a victim and they turn to drugs and their anger boils over. They’ve destroyed the nuclear family unit intentionally. It’s part of their quest for power and blacks are just useful tools to them.
It’s strange I don’t think Bari has to much support from the usual crowd on this platform - these comments seem generally a pretty good judge of where people will be voting in the midterms and I don’t think it’s going to be The Democrats
I've read an evaluation of the statistics that suggests that if we remove the gun murders that occur as a result of black-on-black (often gang violence) from the total before calculating the per capita rate and comparing that rate to other countries, our ranking drops from very a very high number to a very low number.
But as you say, we can't talk about that, let alone do anything about it, because that would be "racist."
Per capita murder rate by state vs racial demographics per state
I've not conducted such an analysis, but I theorize that states with the most Euro-origin population would have the same murder rate as EU countries. Guns are not the relevant variable. Such data analysis would surely be considered verboten and "racist" though.
Interestingly, similar data analysis shows that statistics on Americans of Nordic ancestry (and the communities in which they are the majority) tend to line up very closely with the statistics from Nordic countries. It's as if culturally ingrained values MATTER.
You do need to know about the culture to be influenced by it. My husband was adopted. He didn't even know(other than by strong Norwegian physical similarities) about the large amount of Norwegian dna he got from his bio father/mother till he and our son did dna test from Ancestry when my son was 16 and interested about the genetics from the bio lines.
I, too, am adopted. But I have a lot of traits and preferences that come from my bio parents. For example, I've always loved sci-fi--a common trait in my birthfather's family--despite the fact that no one in my extended adoptive family does.
Well yes that makes sense. We actually connected to my husband's birth father's family. Apparently the bizzare morning thing he does making up silly songs to wake our son up in the morning (since he was a tiny boy, he's 18 now, the son that is. I'm worried on who his new target will be with our son off to college. ;)) is something his birth father did.
I wasn't suggesting that Nordic culture is more pro-gun than any other. Indeed, I wasn't even thinking of the gun aspect at all. I was bringing up another clear indicator of the fact that values (and the behaviors that arise from them) are connected to culture.
I think Clarence Thomas would agree strongly that values are connected to culture. Like most black conservatives, he recognizes that the fatherlessness that LBJ's War on Poverty created for too many black Americans has damaged black culture in horrifying ways.
The racial connection is unavoidable to some degree, but there are many African Americans that live in non urban dystopias whose misuse of firearms rate is, I would wager, about the same as that of whites. Skin color isn’t the determining characteristic, culture is. Many here have touched on some of those cultural issues: no dad at home, drugs, poor and unsafe education, a culture of dependency, etc. The fault lies with Democratic initiatives and politics, mostly, beginning with the Great Society initiatives of the 60’s. As horrible as slavery was (and is today), it would not surprise me if more people died because of this government initiated cultural degradation than during the history of U.S. slavery.
I agree that it's not racial, but it's the closest proxy to culture that we can effectively measure. I did look briefly. #1 and #2 US states by murder rate per capita are MS and AL. #1 and #2 states by % black population are MS and AL. Why can't we talk about this? If white majority states had the highest murder rates per capita we would absolutely be talking about it!
Larry Elder and Candace Owens talk about this as well as other Black conservatives. They are censored by the left-wing media because the Left needs to keep Black people in victimhood because they are their base voters. If you haven't read/listen to Candace Owen's book Blackout you should check it out. She outlines when our government made this diabolical shift to further enslave Black people without them realizing it. Under the leadership of arguably the most racist president Lyndon B Johnson who famously said that his welfare policies would have Black people voting Democrat for the rest of their lives. This was the beginning of using Black people as political pawns. Extremely upsetting and frustrating that we can't break out of this cycle that he created. We are moving in the right direction but the left is always there to thwart. Evil evil people.
what about Jim Crow laws. Interesting number in excess of 90% of people living in Nita housing in NYC work and are not on public assistance. Where would New York get all the low level employees if there was no place for them to live. For the record they pay 30% of their pre tax income for rent and are evicted if they don't pay. That does't not sound like a breeding ground for "welfare Moms" like you suggest
Coleman Hughes would be an excellent addition to this round table. He has compiled an extraordinary amount of evidence around race relations and gun violence and although he skews towards academia-speak he is thoughtful, smart, and consistently debunks the common media narratives that leave out half of the very pertinent information.
While I am an Independent I have to say it's not ignored by Republicans so much as they are shouted down as racist the minute they talk about the real source of the issue. It's cultural of course but the Democrats have made gang banging a strictly black cultural phenomenon and somehow made pointing this out, rather than participating in it, the racist thing. They are really good at BS PR.
I fully agree with you on this. This is a stark and really important point, which I came across in a video by Eric July, a libertarian YouTube commentator whose channel is YoungRippa59, in response to the BLM movement during the Floyd riots. Here's what he said at about 23 minutes in:
"When I was banging, you know, getting in all these fights and stuff like that, doing things that . . . had me on the path to being dead or in jail — just like a lot of the people I grew up with — never once was I accused of not being black, or being “white-washed,” “Uncle Tom” . . . I never was accused of that. Never once was I accused. It wasn’t until I dropped what I was as a leftist, from a political side of things, stopped begging for acceptance and all that sort of loser stuff — that’s when they said that.
"So what does that say? What does that say? Because I choose not to align myself with that, what does that say? I could go beat up, kill — all that — other black people, terrorize, steal from other black people, and they feel like that’s, that’s what it is to be black.
"That in itself shows you it’s a cultural problem. That they don’t want to address because it would require responsibility. And when I say they don’t want to address it I’m not saying there aren’t people who aren’t addressing it, I’m saying that when they look at all of these different things, they treat people like there’s nothing they can do to better their own situations. It’s “I’m the victim”. . . they act as if everything is not their fault. They’re in their situation — and I’m not saying there aren’t people that are actually victims of things — but to sit here, and I’m not willing to do that, sit here and pretend like all black people are innocent, just getting the short end of the stick due to “oppression,” or the history, the legacy of slavery? Like, C’mon dog! No. Lotta y’all in positions you got exactly what you deserve and it’s what you doing, what the folks within your community are doing. But that again requires responsibility. It requires agency." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JocOjvPizzY)
Understanding the cultural problem that has been fostered within urban black communities, and how it breeds a victimhood mindset that results in societal alienation and violence, is key to reducing gun deaths in the U.S....and a host of other problems. If anything, it's racist to refuse to have that honest conversation.
I can only imagine the angst that would accompany a truly clear eyed look into the statistics of gun violence by our populace. It's far easier to blame the guns than formulate an actual plan to reduce the violence. Keep in mind that the race baiters and hustlers making money off the division have no intention of solving the problem. That would eliminate the need for them.
The crazy woke world we live in, recently corrupted by Black Lives Matter’s villainizing the police — the only group standing between homicidal thugs and innocent people in dangerous neighborhoods, has made this proven successful tactic illegal.
Stop and frisk works. If shootings were happening in Chinatown, with gangs of Asians killing each other and innocent people getting hit in the crossfire, would there be the same reaction against police stopping and frisking young Asian men? I don’t think so.
Young Asian men? Try this mental exercise with white males. Imagine that Chicago had almost entirely white guys killing each other, and sometimes innocent bystanders. Mayor Lightfoot would be advocating the most Draconian, tough on crime policies EVER...because we have to protect our community right?
Not doing stop and frisk is immoral. Ask the innocent people living in these crime ridden neighborhoods how they feel about it. If the crime is nearly all being committed in black neighborhoods by black thugs against black people, who should the police stop and frisk — white people or Asian people in other neighborhoods where there is no crime? It’s such a ludicrous argument. And the only people losing out are innocent black people.
Lefties care nothing about minority deaths, they want as many of them dead as possible. That is why they worship Maggie and put a majority of their death factories in minority neighborhoods!
It’s just a natural by product of their overall strategy. Identity politics requires opposition and the left controlled MSM stokes it. They want people to be dependent upon government and politicians. When I grew up in the projects, no one - NO ONE - would ever rat out on the drug dealers. That was their “source” - they needed what they were addicted to. Liberals are the drug dealers of politics and urban blacks are disproportionately addicted to the dependency of government. So…hand out freebies, continue to hand out more and demonize those who (a) have more then you (because they work) and (b) see the game for what it is an oppose you.
Then open the border and see if you can add more of them.
Love your comment just one question how did we vote Brandon in this is so 20th century we left it all behind in 2016 why would we go back to this way of life for Americans it’s very strange
I really don’t think we did. I’m not one who is married to the thought that the vote count was manipulated via machines and double counting. Bit, I am quite certain that cheating went on enough regarding the ballots submitted for counting to turn the election. Lots of nursing home patient ballots filled out by others, ditto the door knockers who intimidated people to turn over the ballots, the collection of ballots,for,people on the rolls but no longer resident or perhaps even alive. Lots of ballots that were ruined bit saved in key precincts. Lots of ballots undated that arrived after Election Day. Courts changing the rules not before, not after, but in the midst of elections.
It didn’t take a whole lot of votes to flip a few states and make a difference.
Read a book called Rigged by Molly Hemingway there was no chain of custody on ballot boxes there was Zuckbucks to tune of $430 million its a lot of money to put into a national election on one side only it was a manipulation a gaslight of our system however it’s not the first time it had been going on since the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of Covid it was a perfect storm for the Democrats it appears now they think they have another perfect storm in 1/6 we not far from Nov let’s see what they can conjure up now Rick
"Do we actually have a national problem, or do we have an urban black on black murder problem?"
I think the answer is obvious. But few want to say it publicly. This is one of many examples of why our politics has become so irrational. Facts are frequently off the table. Only fantasy and make-believe are allowed on many topics.
It's true. Were it not for a small number of urban centers in the US (between about five and nine) and the black victims murdered by (mainly) young black men, the US would have a violent crime and murder rate not that different from many other developed countries. Pace the far left, the problem is not mainly in the South, which is what you'd expect were it a legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It's largely a problem in large cities outside the South, all but one (NYC) ruled by Democratic mayors and machines for decades. This is why law-abiding gun owners in the US deeply and rightly resent the way they're repeatedly demonized for a problem they have virtually no connection with.
Actually, NYC is a great example. Murders shot up to 1,000 over the years of Democrat rule. By the time the 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg ended, it was under. 300. Then that idiot DeBlasio and now this phony law and order guy ex cop takes over with the far left ideals and the numbers are shooting ups again. NYC is actually the proof that left wing Democrat policies kill and conservative policies save
It is true. I think my impression of the data might be a decade old. Gun violence has been slowly rising in more rural areas b/c of the opioid epidemic. That was a mostly non-violent drug epidemic, until recently. And most of the people involved are white, not black.
Yes, there are games you can play like that. It's best to view by city and metro area. The bump up in southern states is still not that big in comparison.
Indeed. Our Congress's incompetency in choosing political expediency over a balanced justice vs. mercy solution to young male homicidal violence is endlessly frustrating. Adult men's refusal to life coach and discipline young men is a root problem.
Pareto's function applies, of course. The sum of the number of gun-involved assaults will be caused by the square root of their sources, be it single black males (7% of the population), in several Zip Codes, by a few types of weapons -- and so on. Single parent homes. Uninvolved fathers. All of these rationally calculated causes are, unfortunately, beyond the reach of the woke blue city governments.
The real problem is the social programs that intentionally trap people in awful situations so that they can be dependent upon their political massahs who want nothing to improve. They stole anger and division - it’s like political fentanyl. And they strike out. The miasma that results from liberal programs is destructive. And most violence is not between unknown people. It’s between people you know or live in your neighborhood. The left doesn’t want their clients to improve their lives. The thing they fear most is an educated black man who is married with children and who actually lives at home. That’s their death nell
Jon, you are right but no matter what we say it is racist. The mainstream media is no help when them amplify white shoots black news just to show they are woke...IT is sad to see so many inner city people killed by their neighbors. How to stop it? One idea: If you are 17 or 18 and not in school or working full-time then you must serve 2 yrs in the military or Dept of Natural Resources teams. No matter your color. 2 years of learning about team work, trust, other races, and more. Ends with 2 years of free college or advanced military/Air Force/navy position. Get the streets cleared of the young people and start our future leaders out on the right foot. Call them USA 1st TEAM Members ... Get on the team and avoid laying on the sidewalk
In my experience it is the military that no longer embraces that. The services won't commit with pending charges and the prosecutor's won't commit without a guarantee of enlistment.
No idea, but they ought to give them a chance if it is a misdeamor. Free food, free insurance, and much more. My son is a Major in the Army and he has seen some rough kids become true leaders in his units.
It is the opposite of what you say. 56% of all gun homicides are black-on-black.
Furthermore, 30-40% of gun homicides are unsolved, from year to year, but most of the victims are black, hence likely most of these are also b-on-b. Easily 60-70% of all gun homicides in the U.S. (10-12K/year) are black (5K to 7K per year). And the numbers are rising because of poor or no law enforcement in the ghetto neighborhoods has become the standard.
I think that Bari Weiss is still on the liberal side of the fence, albeit slowly waking up. Someone should take her out target practicing or hunting, and maybe she'll start to be more pro-2A.
"As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children is guns."
FALSE (this data, widely shared recently, includes 18 and 19 year olds who are not children)
"enhanced background checks for minors"
FALSE (minors, as in 17 year olds and younger, cannot legally buy firearms)
We really need to ask ourselves "what is an adult" in the USA in 2022.
18 or 21? At what age can Americans enlist in the military; buy tobacco products; buy a long arm; buy a handgun; buy alcohol; decide that they want to medically alter their gender? It's inconsistent now.
T, I've been thinking about adult age as well this last week. It seems to me, if an 18 year old can't be trusted with a gun, they also shouldn't be trusted with a ballot.
Thank you for saying that. How can anyone, anywhere, at anytime have an honest and effective conversation when basic factual knowledge is missing and/or incorrect? It’s like one has to have a checklist of fundamental knowledge and walk through it before engaging in dialogue. One of the consequences of the Age of Information we, as a society, have yet to truly grapple with, I suppose.
Well, one thing that was different was that semiautomatic rifles with 30 round magazines (M1 Carbine, WW2 surplus) were sold all over the place, including hardware stores. No background checks or other post-Gun Control Act of 1968 restrictions. Guns don't seem to be the relevant variable.
The biggest change since then has been the decline of the family unit, in the form of fatherless families and the impact on sons, resulting from deliberately harmful liberal policies that seek to replace family and community with government. This is abundantly evident in urban centers.
I might add to your comment, Neil, that for all of my adult life I have watched increasingly violent protests become common place, and a general attitude that does not respect our form of goverment.
During the same period, attendance at churches, temples and mosques has suffered huge loses of congregants.
I do not know if, as I rapidly approach my 80s, I will ever see a democratic Republic worthy of respect. Thus I worry about the country in which my children and grandchildren will live.
Adult in what sense ? Some are 30 and they still have the mindset of a 12 year old . Don't know what they are putting in the water these days , but it sure ain't doing much good
So, given your point on what constitutes a legal age, T Reid - does it really matter? How about learning how to use a firearm, regardless of being either 18 or 21? In reading the interview the most resonant of the responses to me was the one dealing with simple registration and insurance of firearms, as in the purchase of automobiles. While I don't adhere to that exactly - the point I want to make is that it takes weeks to learn how to drive a car (it can kill people too), you need to take a course, and you need such training to get a license. And you need said license to walk into a showroom to buy one.
Why can't that be the way forward in purchasing a weapon? Even at the age of eighteen?
Everybody here is talking about black on black violence. Okay.
But what about what's happening a hundred times a minute in this country - somebody with no training (black or white) checks into a gun store or show, and half an hour later (!) walking out the proud owner of a weapon he or she has no idea how to use? Not understanding the responsibility? With all the ammunition they may not really need?
Civil Liberties cannot be licensed and taxed. Imagine needing government permission to vote or even make a post here.
Rights do have reasonable restrictions and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is already easily the most proscribed of all our civil liberties.
Any possible malfeasance with a firearm is already criminalized. But we enforce and prosecute these laws weakly, at best.
For instance, knowingly lying on the background check to buy a gun is punishable by 10 years in prison. There were over 100,000 attempts by denied parties to lie on Form 4473 to buy a gun a few years ago. The United States of America prosecuted...twelve (12). Get serious, drop the hammer.
Having said that, bad people are going to do bad things. In Norway a nutjob played along with all their gun laws and checks and regulations and killed more students than in any US mass murder in our history.
With respect - you did not read my comment through. I did not say I endorsed registering or taxing. I am merely comparing driving a car that could be a weapon with having a gun that is one. If we have to learn how to drive a car in order to buy one then I humbly suggest that we should learn how to responsibly own and use a firearm before we buy one, regardless of minimum age.
I am emphatically not trying to take anyone’s right to own a weapon - just pointing out the abject irony of making people learn how to drive but not doing the same when handling something that is designed to kill.
Respectfully, I did read your comment comparing a specific named individual civil liberty to a regulated commercial transaction (buying a car for use on public roads). They are definitely not in the same category.
I advocate and practice responsible exercise of civil liberties like the right to keep and bear arms, the right to vote, the right to free speech, free exercise of religion, etc.
Now we can red-flag Garlands “domestic terrorist” parents for attend school board meetings but we can’t red-flag a traitor like Swalwell admitting he was “sleeping with the enemy” Fang, Fang, Chinese intel agent.
And they, the government wonder why some don’t trust them?
There have been HUNDREDS of millions of people killed by tyrannical governments. A terrible year for gun violence in the US sees 20,000 deaths - of which roughly 100% are committed by criminals who don’t care about the law. These discussions are exactly what people not interested in actually solving problems sit around and discuss. We’re always one generation from giving up our freedoms and apparently 10 seconds of news cycle away from forgetting all the lessons of what happens when the government has a monopoly on force. We are a sad people.
That is specifically and exactly the purpose of the constitution It is the bounds placed on government to restrict them from infringing upon those rights which are innately ours. We have everything we possibly need. Except in an era where "smart" people actually believe these are "not absolute" because it makes them feel better, while turning over more and more power to people who have proven over and over that their ability to fail literally knows no bounds...
50 Christians were just gunned down in their church in Nigeria recently, where was the coverage of that atrocity. (oops, not one of the protected classes).
Red Flag laws are unconstitutional. No crime has been committed. An abusive accuser can go to court without confronting the accused. The process to recover one's guns is ill-defined (prove one's innocence?), expensive (ever hire an attorney?), and very time consuming. If someone is psychologically disturbed, there is an involuntary commitment process that is constitutional unlike "red flag" processes. Why not use that process to get help for the person?
I agree. But as a practical matter the involuntary commitment process has no teeth. It is virtually impossible to commit someone for any significant period of time.
So, perhaps the mental health laws, that the Dems eliminated, need to be re examined, and psych hospitals need to return. There are people on the streets who are a danger to society, and need to be controlled, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The problem with Dem solutions, is that they seek to control the people who aren't part of the problem.
Hence the demise of SF, that was the subject of the last, most excellent, CS post.
I’ll also add that minors that are involuntarily committed, which is still very hard since many states allow minors as young as 13 to make their own healthcare decisions, often have their record sealed. And of course, any minor that agrees to voluntary commitment (which is often coerced) does not have their hospitalization records shared or distributed. These are your high risk, mentally unstable juveniles that eventually age into adults and have zero trouble buying guns because their mental health records occurred as minors.
I think "red flag" laws may have their place, despite their potential for abuse. However, I don't see any liberals willing to compromise on any of our proposals. For example, you want mandatory background checks and red flag laws, I want national CCW reciprocity and DOE funding for gun safety and shooting clubs in schools.
When Democrats ask for compromise on this issue what they mean is capitulation. (And why should they compromise. Our team's representatives are so weak kneed they will give away the farm and get nothing in return.)
I agree with all of that. And I don’t know what the answer is. I unfortunately live in a bluer than blue state (WA) where we have a red flag law and I looked into our state’s stats. In 2021, there were 34 red flag requests submitted and 30 of those were submitted by police officers who had encountered the subjects and subsequently submitted the request. I had not considered this scenario but I see how this is a situation that may make sense. I also see the threat of putting even more power in a state’s hands but law enforcement frequently encounter situations in which nobody is charged but the likelihood of repeat violence is high (think DV situations in which the victim won’t press charges, a suicidal person talked down, etc). I’m no expert on the process but I guess I just envision some kind of process akin to reporting suspected child abuse to CPS. Definitely potential for abuse, but may save some lives too.
I don't think it's fair that I compromise to change laws and make it harder for people to exercise a Constitutional right just to get the Democrats to enforce the laws that they already voted to put on the books.
I agree that red flag laws are fraught with opportunity for abuse but I think there are scenarios in which they can be a good short-term solution. Having someone involuntarily committed is dependent upon mental health beds being available, of which there is currently a major National shortage of. I work for a hospital system and patients often wait weeks for an available bed or are boarded in an ED for days until being released. The system does not function as ideally as we’d all like.
On the one hand, I think that would work well for determining whether people in the 18-20 range can buy guns, it begins to look too much like a social credit system if applied to adults.
In the new world of cancel culture - I cannot support Red Flags. A family hates you. A divorce spouse gets angry. A angry co worker decides to destroy you. The FBI targets you. Yes that can’t possibly end well. The 2nd amendment is about our right to defend our nation against foreign adversaries. How about we actually start enforcing the laws we have on the books. Or is that too inconvenient for Soros funded DAs.
In my view, Bruce, the preamble "A well regulated Militia" all the way through to the "security of a free state" appears to mean (at the time this was written in the late 18th century) the right for a citizen to bear arms in order to join a military force in defending the country from an invading foreign power (ie Britain, France, or Spain..) when needed.
Domestic tyranny, if you want to call it that, would not arrive in serious force until 1860. And that, probably claimed more by the Confederate side. But that's another story.
The right to own weapons was a necessity in. Colonial America. For both food and protection. The militia line is a throwaway. The notion that the right was “owned” by the sovereign would be laughed at. Then and now.
Sorry Bruce - ‘a well regulated militia’ was not a throwaway. I disagree. It’s the preamble - it sets up the right to bear arms. It’s the reason why we should and must have the right to have weapons in the first place - otherwise why would the Founders put it there?
Why have the word militia in there at all?
You appear to view the 2nd Amendment through 21st century lens - as do many here. You cannot say with any certainty that the ‘militia’ connotation was a throwaway line - the men who wrote this were a hell of a lot more serious than that.
Lee, if the right to own a weapon was organic and predated the Constitution, that right didn’t come from government. In fact, the weapons of militiamen were their personal property- not provided by the militia company. You’ve got it completely backward.
Interesting comment. If the right to bear arms predates the Constitution - then why is the 2nd Amendment of said Constitution held as sacrosanct?
The only right I know of that could possible be construed as 'organic' is breathing (sexual intercourse might be another).
The right to bear arms was indeed a granted right - by the designers of a Constitution that structures the government we have today (for good or for bad..)
The question then becomes, as has been discussed for the last 230 years - is what kind of right? A controlled one? Or a free for all?
I don't recall where I read the comment or who, but someone said reading the *drafts* of the Constitution indicated a different reading. Don't know anything about it, myself, so there is that.
Historically not really. If you review when it was written and in the context of the times - it was always about our ability to defend the land and ensure “the security of a free state”. I suspect the domestic tyranny element could arguably be supported in a more current times analysis when there are military grade weapons being issued to local law enforcement but I truly do not believe that we need to defend against our government (although J6 political persecutions don’t bear that out generally does it). There are other rights which support us should we be targeted by our government in the Bill of Rights as well. However, to your point, we have the right to bear arms and defend ourselves and be secure in our homes from any enemy foreign or domestic. Period. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to reply in depth but I think you take a very cramped and unrealistic view of the historical antipathy of our founders to government power
Excellent discourse. I would point out four barely related points:
- Many of the weapons used by the nascent Americans during the Revolutionary War were privately owned. From muskets to ships; so they were indeed privately owned “weapons of war”.
- If one were to subtract the daily violence in Chicago, Philadelphia etc committed by criminals, using illegally acquired firearms while committing multiple felonies, the US’s gun violence rate is actually quite low. Criminals don’t obey laws and passing more won’t change that.
- If we want to protect our schools, they need to be secured in a meaningful manner. There are 2,300 Capitol Police protecting 535 members of Congress or about 4 police for every member. And all they do is spend money our money.
- Finally, the Second Amendment follows the First for a reason. It secures our right to Free Speech which is among the first things tyranny’s restrict. Another first thing they do is to to disarm the people.
The last few years have proven to me that the government WILL NOT protect us against violent people. We are on our own. In addition on many issues giving in one inch to the left is never enough. For instance we started by insuring homosexuals were treated fairly, now we have drag queen story hour. I don’t trust our govt and I certainly don’t trust the left.
I am disappointed that as horrific as the Uvalde killings were, we as a society still do not have the courage to talk about what I believe is the cause of all of this violence, that is, the family and its breakdown. Why are we not brave enough to discuss the Uvalde shooter’s missing parents? Children cannot raise themselves and yet we expect that to happen. Why? What happens to parentless children? How can we intervene to help them? What can be done to teach parents to parents? We will live with the consequences of parents who do not parent until we make the choice to have this very hard conversation.
For many years, parents would often teach their children about guns and both how to shoot one and respect for one. Now they take the children to see Drag Queen shows and wonder "why are my kids so fucked up?"
My husband teaches Hunters Education & Safety for Department of Fish and Wildlife in his spare time and he firmly believes that participation in hunting as a child, even just tagging along with an adult, lays a strong foundation for understanding what guns are capable of. Many kids see guns used in cartoons or on TV and do not comprehend their seriousness. Witnessing the impact on an animal (in an ethical manner of course) offers a healthy dose of respect for guns.
From a historical perspective, guns have been around for a very long time and teenagers have had access as well. In fact, it was probably easier for a teen to get a gun decades ago than now and nobody thought twice about teens carrying around loaded weapons. And yet we didn’t have mass shootings of the nature that we do now. Errant, accidental shootings from kids being dumb, sure but not intentional mass homicide. Something changed and it sure wasn’t teenagers’ ability to access guns. We must look to societal breakdown and mental health issues today.
It worked before. It doesn't work now. What changed?
If your computer stopped working correctly when you installed a new piece of software, you wouldn't start your troubleshooting by checking the power cord.
If your relationship with your wife went downhill when you started working more, you wouldn't think, "gee, it must be hormonal". (Unless you're a complete clod.)
When teenagers use guns for decades, then suddenly start shooting up schools for no apparent reason, believing it's a problem of gun access is stupid. The guns didn't change; the teenagers did.
To be clear, fixing teenagers is far more difficult than banning guns, but not fixing the family structures that give us teenage shooters is going to destroy our society in countless other ways too. In that sense, the random mass shooters are just the canaries in the coal mine of America.
Excellent Podcast and my total agreement CG, though a few things left unsaid. This is perhaps the biggest. The breakdown of Family is seen in two branches of the shootings epidemic: 1) Lone, disturbed killer (most often young white males with minimal or non-existent Adult male -as in mature responsible father, and 2) gang shootings in urban areas where youth get their stripes on the street because try as she might the mother can’t hold THAT much together when her “man” is always absent. These are much more Black mothers with minimal income and many kids. I’ve regarded these Black moms as hero’s as they instill what values their kids do get, kind of against all odds.
So to the excellent podcast, I’d have begged to add another message: “Men (black and white), where the hell are you? Get your ass to your family and get your sons their moral compass even if you have to bring them to a local mission or support while you work your ass off at a bad, low paying job. You’ll rise up and be a beacon to the boy and he’ll escape. Go to your church and they’ll show you”. I know it’s tough as hell, but you fathered them.
My comments come from thoughts that looking to the government to make a social illness go away, and counting on crooked politicians who’ll sabotage a Bill that even they agree with just to get a political advantage is not only barking up the wrong tree, but foolish.
The guns are inanimate objects. Blaming them is childish but regulating their use can be appropriate if it’s done prudently. The biggest hole I see is the lack of accountability for them. If I own a gun and it’s used in a crime both the user and I should pay a price that tells everyone “don’t let this happen to you”.
The Uvalde shooter had parents, albeit maybe imperfect ones. He had been living with his mother until recently when he had a falling out with her. He then moved in with his grandparents and had a falling out with his grandmother . He then shot her in the face and went to the elementary school where she worked and you know the rest. My mother used to say when you are having problems with the whole world, it's probably not the world. As for the shooter's mental illness or red flags, there was no evidence which would have disqualified him under either theory. There was some abuse of animals on his social media and he made comments within the last two months on social media but all of that came to light after the fact. Some people are just bad. Very, very bad.
Nope, he was living with his grandmother because his mother was a drug addict. So basically she was not in his life, and who knows where the father is. Reports say he was off making money for the family in anther state, but he never sent that money and this kid hasn't seen him since he was a baby. So basically a deadbeat Dad.
He also had a looooooong track record of violence and mental health issues, including checking into a mental health facility inpatient, and those were not on his record.
Why do you say his mother was an addict? Yes he was living with his grandmother but only recently from what I have read. Also my understanding is that the father was in his life. Both parents gave statements to the press almost immediately. And how do you know he had a lo-o-ong history of violence and mental health issues, much less that he had checked into an inpatient mental health facility that does not appear of record? All of this is completely contrary to what I read.
"Reportedly, Reyes struggled with drug use and kicked her son out of her home, which forced Salvador Ramos to move in with his grandparents."
"Ramos' classmates said he would engage in fights and threaten fellow students. They also stated that Ramos displayed disturbing behavior over the past two years, where he threatened a classmate and stalked others. Meanwhile, his friends told reporters that Salvador Ramos was distraught and often lashed out."
And I know a lot of people who struggle with drug use, much of it prescription, that do not have kids that have shot up a couple of classrooms of elementary school kids. From what I have read, from reliable sources, he was an asshole who treated people badly. That does not make him mentally ill nor does it justify blaming his mother, or the police, or for that matter the guns. Let's blame the person at fault - the shooter. But if that doesn't work for you let's blame the first person shooter games I would wager he played. He went for head shots.
I'm not blaming his actions solely on his mom, but I do blame her for drug use and I do blame the cops for standing outside and arresting parents while the killer massacred kids. I don't think drug users are horrible people but they are destructive and bad parents. Has accountability gone right out the window? "Well she drinks a lot and kicks her troubled son out of the house to do drugs, but that doesn't make her a bad parent!" YES, it does.
You have got to be kidding me. A sports news website, based in India, that derives its revenue from advertisements? That is your source? Do you believe everything on the internet?
Current failure to prosecute gun law violators is rampant. New York had an effective means of getting guns off the street and out of the hands of criminals - the so called “stop and frisk” law. After that was declared unconstitutional, gun crimes and murders exploded.
Law enforcement and prosecutors must aggressively put violators away, rather than pleading out the gun charges to get an easy guilty plea.
In Chicago, less than 50% of homicide cases by gunfire are cleared; car jacking, usually gun related, has less than 10% convicted.
So, the first thing, enforce current laws aggressively. We might be surprised at how that works out!
Any reason you didn't talk to Dr. John Lott? This is his area of expertise, probably more so than your two guests.
I noted that Rajiv seems to understand the context of the Second Amendment better than most Americans: distrust of the government. And why is that so hard to grasp these days? Over the last 20 years, the government has given us LOADS of reasons to not trust them. One would be stupid to assume that if the right to self defense was eliminated that our elected representatives would start acting like angels. No, they would quickly escalate their abuses of power, and in very short order we would have a dictatorship in place. Oh, we might have elections in which 96.6% of the people vote for the person already in power.
But let's address what no one really wants to address: the increase in fatherless families brought on by democrat parties in urban areas. That's about as close to a social laboratory as you can get since almost all urban areas have been run by Democrats for decades. That's one variable you don't have to worry about. That will take a couple of generations to fix, if anyone ever has the fortitude to take it on: which I highly doubt.
I would second the John Lott recommendation. I cannot even fathom how the left envisions this surrendering of weapons would go for this very reason. Folks that don’t trust the government and own several guns often don’t have them all registered to them and at least in our case, have them stored numerous different places. Would this be a door to door search and seizure? And what army is going to volunteer for that job? We thought summer of 2020 riot control was dangerous for law enforcement, it would be small potatoes compared to that task. The Australia approach referenced in the podcast would never work in the U.S. and any attempt would be violating more than just the 2nd amendment.
Of course there was. John Lott would have actually presented a contrary view. Instead she did what the NY Times trained her to do: get a Leftist and a moderate and say you're going to have a debate. Then you spend the whole time asking the moderate which of the Leftist proposals his side (which he doesn't really represent anyway) can get on board with.
Here we go again. A discussion about guns and “gun violence” without a balanced advocacy. An anti-gun nut paired with someone who “understands” people who have strong feelings about gun ownership. And more Orwellian “Newspeak”. I guess Bari wasn’t liberal enough for The NY Times. But that doesn’t mean she’s not liberal. This whole article is a setup.
First of all, the use of the term “gun violence”. Guns are an inanimate object. They don’t get violent. But if they do, I suppose we have “knife and fork violence” that causes deadly health diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Or in the news room, how about “paper violence”? After all, the false narratives of the MSM gets a lot of people all riled up causing them to get violent. Ask Steve Scaliese. They played a big role in the 2020 summer riots in concert with their Democrat friends to try to undermine the election. Oh, and paper causes paper cuts too….
The pen is mightier than the sword. The sword, in the wrong hands can cause grievous damage, so maybe it requires licensure too. How about the purveyor of words, like publishers of newspapers, magazines, blogs, Substack, tv shows, movies, music, etc? They certainly are the vessel that shapes the culture, which can cause grievous damage. Why not license them? I’d love to.
Think about the effect a corrupt media has - causing all sorts of false information to circulate to help or harm, candidates who in turn have tremendous power. Who controls positions in the dog catchers office to the White House is affected by the media, why shouldn’t they be licensed and regulated?
Ah….but you NEVER hear anything about that.
I am a responsible gun owner and am very careful about my weapons. I never wanted a gun until I had a business dispute where the losing party literally threatened to kill me. He shot up what he thought was my apartment. He took over a business with a load of weapons - hand guns, rifles, weapon style knives, bullet proof vests and the like and held off the police for hours.
And then? The liberal judge gave him a conditional guilty plea attached to a few years of probation. If he behaves during probation, his guilty plea is expunged and he’s free to buy more weapons. No record of his crime. Liberals like that. Why ruin his life for one silly incident?
He has enough money to pay someone to do his dirty work and travels with the kind of people who would.
So I apply for a concealed carry permit with the NYPD. Denied. Why? Well, if you see him harassing you, call the police. As if you can call the police in between the shot and it’s impact….
It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to ultimately get my permit. And I’m not just an honest citizen, I’m an officer of the court in five states.
Then I went to apply for one in NJ since my family has a home there as well. NJ is funny. First you go to the chief of police in your town. He can just say no. If he says yes, then a Superior Court judge can say no. When you get to the PD, the PD almost always says no. Period. NJ issues next to no licenses other than to retired law enforcement officers. And I say, well, I’ll appeal. And the chief reminds me that when I go to renew my NYPD li mess, I have to disclose that I was denied an application by another state, which is grounds for non-renewal in NY. So, with a smirk on his face, he said I should think twice before handing him my application. He threatened my NY license if I dared to try to defend myself from a violent felon. Amazing.
Now this violent felon has mental problems. Established mental problems.
That’s the thing that Bari and her guests - and all anti-gun nuts - never address.
As to the mass shootings, almost without fail, the person has mental illness. No one - NO ONE - in the anti gun world even thinks to ask “why is America producing so much mental illness? Why are so many people feeling dissociated from society? Why are so many people so VIOLENT, with bats, knives, guns, pushing people into traffic or in front of trains?”
Perhaps it’s because all of the above is a product of liberal policies and an examination of them will never do.
LBJ’s Great Society has undermined the nuclear family unit. Free money, food stamps/snap cards, housing allowances - you want to get out of your mother’s house? Have a baby!
No father in the house? No example to set for young boys growing up. Mothers too busy working to watch them or worse, mothers too stoned on crack or meth watching tv as they use their snap cards for cool ranch Doritos and soda. Liberals have purposefully entrapped “people of color” (another made up new age Newspeak phrase - do you wear jeans of blue or a shirt of white?) in urban plantations overrun with crime, violence, drugs and lousy schools, intentionally denying them real opportunity because they want them dependent on them for their daily needs which they gladly trade for their votes. They want them just where they are. Wading in drugs, violence and worse. It’s the softer version of slavery. Some POC see this, and that scares the daylights out of libs.
This is the result of the Great Society and all that followed in its wake and it’s no mistake. So much of the death by gun results from these dysfunctional cities and neighborhoods, but they refuse to do anything about it, other than doling out more freebies. Now they give up all pretense - equal opportunity (equality) is not enough. Now they want equality of outcome (equity).
Sex is trivialized - it’s transformed from the most tender manifestation of love to a physical act. Those who oppose guns have no problem in defending partial birth abortion. Oh, it’s just a small percentage of abortions. Hmmmm. Death by rifle is only 4% of gunshot death. Uh-oh….can’t have that conversation.
Movies, tv, music, video games - most of which are produced by liberal coastal elites - are filled with violence. Look at all the violence in the Marvel Universe movies that get mindlessly churned out - all by former family company Disney. Time was sex never came up on tv. Now, you can turn on Peacock by NBC and the first three lines of the first episode of the remake of Queer as Folk are all related to a receiving partner asking for his rectum to be violated more and more and more. Go watch a 10 year old episode of Law and Order and you’ll see voluptuous women in their underwear or even worse naked but mostly hidden engaging in simulated love acts.
Turn on the radio or your streamer and listen to the dominant music of the day - rap and gangster rap and all of the violent messages it carries. And you wonder why octogenarians from the 60s are still touring? When was the last time a true musical group which wrote their own stuff and performed it came to the fore? I saw Billy Joel’s Last Play At Shea and he marveled that he could sell out a 55,000 seat stadium without having had any new music in 30 years.
The left has proudly announced how they play the politic of identity which by its very nature turns large groups of people into opponents. They use divisive language like “pay your fair share” even as a huge part of their base pay noth8ng for their share and then they double down by using the 1% and lead people into the green monster of envy and anger because people who work hard have nice things while people on the dole do not.
And you wonder why there’s violence in urban centers causing the highest proportion of murder by any weapon and especially guns? And you wonder why it continues and spreads when you turn the police into enemies? Why crime escalates when police pull back as a result?
Liberals NEVER consider anything but guns when violent crime arises. They don’t examine their role in it.
They change the subject.
Assault weapons? None are for sale to civilians but they keep talking about it. An AR-15 has the same capabilities as a hunting rifle sold in 1950. It just has a different look to resemble a military weapon. That’s all the libs need to LIE about the rifles. And oh, of course, forget about the fact that only 4% of death by firearm comes from any kind of long gun. In 1965 Charles Whitman shot dozens of people from a tower in Texas with a rifle that was more powerful than an AR-15.
But we didn’t have so many people thinking they needed guns back then. And we didn’t have so many crazy people shooting up schools and night clubs. Yet the left refuses to ask why so many people are angry and dissociated. They just yell guns guns guns.
I'm not trying to be nit picky, I just don't see the evidence that you do for the idea that Australia is, overall, an equally or considerably more violent society than America.
The most important statistic I know of for overall criminality is the total incarceration rate. On that count, USA vs Australia: 629 vs 167.
I'm a gun owner and staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. This is probably the most balanced discussion on the topic that I have ever come across. Well done, Bari.
You must have read this in your sleep. No discussion of what liberals call the. “Root causes”. No advocate who values gun ownership, just someone who has studied the subject and “Understands” us. Nah.
R.D, I am also a gun owner, and we read two different interviews. The one I read was a bunch of questions asking why conservatives won't get behind "common sense gun laws" that the Left proposes, and none about why the liberals won't get behind "common sense gun laws" that the Right proposes (things like gun safety in schools, national CCW reciprocity, etc...)
A moderate and a progressive, by definition, can't have a real debate about any issue.
More importantly any discussion should include - probably as the primary issue - why there is so much more mental illness and societal alienation that causes so many people to wig out
I think we have to move the age for gun ownership, military service, and voting to 21. If your brain isn't fully formed, you shouldn't be doing any of those things.
The problem is, neither party's base will let them do it. The NRA wants to initiate kids as young as 8 or 10 on firearms; some Democrats want 16- year- olds to vote. That's the problem with the two party system we now have; the most partisan call the shots --what's best for the country doesn't have a chance.
I'm up for that too Susan. If the Democrats don't trust them with a gun, I don't trust them with a ballot. After all, the pen is mightier than the sword.
I disagree. The military is an excellent option for many teenagers. Both my best friend and my brother enlisted at the age of 17 with parental consent and it was the best path for both of them. I can only imagine what kind of havoc they would have wreaked on society had they been forced to languish in the real world until 21. They likely would have hung with the wrong crowd, acquired criminal records, and gone on to be at best, leachers of the system and at worst, doing hard time. They are now an RN and a local sheriff deputy. You are right that their brain was not fully formed at 18, but the military offered a disciplined structure that kept them busy and out of trouble until it was fully formed.
I was drafted, and I have to say the military was very good for the development of character. I was pretty good going in, if I must say, but I was better going out.
Licensed gun owners have a lower arrest rate than the police. If you want to solve the gun violence problem, enforce existing gun laws and actually prosecute the offenders. Operation Exile in Richmond was started in 1997 and was very successful (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg66358/html/CHRG-106hhrg66358.htm) in that it directly targeted criminals by adding a mandatory federal sentence when a criminal was caught with a gun. Richmond is a predominately black city; the majority of criminals and victims were black, leading to a disproportionate number of young black men being incarcerated through this program. Although Operation Exile significantly reduced gun violence; it raised disparate impact concerns that eventually led the city to abandon the program.
Therein lies one of the biggest problems in fighting gun violence - our politicians and court system need to identify and address the problem, whether it’s criminality or mental illness, then have the gonads to follow through on treatment or incarceration. Don’t hold your breath.
I note that Bari & Co. skirted around the demographic component of gun violence. If you can’t talk about that, what’s the point of all this chin pulling about the Second Amendment?
Inner city gangbangers aren’t purchasing their weapons at gun shows. Almost all are obtained illegally. There are laws on the books that would enable the authorities to crack down on that illegal market, but for various reasons—bureaucratic inertia and progressive ideology—they’re not rigorously enforced. Congress can pass call the laws it likes but unless they’re enforced, they’re perfectly useless.
I have a hard time accepting that progressives are sincere in their desire to reduce gun violence. Let’s just say that their anti-police rhetoric and policies are not helpful. Demanding new laws and regulations while reviling law enforcement betrays a certain disorganization of thought.
When one considers that almost all gun violence in this country is perpetrated by criminals or head cases, it seem a bit wooly-headed to spend so much time obsessing over America’s “gun culture.” Relative to the number of firearms in private hands, the gun homicide rate is not excessive. So perhaps it would be better to concentrate on the actual, real-world problem instead of engaging in social science theorizing of dubious utility.
It would be no complex task to secure our schools against mass shootings. Simply treat it as a military problem and identify the passive and active defense measures needed to prevent or repel an attack. It’s not that the solution is complicated, it’s that many people refuse to accept a grim reality: If a shooter gets inside a school, the result will be a massacre if there’s no on-site armed defense.
While I don’t oppose them, enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks & etc. are not to be relied upon. They’re too dependent on an elephantine bureaucracy that lets too much fall through the cracks. Ditto spending more on mental health: It’s hard to imagine a less efficient, less cost-effective method of preventing mass shootings.
Finally, let’s quit comparing America to other countries like Britain, Germany, etc. that actually are very different from our own. By and large, we can’t solve our gun violence problem by importing foreign laws and regulations. What Australia did would never be tolerable or even workable here. And as the pandemic revealed, Australia is not exactly the model of a liberal democracy.
Rajiv Sethi: "I wouldn't shed any tears if we got rid of the Second Amendment."
Of course. You're a liberal professor at Barnard (a part of Columbia University in New York City). If you actually said anything supportive of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you'd probably be swarmed and harassed out of your job by angry know-nothing college students supported and backed by the woke administrators.
Seriously. Academics can never be considered objective. Bari has done an exemplary job of illustrating what happens to rational, open minded academics. They shouldn't even be part of the discussion, or described as 'experts', as they have very significant restrictions on what they can opine, without putting their job in jeopardy.
I mean, I don't care what attachment Rajiv Sethi does or doesn't have to the Second Amendment? Why does that matter? Who the hell is he to decide whether my rights, which generations of my ancestors have been defending in this country since its founding, are personally pleasing to him or not?
Reciting that type of catechism is a requirement for him to keep his job.
It's like during 2015-2020 when every liberal -- politician, actor, newscaster, commentator -- was required to say "I hate Donald Trump!" before proceeding with whatever drivel they were to spout.
His overall view was that while he personally wouldn’t shed a tear, but that in the real world the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 2A cannot be wished away. He said that repeal through amendment was the only intellectually honest approach to those who believe the 2A is some fossil from a prior time. His own suggested policies accept the current state of the law as well as the fact that repeal is a fantasy.
And, for what it’s worth, Barnard is an autonomous part of Columbia. It has its separate administration (from President on down) and should not be confused with, say, the Law or Medical schools, let alone departments within the University structure. Does its faculty tend to be of the Left? Sure, but it’s more persuasive to make a reasoned argument than deploy a label as if that alone were a drop mic moment “proving” your point
While this was a great interview, I believe it would have been even better had they discussed the third rail of gun control, that of the horrendous number of young black males who die each year from black on black gun murders.
I just pulled this factoid up from a Reuters article regarding the rise of gun deaths during 2020:
'Among African Americans, the rate was 26.6 deaths per 100,000, a 39.5% increase over 2019. For white Americans, the rate was 2.2 per 100,000.'
Do we actually have a national problem, or do we have an urban black on black murder problem? But dealing with the horrendous problem of gun murders for black male youth is too hard, and would involve lots of accusations of racism, so we tend to ignore the real progress that could be made if we isolated and concentrated on it.
I'm of the belief that the motivation for mentally ill people to carry out mass murders is the issue that needs to be dealt with more than the access to weapons, but that's just mho.
For the 2020 FBI crime states, 53% of US murders where the race of the offender was known were committed by blacks. Who comprise 13% of the US population (and most of these are committed by males, so 6.5% of the US population). This is a VASTLY disproportionate murder rate per capita. It is never spoken of. A problem not acknowledged cannot be solved.
"Who comprise 13% of the US population (and most of these are committed by males, so 6.5% of the US population)."
Yes, and considering that the vast majority of black people, including black males, are NOT crminals the number of black people committing the majority of crimes is really something more like 1-2%. There is a very small, incredibly violent group of gang bangersw commiting most of the gun violence in this country. Remove them and we are safer than Denmark when it comes to gun homicide stats.
Though eminently well-documented, this is not widely understood. Cops are doing their job (mostly) and making arrests. Prosecutors / DA's need to prosecute every violent crime, every gun law violation (and any sort of malfeasance one could possible do with a gun is already a crime). I wonder why big money leftists have taken such an interest in DA's (like the one in NYC and the recently removed one in San Francisco) who are soft on crime? They WANT chaos, it aids their march towards power.
Exactly. Prosecutors have, for decades now, been in the habit of dropping gun charges and any sentencing enhancement for using a gun to commit a crime. As a result, those who have demonstrated the propensity to shoot or threaten to shoot people end up back on the streets in a short time, instead of being locked up for a very long time.
I would be in favor of INTENSE sentencing enhancement for the use of a gun to commit a crime; say, for example, an automatic ten-year enhancement, on top of whatever penalty they get for the crime they committed. If the gun criminals were locked up for long periods, there would be fewer of them on the street.
But that can't happen for the same reason that prosecutors end up dropping gun charges: the results, in practice, appear to be too "racist."
Spot on. So, here we are. Most murders are happening in Democrat-run urban areas. These policies won't change.
The policies will NEVER change as long as those areas are run by Democrats. I'm not even convinced that Republicans have the cujones to make the necessary changes, should they somehow be elected in those cities. We need LEADERSHIP, and there is none to be found.
Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the land and that hasn't stopped the murders. Of course, it doesn't help having an idiot for a mayor.
You're absolutely right! Do politicians and the academe think these young black men care about the second amendment; the NRA? Those arguments are a distraction from the real issues that (sshhh!) can not be discussed. We also have the disenfranchised white middle class overly medicated kids with mental disorders raised by parents and, in many cases, grandparents. These folks live in fear and denial and suddenly everyone is shocked when disaster strikes. It brings me very little solace to compare our stats with that of El Salvador and Guatemala.
Agreed!
It should be, if you are convicted of a crime involving a gun, life without parole.
I agree completely. Let out all the people who are locked up for merely possessing drugs (our utterly failed "War on Drugs" and put the violent criminals in there instead.
I'm with Celia with one exception. No life if committing a crime with a gun. Here in Los Angeles if I shot an intruder in my bedroom, I'd be in jail for life. Otherwise, there is a great deal of frankness on this issue with Celia and so many others.
Yeah Celia, when?
Yes. Celia is one of the most sensible people here.
T R...seems to be the sick part...buttered-up thru the Media. To be forthright, the media must ease-up on the " you have not advanced because of Whitey" proclivity. More MLK , Sen Scott and Walker. Less of the substance from the assembly fluttering "Racist".
It adds to their march towards Socialism.
TY, hadn't thought of it that way. Probably true, or at least part of the truth.
I've posted this before but I think it is relevant: Every time there is a mass shooting like Sandy Hook or Columbine High School there is an outcry from the left to confiscate guns from law abiding citizens. In the majority of these shooting these victims are white and the nuts who shoot them are white. There is no doubt that these shootings are tragic and horrible.
However every week in the inner cities far more black people are murdered by black armed thugs than are these mass shootings. Yet I don’t hear outrage from the Democrats, who claim to be the party defending women and minorities,. To be fair you don’t hear it from the Republicans either. In fact the only thing you hear about these outrageous murders from either party is the sound of crickets chirping.
The point I am making is you never hear from the minority support party any outrage about the slaughter in black communities but you sure do hear it when there is a mass shooting in the white community.
Isn’t that one of the definitions of racism, outrage about white deaths but silent about black deaths?
Years ago after Sandy Hook Diane Feinstein called for the confiscation of all guns. Of course she meant confiscation of law abiding citizens guns. Not one person in the media or from the right asked Diane how she proposed to get the guns out of the hands of the gangs that have been terrorizing black communities for decades.
According to FBI statistics, in 2020 at least 9,713 blacks were murdered. In the past 30years tens of thousands of blacks were murdered in the inner city. Where is the outrage? Isn’t it racist to ignore these murders? Where is BLM, Antifa and the woke people when they are needed the most. More importantly, where are the Democrats who claim to be the party of the minorities? They control the House and the Senate. Why aren’t they screaming to stop these murders. Where is Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Oh, wait a minute! They make their livings off the misery of black people.
Yes. It is racist to ignore black-on-black murders, because the innocent people in those neighborhoods need help stemming the bloodshed. Like all of us, they want to be left in peace to live their lives and not have to throw their babies in the bathtub when gang gunfire breaks out.
Mass shootings in schools and workplaces seems to be a white phenomenon, and nobody has any qualms about saying so. Street murders by gun is largely (though not exclusively) a black phenomenon. That needs to be equally emphasized, because pretending otherwise does not help Americans of any color.
"Mass shootings in schools and workplaces seems to be a white phenomenon." Regardless of how the Media spins it, mass shootings seem to be becoming less exclusive to white people. The NYC subway shooter was black, as was the Tulsa hospital shooter. The Uvalde shooter was hispanic.
Workplace shootings at Hartford Distributors in Connecticut, at Rite Aid Distribution Center in Maryland, Henry Pratt Company in Aurora, Illinois, and at the Washington Navy Yard were committed by black shooters. Workplace shootings at Fort Hood and at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California were committed by Muslim Arabs (as was the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida and the grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado). A workplace shooting at the UPS facility in San Francisco was committed by a Thai man. The school shooting at Virginia Tech was committed by a South Korean.
So the Media's insistence that mass shootings are a white phenomenon is disingenuous.
Not fair, Celia. You dug up the research.
You do realize you are a racist for pointing out the truth. It is burden you will have to bear. The left hates reality. It makes them uncomfortable.
Not a problem, Polecat. Golfer has a large assortment of weapons in his garage, ranging from a lob wedge all the way up to 3 iron.
And from 150 yards in he might even keep a deranged left of center crowd from ever getting closer than 50 yards. Golf balls are very hard 😁
Wonderful comment!!!
The problem can be solved, although it will take a couple of generations. Eliminate policies that Democrats have established over the last 50+ years that are destroying families. Fatherless families are a HUGE problem, especially in urban areas.
That would help the woeful HS and college graduation rates, which would lead to natural resolution of the equity issues, and is far preferable to the ridiculous DEI programs.
Neil...so right, but to point to the truth, they'd be Racist.
We need brutal honesty and brave people willing to be called names as a result. Courage is contagious. ✌️💜🙏🇺🇸
“A problem not acknowledged cannot be solved”
Precisely. I’ve read that up to HALF of all gun deaths are suicides. No discussion about that by the panelists though. Not to be outdone, Bari asserts that, “As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children is guns” but neglects to mention that 18-year-old “child” gang bangers are included in that statistic and when it’s removed, the REAL leading cause of death among children is cars. How many gun offenders have been released with little more than a slap on the wrist? How many of them are repeat offenders? Where are the actual statistics? It seems the only statistics we get are phony, like the one peddled by Bari. I haven’t even touched on the malleable definition of “mass shootings” the gun grabbers employ to dupe the public.
It’s difficult to take seriously any discussion of gun violence when neither of the participating twits even bother to discuss what does work. I’m old enough to remember the rampant gun violence in New York City back in the 70s and 80s. When Giuliani implemented his “stop and frisk” policy, gun violence almost disappeared. Success be damned, the leftist gun grabbers shrieked for years that the policy was racist until finally it was abandoned with predictable results. The statistics are available but their exclusion from the discussion speaks volumes about the real goal, eliminating guns from law abiding citizens while letting armed criminals roam the streets until they get their way.
To top it all off, we get to hear Rajiv Sethi, an Indian immigrant patronizingly chastise we native born Americans for the “widespread belief that there's a sacred right to bear arms that's enshrined in our most cherished document through the Second Amendment” Someone should point out to him that the Second Amendment together with the rest of our cherished Constitution is what separates us from the cesspool he emigrated from.
Best comment so far!
More than half, I believe: suicides account for two-thirds of gun deaths, and murders the other third, with a tiny fraction left over for accidents and justifiable homicides.
Stop and frisk WAS racist, in that NYPD stopped and frisked black and brown people almost exclusively. They also found 99 percent of those stopped and frisked had no guns on them. I'd argue that stop and frisk didn't cause the plunge in homicides in New York City, it was coincidental. Murders, gun or not, rise and fall independent of most anything we think of as "the cure."
Agree that "child" in this case is disturbingly flawed. Take out the numbers of dead who belonged to gangs, and got caught up in that warfare, to get a more accurate number.
Rajiv Sethi is an idiot for having said that. I don't believe it's a "sacred" right as in religious, but it's as cherished a right (as you said) as anything else in the Constitution and thus worth defending to the max.
“I'd argue that stop and frisk didn't cause the plunge in homicides in New York City, it was coincidental”
Then, by your logic the staggering increase in homicides once stop and frisk was dropped is also coincidental. I’m no statistician but I’d say the probability of both being true is about nil. As someone who has been wrongfully stopped by police, I appreciate that abuses occur, but please, lets get over the racist trope. Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t most gun crimes committed by black and brown people? Frankly I find the whole argument against stop and frisk disingenuous when you consider that every time we board a flight we’re treated like would be terrorists by the TSA. We're scanned , frisked and have our belongings rummaged through yet 99.999…% of the time there is no gun, no explosive or threat of any kind. I'd argue that the absence of any hijackings since 9/11 can much more plausibly be considered coincidental.
If stop and frisk was racist, that was because the facts were (and are) racist.
People don't claim stop-and-frisk was racist because of the outcome of more young black men getting arrested for gun crimes, but because the policy was to presume that any given young black man was a criminal and search him without cause. Mayor Bloomberg was notoriously recorded saying essentially that (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/leaked-audio-bloomberg-aspen-institute-racial-profiling-stop-and-frisk-policing.html). It was immoral, and a gross violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Morality is a tricky thing. On the one hand you have a young black man briefly detained by police, then being sent on his way. On the other hand you have predominately black inner-city neighborhoods being ravaged by gang-related gun violence. It's not a tough call, really.
Jon, T. Reid, and Madjack all point to the actual problem which has nothing to do with "too many guns" and everything to do with social breakdown in the black urban communities, and lack of care for the mentally ill.
Unfortunately, some 30-40% of gun murders every year are unsolved, yet most of the victims are black, so clearly the black homicide participation is likely much higher than 53% (or 56% or whatever number for a given year, based on bjs.gov statistics). Let us say, 60% or 65%.
What's more, it's certainly not all black males who commit murder, but a small fraction thereof, age 16-39, in urban ghetto neighborhoods. Let us say, 10% of the black male population, or 0.6% of the U.S. population.
That's less than 1% of the country causing 60% or more of all the gun homicides. If you could somehow clamp down on this violent population, throw all the gang leaders in prison, intervene in at-risk families and incentivize more economic development in the cities thru lower taxes & regs... and of course better policing... then our gun murder rates would drop down to the level of Canada and Western Europe, or even lower. We would not even be having a debate on gun control, because relatively speaking, it would simply not be such a significant problem.
Trump did try, with his (and Sen. Tim Scott's) opportunity zones initiative, along with his "back the blue" rhetoric. One can hardly imagine a better approach. Unfortunately, the Democrats pulled him down from power, shut down all these initiatives, and have pushed the country ever further into anarchy and urban decay.
Accurate. Vermont allows license-free open and concealed carry of firearms. It has a Western Europe level of murder per capita. Chicago specifically, and Illinois in general, has a strict licensing scheme and areas of Chicago have per capita murder rates exceeding Brazil and South Africa.
Chicago's numbers aren't nearly that bad. St. Louis and New Orleans, however, are. A couple neighborhoods in St. Louis are one of the murder capitals of the world all by themselves.
Vermont's neighbor Maine, a state that is larger than all the other New England states has for many decades allowed open carry, and within recent times has made concealed carry legal for most of its citizens.
Folks in Maine can even carry a loaded hand gun in their car, or walk into a private business with a firearm (including restaurants and bars) if the owners allow it.
I spent most of my working life in Maine and did the paper work to get a concealed weapon permit. But within a few years, the Maine legislator made my permit redundant.
My wife and I now live in a rural area of north central Florida.
Within a few months of moving to Florida I got a concealed carry permit, but it also is now mostly redundant when I visit my friends up in Maine.
Seems I can never get a break from inconsistent firearm laws 😁
I believe it was Bill Barr who stated that most violent crime in cities is committed by a relatively small group of individuals that cycle through the system on a regular basis until they are removed from the streets when locked up for an extended length of time or die.
T247...via Mayor Gugliami style
Consider the economic incentives of black markets. Violence in black markets is used routinely used to settle disputes and expand market share. This violent incentive created gangs and long standing drug war has encompassed multiple generations. Our drug policies are partly to blame for the culture of violence within these communities. To date we have militarized our police, spent >1 trillion and the addiction rate remains flat from 1980. We could lock up every potential murder based on the profile stated above and the murders will not stop because the incentives are still there.
Giuliani proved that smart policing in partnership with an enlightened city governance could reduce the problem.
Unfortunately, he was the exception. The woke racist fools running most of America's big cities are simply exacerbating the problems.
Of course, substance abuse is a huge problem. But there are ways to attack the gang violence and at least reduce the shootings. There are only so many men out there willing to commit murder. Lock up enough of them, and the problem starts to diminish.
Yes. Substance abuse in and of itself does not drive murders. San Francisco is so addicted that city sidewalks are littered with addicts mainlining themselves toward the grave. But murders there are low. They don't have the drug-related gang violence of other cities.
Yip this comment is spot
Yes we have a black violence problem and a mental health problem.
you best me to it . i know 100's of gun owners they have lots of weapons , not one has ever committed a crime why should they suffer for a few insane people with short fuses and no control over their emotions ?
I live in a town where there has been no murders in 50 years. Next door is another town where the last gun homicide was 80 years ago. Yet, there are people in these communities pushing to pass ordinances banning various types of firearms, and enact red flag laws and other restrictions on lawful gun ownership.
So far, they've been voted down, in part because the town governance is afraid of the expensive lawsuits that would result, should they enact one of these dumb laws such as was passed in that town in Illinois.
The most recent murders in our town were committed with a pillow (in one case) and an electric cord (in the other). The last gun murder (still unsolved), dates to 1999.
Clearly you need pillow control including perhaps a Red Flag law to take pillows out of the hands of potentially dangerous users.
In both cases, a 20-something male murdered his own mother. No sign of a father in the picture in either case.
They can’t address that question. The left intentionally herds blacks into violent communities and fills their heads with messages of no opportunity, other people are the reason why you are a victim and they turn to drugs and their anger boils over. They’ve destroyed the nuclear family unit intentionally. It’s part of their quest for power and blacks are just useful tools to them.
It’s strange I don’t think Bari has to much support from the usual crowd on this platform - these comments seem generally a pretty good judge of where people will be voting in the midterms and I don’t think it’s going to be The Democrats
Its only an indication of where they will be voting. Lets not live in any bubble not even Bari's bubble
I've read an evaluation of the statistics that suggests that if we remove the gun murders that occur as a result of black-on-black (often gang violence) from the total before calculating the per capita rate and comparing that rate to other countries, our ranking drops from very a very high number to a very low number.
But as you say, we can't talk about that, let alone do anything about it, because that would be "racist."
Here's a data analysis that would be interesting:
Per capita murder rate by state vs racial demographics per state
I've not conducted such an analysis, but I theorize that states with the most Euro-origin population would have the same murder rate as EU countries. Guns are not the relevant variable. Such data analysis would surely be considered verboten and "racist" though.
Interestingly, similar data analysis shows that statistics on Americans of Nordic ancestry (and the communities in which they are the majority) tend to line up very closely with the statistics from Nordic countries. It's as if culturally ingrained values MATTER.
You do need to know about the culture to be influenced by it. My husband was adopted. He didn't even know(other than by strong Norwegian physical similarities) about the large amount of Norwegian dna he got from his bio father/mother till he and our son did dna test from Ancestry when my son was 16 and interested about the genetics from the bio lines.
I, too, am adopted. But I have a lot of traits and preferences that come from my bio parents. For example, I've always loved sci-fi--a common trait in my birthfather's family--despite the fact that no one in my extended adoptive family does.
Well yes that makes sense. We actually connected to my husband's birth father's family. Apparently the bizzare morning thing he does making up silly songs to wake our son up in the morning (since he was a tiny boy, he's 18 now, the son that is. I'm worried on who his new target will be with our son off to college. ;)) is something his birth father did.
I wonder if Clarence (as in Thomas) would agree with you. He is as pro 2nd Amendment as everybody here, yet he ain't from Norway, nor Denmark..
I wasn't suggesting that Nordic culture is more pro-gun than any other. Indeed, I wasn't even thinking of the gun aspect at all. I was bringing up another clear indicator of the fact that values (and the behaviors that arise from them) are connected to culture.
I think Clarence Thomas would agree strongly that values are connected to culture. Like most black conservatives, he recognizes that the fatherlessness that LBJ's War on Poverty created for too many black Americans has damaged black culture in horrifying ways.
And he gets called "Uncle Tom" for that.
Values are connected to culture, you're right. But what culture do you mean? Black culture? (As I thought you meant). Or gang culture?
If you mean fatherless children ending up in gangs for affirmation I agree with you. But that is not race specific.
The racial connection is unavoidable to some degree, but there are many African Americans that live in non urban dystopias whose misuse of firearms rate is, I would wager, about the same as that of whites. Skin color isn’t the determining characteristic, culture is. Many here have touched on some of those cultural issues: no dad at home, drugs, poor and unsafe education, a culture of dependency, etc. The fault lies with Democratic initiatives and politics, mostly, beginning with the Great Society initiatives of the 60’s. As horrible as slavery was (and is today), it would not surprise me if more people died because of this government initiated cultural degradation than during the history of U.S. slavery.
I agree that it's not racial, but it's the closest proxy to culture that we can effectively measure. I did look briefly. #1 and #2 US states by murder rate per capita are MS and AL. #1 and #2 states by % black population are MS and AL. Why can't we talk about this? If white majority states had the highest murder rates per capita we would absolutely be talking about it!
Larry Elder and Candace Owens talk about this as well as other Black conservatives. They are censored by the left-wing media because the Left needs to keep Black people in victimhood because they are their base voters. If you haven't read/listen to Candace Owen's book Blackout you should check it out. She outlines when our government made this diabolical shift to further enslave Black people without them realizing it. Under the leadership of arguably the most racist president Lyndon B Johnson who famously said that his welfare policies would have Black people voting Democrat for the rest of their lives. This was the beginning of using Black people as political pawns. Extremely upsetting and frustrating that we can't break out of this cycle that he created. We are moving in the right direction but the left is always there to thwart. Evil evil people.
what about Jim Crow laws. Interesting number in excess of 90% of people living in Nita housing in NYC work and are not on public assistance. Where would New York get all the low level employees if there was no place for them to live. For the record they pay 30% of their pre tax income for rent and are evicted if they don't pay. That does't not sound like a breeding ground for "welfare Moms" like you suggest
Bob S
Coleman Hughes would be an excellent addition to this round table. He has compiled an extraordinary amount of evidence around race relations and gun violence and although he skews towards academia-speak he is thoughtful, smart, and consistently debunks the common media narratives that leave out half of the very pertinent information.
Yep. heyjackass.com tells a story nobody wants to talk about in ChiTown.
Wow. I can't imagine there's a more glaring problem in our country today that is totally ignored by both parties.
While I am an Independent I have to say it's not ignored by Republicans so much as they are shouted down as racist the minute they talk about the real source of the issue. It's cultural of course but the Democrats have made gang banging a strictly black cultural phenomenon and somehow made pointing this out, rather than participating in it, the racist thing. They are really good at BS PR.
I fully agree with you on this. This is a stark and really important point, which I came across in a video by Eric July, a libertarian YouTube commentator whose channel is YoungRippa59, in response to the BLM movement during the Floyd riots. Here's what he said at about 23 minutes in:
"When I was banging, you know, getting in all these fights and stuff like that, doing things that . . . had me on the path to being dead or in jail — just like a lot of the people I grew up with — never once was I accused of not being black, or being “white-washed,” “Uncle Tom” . . . I never was accused of that. Never once was I accused. It wasn’t until I dropped what I was as a leftist, from a political side of things, stopped begging for acceptance and all that sort of loser stuff — that’s when they said that.
"So what does that say? What does that say? Because I choose not to align myself with that, what does that say? I could go beat up, kill — all that — other black people, terrorize, steal from other black people, and they feel like that’s, that’s what it is to be black.
"That in itself shows you it’s a cultural problem. That they don’t want to address because it would require responsibility. And when I say they don’t want to address it I’m not saying there aren’t people who aren’t addressing it, I’m saying that when they look at all of these different things, they treat people like there’s nothing they can do to better their own situations. It’s “I’m the victim”. . . they act as if everything is not their fault. They’re in their situation — and I’m not saying there aren’t people that are actually victims of things — but to sit here, and I’m not willing to do that, sit here and pretend like all black people are innocent, just getting the short end of the stick due to “oppression,” or the history, the legacy of slavery? Like, C’mon dog! No. Lotta y’all in positions you got exactly what you deserve and it’s what you doing, what the folks within your community are doing. But that again requires responsibility. It requires agency." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JocOjvPizzY)
Understanding the cultural problem that has been fostered within urban black communities, and how it breeds a victimhood mindset that results in societal alienation and violence, is key to reducing gun deaths in the U.S....and a host of other problems. If anything, it's racist to refuse to have that honest conversation.
I can only imagine the angst that would accompany a truly clear eyed look into the statistics of gun violence by our populace. It's far easier to blame the guns than formulate an actual plan to reduce the violence. Keep in mind that the race baiters and hustlers making money off the division have no intention of solving the problem. That would eliminate the need for them.
I think the southern border crisis is an example.
3 words: STOP and FRISK
The crazy woke world we live in, recently corrupted by Black Lives Matter’s villainizing the police — the only group standing between homicidal thugs and innocent people in dangerous neighborhoods, has made this proven successful tactic illegal.
Stop and frisk works. If shootings were happening in Chinatown, with gangs of Asians killing each other and innocent people getting hit in the crossfire, would there be the same reaction against police stopping and frisking young Asian men? I don’t think so.
Young Asian men? Try this mental exercise with white males. Imagine that Chicago had almost entirely white guys killing each other, and sometimes innocent bystanders. Mayor Lightfoot would be advocating the most Draconian, tough on crime policies EVER...because we have to protect our community right?
Stop and frisk is immoral, and a gross violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, because it is a policy of presuming that any given young, black man is a criminal and then searching him without cause. Mayor Bloomberg essentially said as much in 2015: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/leaked-audio-bloomberg-aspen-institute-racial-profiling-stop-and-frisk-policing.html
Not doing stop and frisk is immoral. Ask the innocent people living in these crime ridden neighborhoods how they feel about it. If the crime is nearly all being committed in black neighborhoods by black thugs against black people, who should the police stop and frisk — white people or Asian people in other neighborhoods where there is no crime? It’s such a ludicrous argument. And the only people losing out are innocent black people.
Lefties care nothing about minority deaths, they want as many of them dead as possible. That is why they worship Maggie and put a majority of their death factories in minority neighborhoods!
It’s just a natural by product of their overall strategy. Identity politics requires opposition and the left controlled MSM stokes it. They want people to be dependent upon government and politicians. When I grew up in the projects, no one - NO ONE - would ever rat out on the drug dealers. That was their “source” - they needed what they were addicted to. Liberals are the drug dealers of politics and urban blacks are disproportionately addicted to the dependency of government. So…hand out freebies, continue to hand out more and demonize those who (a) have more then you (because they work) and (b) see the game for what it is an oppose you.
Then open the border and see if you can add more of them.
Love your comment just one question how did we vote Brandon in this is so 20th century we left it all behind in 2016 why would we go back to this way of life for Americans it’s very strange
I really don’t think we did. I’m not one who is married to the thought that the vote count was manipulated via machines and double counting. Bit, I am quite certain that cheating went on enough regarding the ballots submitted for counting to turn the election. Lots of nursing home patient ballots filled out by others, ditto the door knockers who intimidated people to turn over the ballots, the collection of ballots,for,people on the rolls but no longer resident or perhaps even alive. Lots of ballots that were ruined bit saved in key precincts. Lots of ballots undated that arrived after Election Day. Courts changing the rules not before, not after, but in the midst of elections.
It didn’t take a whole lot of votes to flip a few states and make a difference.
Read a book called Rigged by Molly Hemingway there was no chain of custody on ballot boxes there was Zuckbucks to tune of $430 million its a lot of money to put into a national election on one side only it was a manipulation a gaslight of our system however it’s not the first time it had been going on since the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of Covid it was a perfect storm for the Democrats it appears now they think they have another perfect storm in 1/6 we not far from Nov let’s see what they can conjure up now Rick
"Do we actually have a national problem, or do we have an urban black on black murder problem?"
I think the answer is obvious. But few want to say it publicly. This is one of many examples of why our politics has become so irrational. Facts are frequently off the table. Only fantasy and make-believe are allowed on many topics.
It's true. Were it not for a small number of urban centers in the US (between about five and nine) and the black victims murdered by (mainly) young black men, the US would have a violent crime and murder rate not that different from many other developed countries. Pace the far left, the problem is not mainly in the South, which is what you'd expect were it a legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It's largely a problem in large cities outside the South, all but one (NYC) ruled by Democratic mayors and machines for decades. This is why law-abiding gun owners in the US deeply and rightly resent the way they're repeatedly demonized for a problem they have virtually no connection with.
Actually, NYC is a great example. Murders shot up to 1,000 over the years of Democrat rule. By the time the 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg ended, it was under. 300. Then that idiot DeBlasio and now this phony law and order guy ex cop takes over with the far left ideals and the numbers are shooting ups again. NYC is actually the proof that left wing Democrat policies kill and conservative policies save
It is true. I think my impression of the data might be a decade old. Gun violence has been slowly rising in more rural areas b/c of the opioid epidemic. That was a mostly non-violent drug epidemic, until recently. And most of the people involved are white, not black.
Yes, there are games you can play like that. It's best to view by city and metro area. The bump up in southern states is still not that big in comparison.
Indeed. Our Congress's incompetency in choosing political expediency over a balanced justice vs. mercy solution to young male homicidal violence is endlessly frustrating. Adult men's refusal to life coach and discipline young men is a root problem.
Pareto's function applies, of course. The sum of the number of gun-involved assaults will be caused by the square root of their sources, be it single black males (7% of the population), in several Zip Codes, by a few types of weapons -- and so on. Single parent homes. Uninvolved fathers. All of these rationally calculated causes are, unfortunately, beyond the reach of the woke blue city governments.
The real problem is the social programs that intentionally trap people in awful situations so that they can be dependent upon their political massahs who want nothing to improve. They stole anger and division - it’s like political fentanyl. And they strike out. The miasma that results from liberal programs is destructive. And most violence is not between unknown people. It’s between people you know or live in your neighborhood. The left doesn’t want their clients to improve their lives. The thing they fear most is an educated black man who is married with children and who actually lives at home. That’s their death nell
Jon, you are right but no matter what we say it is racist. The mainstream media is no help when them amplify white shoots black news just to show they are woke...IT is sad to see so many inner city people killed by their neighbors. How to stop it? One idea: If you are 17 or 18 and not in school or working full-time then you must serve 2 yrs in the military or Dept of Natural Resources teams. No matter your color. 2 years of learning about team work, trust, other races, and more. Ends with 2 years of free college or advanced military/Air Force/navy position. Get the streets cleared of the young people and start our future leaders out on the right foot. Call them USA 1st TEAM Members ... Get on the team and avoid laying on the sidewalk
Do some judges still give criminals the right to do military service in lieu of jail, or was that ruled unconstitutional?
In my experience it is the military that no longer embraces that. The services won't commit with pending charges and the prosecutor's won't commit without a guarantee of enlistment.
No idea, but they ought to give them a chance if it is a misdeamor. Free food, free insurance, and much more. My son is a Major in the Army and he has seen some rough kids become true leaders in his units.
True but not the issue in this discussion. More white people shoot white people than black people shoot black people
Not per capita. Per capita, way more blacks kill outside their race than any other race.
See the data at bjs.gov
It is the opposite of what you say. 56% of all gun homicides are black-on-black.
Furthermore, 30-40% of gun homicides are unsolved, from year to year, but most of the victims are black, hence likely most of these are also b-on-b. Easily 60-70% of all gun homicides in the U.S. (10-12K/year) are black (5K to 7K per year). And the numbers are rising because of poor or no law enforcement in the ghetto neighborhoods has become the standard.
With a special focus on the explosion in homicides in 2020.
We do need courageous people willing to be the first to say the unpopular truth. Courage is contagious. ✌️💜🙏🇺🇸
I don’t think she is scared she left the Ny Times because her voice was shut out
I think that Bari Weiss is still on the liberal side of the fence, albeit slowly waking up. Someone should take her out target practicing or hunting, and maybe she'll start to be more pro-2A.
We need to deal in facts:
"As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children is guns."
FALSE (this data, widely shared recently, includes 18 and 19 year olds who are not children)
"enhanced background checks for minors"
FALSE (minors, as in 17 year olds and younger, cannot legally buy firearms)
We really need to ask ourselves "what is an adult" in the USA in 2022.
18 or 21? At what age can Americans enlist in the military; buy tobacco products; buy a long arm; buy a handgun; buy alcohol; decide that they want to medically alter their gender? It's inconsistent now.
Ahhh so that's the scaremongering tactic. Inner-city urban teenagers kill each other, and leftist propagandists say, "children are dying from guns."
Anthony - yes. That is the current tactic. Pretending that 16-19 year olds killed in drug / gang shootings are innocent children.
T, I've been thinking about adult age as well this last week. It seems to me, if an 18 year old can't be trusted with a gun, they also shouldn't be trusted with a ballot.
Thank you for saying that. How can anyone, anywhere, at anytime have an honest and effective conversation when basic factual knowledge is missing and/or incorrect? It’s like one has to have a checklist of fundamental knowledge and walk through it before engaging in dialogue. One of the consequences of the Age of Information we, as a society, have yet to truly grapple with, I suppose.
Thanks T Reid for debunking some of the "facts" discussed in the interviews.
I first noticed how fluid was the definition of a child during the past couple of decades.
For certain causes, a child could be the kid in your basement who last week turned 25.
For other causes, children were shown to be between 4 years old and 11 years old.
I was born during WWII and grew up during the 40s and 50s, largely in very rural areas.
Granted, my aged brain is not as sharp as it once thought it was, but I cannot think of a single mass school shooting during those decades.
Seems like nobody asks the question "what was different back then?"
Well, one thing that was different was that semiautomatic rifles with 30 round magazines (M1 Carbine, WW2 surplus) were sold all over the place, including hardware stores. No background checks or other post-Gun Control Act of 1968 restrictions. Guns don't seem to be the relevant variable.
The biggest change since then has been the decline of the family unit, in the form of fatherless families and the impact on sons, resulting from deliberately harmful liberal policies that seek to replace family and community with government. This is abundantly evident in urban centers.
I might add to your comment, Neil, that for all of my adult life I have watched increasingly violent protests become common place, and a general attitude that does not respect our form of goverment.
During the same period, attendance at churches, temples and mosques has suffered huge loses of congregants.
I do not know if, as I rapidly approach my 80s, I will ever see a democratic Republic worthy of respect. Thus I worry about the country in which my children and grandchildren will live.
Thank you Neil for your very accurate comment.
Very much agree. The government does not respect the people and the people do not respect the government. This will eventually break the country.
Adult in what sense ? Some are 30 and they still have the mindset of a 12 year old . Don't know what they are putting in the water these days , but it sure ain't doing much good
No one ever puts this together. "At what age can Americans enlist in the military" ... and carry a backpack nuke?
So, given your point on what constitutes a legal age, T Reid - does it really matter? How about learning how to use a firearm, regardless of being either 18 or 21? In reading the interview the most resonant of the responses to me was the one dealing with simple registration and insurance of firearms, as in the purchase of automobiles. While I don't adhere to that exactly - the point I want to make is that it takes weeks to learn how to drive a car (it can kill people too), you need to take a course, and you need such training to get a license. And you need said license to walk into a showroom to buy one.
Why can't that be the way forward in purchasing a weapon? Even at the age of eighteen?
Everybody here is talking about black on black violence. Okay.
But what about what's happening a hundred times a minute in this country - somebody with no training (black or white) checks into a gun store or show, and half an hour later (!) walking out the proud owner of a weapon he or she has no idea how to use? Not understanding the responsibility? With all the ammunition they may not really need?
Civil Liberties cannot be licensed and taxed. Imagine needing government permission to vote or even make a post here.
Rights do have reasonable restrictions and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is already easily the most proscribed of all our civil liberties.
Any possible malfeasance with a firearm is already criminalized. But we enforce and prosecute these laws weakly, at best.
For instance, knowingly lying on the background check to buy a gun is punishable by 10 years in prison. There were over 100,000 attempts by denied parties to lie on Form 4473 to buy a gun a few years ago. The United States of America prosecuted...twelve (12). Get serious, drop the hammer.
Having said that, bad people are going to do bad things. In Norway a nutjob played along with all their gun laws and checks and regulations and killed more students than in any US mass murder in our history.
The biggest problem we have at this moment is that prosecutors WILL NOT charge people for violating existing gun laws.
With respect - you did not read my comment through. I did not say I endorsed registering or taxing. I am merely comparing driving a car that could be a weapon with having a gun that is one. If we have to learn how to drive a car in order to buy one then I humbly suggest that we should learn how to responsibly own and use a firearm before we buy one, regardless of minimum age.
I am emphatically not trying to take anyone’s right to own a weapon - just pointing out the abject irony of making people learn how to drive but not doing the same when handling something that is designed to kill.
Strange - don’t you think??
Respectfully, I did read your comment comparing a specific named individual civil liberty to a regulated commercial transaction (buying a car for use on public roads). They are definitely not in the same category.
I advocate and practice responsible exercise of civil liberties like the right to keep and bear arms, the right to vote, the right to free speech, free exercise of religion, etc.
If so, and it wasn't clear, then yes. Background info into the "denied party" list for the NICS database should have comprehensive sources.
you do realize the FBI and others farm out background checks to the lowest bidder , not a good idea . The checks should be thorough
And yet many of the mass shooters are known to those charged with doing the background checks, enforcing current gun laws.
Hunter Biden should be charged for lying on his gun application https://nypost.com/2021/03/29/hunter-biden-should-be-charged-for-lying-on-gun-application/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app
Or, they plea bargain it down; Department of Justice Plea Bargain for Dontray Mills-Mostly Truth! -
https://www.truthorfiction.com/department-of-justice-plea-bargain-for-dontray-mills/
Now we can red-flag Garlands “domestic terrorist” parents for attend school board meetings but we can’t red-flag a traitor like Swalwell admitting he was “sleeping with the enemy” Fang, Fang, Chinese intel agent.
And they, the government wonder why some don’t trust them?
There have been HUNDREDS of millions of people killed by tyrannical governments. A terrible year for gun violence in the US sees 20,000 deaths - of which roughly 100% are committed by criminals who don’t care about the law. These discussions are exactly what people not interested in actually solving problems sit around and discuss. We’re always one generation from giving up our freedoms and apparently 10 seconds of news cycle away from forgetting all the lessons of what happens when the government has a monopoly on force. We are a sad people.
So true. Greatest murderer of all time: GOVT. Let’s put more constraints on govt not the people!!
That is specifically and exactly the purpose of the constitution It is the bounds placed on government to restrict them from infringing upon those rights which are innately ours. We have everything we possibly need. Except in an era where "smart" people actually believe these are "not absolute" because it makes them feel better, while turning over more and more power to people who have proven over and over that their ability to fail literally knows no bounds...
50 Christians were just gunned down in their church in Nigeria recently, where was the coverage of that atrocity. (oops, not one of the protected classes).
Red Flag laws are unconstitutional. No crime has been committed. An abusive accuser can go to court without confronting the accused. The process to recover one's guns is ill-defined (prove one's innocence?), expensive (ever hire an attorney?), and very time consuming. If someone is psychologically disturbed, there is an involuntary commitment process that is constitutional unlike "red flag" processes. Why not use that process to get help for the person?
I agree. But as a practical matter the involuntary commitment process has no teeth. It is virtually impossible to commit someone for any significant period of time.
So, perhaps the mental health laws, that the Dems eliminated, need to be re examined, and psych hospitals need to return. There are people on the streets who are a danger to society, and need to be controlled, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The problem with Dem solutions, is that they seek to control the people who aren't part of the problem.
Hence the demise of SF, that was the subject of the last, most excellent, CS post.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I’ll also add that minors that are involuntarily committed, which is still very hard since many states allow minors as young as 13 to make their own healthcare decisions, often have their record sealed. And of course, any minor that agrees to voluntary commitment (which is often coerced) does not have their hospitalization records shared or distributed. These are your high risk, mentally unstable juveniles that eventually age into adults and have zero trouble buying guns because their mental health records occurred as minors.
Maybe it's short term, but at least it's constitutional.
I think "red flag" laws may have their place, despite their potential for abuse. However, I don't see any liberals willing to compromise on any of our proposals. For example, you want mandatory background checks and red flag laws, I want national CCW reciprocity and DOE funding for gun safety and shooting clubs in schools.
When Democrats ask for compromise on this issue what they mean is capitulation. (And why should they compromise. Our team's representatives are so weak kneed they will give away the farm and get nothing in return.)
I agree with all of that. And I don’t know what the answer is. I unfortunately live in a bluer than blue state (WA) where we have a red flag law and I looked into our state’s stats. In 2021, there were 34 red flag requests submitted and 30 of those were submitted by police officers who had encountered the subjects and subsequently submitted the request. I had not considered this scenario but I see how this is a situation that may make sense. I also see the threat of putting even more power in a state’s hands but law enforcement frequently encounter situations in which nobody is charged but the likelihood of repeat violence is high (think DV situations in which the victim won’t press charges, a suicidal person talked down, etc). I’m no expert on the process but I guess I just envision some kind of process akin to reporting suspected child abuse to CPS. Definitely potential for abuse, but may save some lives too.
I don't think it's fair that I compromise to change laws and make it harder for people to exercise a Constitutional right just to get the Democrats to enforce the laws that they already voted to put on the books.
I agree that red flag laws are fraught with opportunity for abuse but I think there are scenarios in which they can be a good short-term solution. Having someone involuntarily committed is dependent upon mental health beds being available, of which there is currently a major National shortage of. I work for a hospital system and patients often wait weeks for an available bed or are boarded in an ED for days until being released. The system does not function as ideally as we’d all like.
On the one hand, I think that would work well for determining whether people in the 18-20 range can buy guns, it begins to look too much like a social credit system if applied to adults.
But driving is a privilege. Gun ownership is a right.
In the new world of cancel culture - I cannot support Red Flags. A family hates you. A divorce spouse gets angry. A angry co worker decides to destroy you. The FBI targets you. Yes that can’t possibly end well. The 2nd amendment is about our right to defend our nation against foreign adversaries. How about we actually start enforcing the laws we have on the books. Or is that too inconvenient for Soros funded DAs.
The Second Amendment is about our right to defend our nation against domestic tyranny.
In my view, Bruce, the preamble "A well regulated Militia" all the way through to the "security of a free state" appears to mean (at the time this was written in the late 18th century) the right for a citizen to bear arms in order to join a military force in defending the country from an invading foreign power (ie Britain, France, or Spain..) when needed.
Domestic tyranny, if you want to call it that, would not arrive in serious force until 1860. And that, probably claimed more by the Confederate side. But that's another story.
The right to own weapons was a necessity in. Colonial America. For both food and protection. The militia line is a throwaway. The notion that the right was “owned” by the sovereign would be laughed at. Then and now.
Sorry Bruce - ‘a well regulated militia’ was not a throwaway. I disagree. It’s the preamble - it sets up the right to bear arms. It’s the reason why we should and must have the right to have weapons in the first place - otherwise why would the Founders put it there?
Why have the word militia in there at all?
You appear to view the 2nd Amendment through 21st century lens - as do many here. You cannot say with any certainty that the ‘militia’ connotation was a throwaway line - the men who wrote this were a hell of a lot more serious than that.
Lee, if the right to own a weapon was organic and predated the Constitution, that right didn’t come from government. In fact, the weapons of militiamen were their personal property- not provided by the militia company. You’ve got it completely backward.
Interesting comment. If the right to bear arms predates the Constitution - then why is the 2nd Amendment of said Constitution held as sacrosanct?
The only right I know of that could possible be construed as 'organic' is breathing (sexual intercourse might be another).
The right to bear arms was indeed a granted right - by the designers of a Constitution that structures the government we have today (for good or for bad..)
The question then becomes, as has been discussed for the last 230 years - is what kind of right? A controlled one? Or a free for all?
I don't recall where I read the comment or who, but someone said reading the *drafts* of the Constitution indicated a different reading. Don't know anything about it, myself, so there is that.
Historically not really. If you review when it was written and in the context of the times - it was always about our ability to defend the land and ensure “the security of a free state”. I suspect the domestic tyranny element could arguably be supported in a more current times analysis when there are military grade weapons being issued to local law enforcement but I truly do not believe that we need to defend against our government (although J6 political persecutions don’t bear that out generally does it). There are other rights which support us should we be targeted by our government in the Bill of Rights as well. However, to your point, we have the right to bear arms and defend ourselves and be secure in our homes from any enemy foreign or domestic. Period. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to reply in depth but I think you take a very cramped and unrealistic view of the historical antipathy of our founders to government power
I saw this definition of red flag laws the other day: the ex-girlfriend empowerment act.
*slow clap*
And defending ourselves against a tyrannical govt
The gun ownership rate certainly has a deterrent effect.
Excellent discourse. I would point out four barely related points:
- Many of the weapons used by the nascent Americans during the Revolutionary War were privately owned. From muskets to ships; so they were indeed privately owned “weapons of war”.
- If one were to subtract the daily violence in Chicago, Philadelphia etc committed by criminals, using illegally acquired firearms while committing multiple felonies, the US’s gun violence rate is actually quite low. Criminals don’t obey laws and passing more won’t change that.
- If we want to protect our schools, they need to be secured in a meaningful manner. There are 2,300 Capitol Police protecting 535 members of Congress or about 4 police for every member. And all they do is spend money our money.
- Finally, the Second Amendment follows the First for a reason. It secures our right to Free Speech which is among the first things tyranny’s restrict. Another first thing they do is to to disarm the people.
And if anyone doubts the threat to losing our rights, just look at what's happened to 'due process' clause. The left has made a mockery of it.
The last few years have proven to me that the government WILL NOT protect us against violent people. We are on our own. In addition on many issues giving in one inch to the left is never enough. For instance we started by insuring homosexuals were treated fairly, now we have drag queen story hour. I don’t trust our govt and I certainly don’t trust the left.
I am disappointed that as horrific as the Uvalde killings were, we as a society still do not have the courage to talk about what I believe is the cause of all of this violence, that is, the family and its breakdown. Why are we not brave enough to discuss the Uvalde shooter’s missing parents? Children cannot raise themselves and yet we expect that to happen. Why? What happens to parentless children? How can we intervene to help them? What can be done to teach parents to parents? We will live with the consequences of parents who do not parent until we make the choice to have this very hard conversation.
For many years, parents would often teach their children about guns and both how to shoot one and respect for one. Now they take the children to see Drag Queen shows and wonder "why are my kids so fucked up?"
My husband teaches Hunters Education & Safety for Department of Fish and Wildlife in his spare time and he firmly believes that participation in hunting as a child, even just tagging along with an adult, lays a strong foundation for understanding what guns are capable of. Many kids see guns used in cartoons or on TV and do not comprehend their seriousness. Witnessing the impact on an animal (in an ethical manner of course) offers a healthy dose of respect for guns.
Or worse, they use them in video games.
From a historical perspective, guns have been around for a very long time and teenagers have had access as well. In fact, it was probably easier for a teen to get a gun decades ago than now and nobody thought twice about teens carrying around loaded weapons. And yet we didn’t have mass shootings of the nature that we do now. Errant, accidental shootings from kids being dumb, sure but not intentional mass homicide. Something changed and it sure wasn’t teenagers’ ability to access guns. We must look to societal breakdown and mental health issues today.
Basic troubleshooting of any system:
It worked before. It doesn't work now. What changed?
If your computer stopped working correctly when you installed a new piece of software, you wouldn't start your troubleshooting by checking the power cord.
If your relationship with your wife went downhill when you started working more, you wouldn't think, "gee, it must be hormonal". (Unless you're a complete clod.)
When teenagers use guns for decades, then suddenly start shooting up schools for no apparent reason, believing it's a problem of gun access is stupid. The guns didn't change; the teenagers did.
To be clear, fixing teenagers is far more difficult than banning guns, but not fixing the family structures that give us teenage shooters is going to destroy our society in countless other ways too. In that sense, the random mass shooters are just the canaries in the coal mine of America.
My post, which started this, is exactly that. We broke the AA family to get Dems elected in the 60s and we're now reaping what we sowed.
Hear hear!
Excellent Podcast and my total agreement CG, though a few things left unsaid. This is perhaps the biggest. The breakdown of Family is seen in two branches of the shootings epidemic: 1) Lone, disturbed killer (most often young white males with minimal or non-existent Adult male -as in mature responsible father, and 2) gang shootings in urban areas where youth get their stripes on the street because try as she might the mother can’t hold THAT much together when her “man” is always absent. These are much more Black mothers with minimal income and many kids. I’ve regarded these Black moms as hero’s as they instill what values their kids do get, kind of against all odds.
So to the excellent podcast, I’d have begged to add another message: “Men (black and white), where the hell are you? Get your ass to your family and get your sons their moral compass even if you have to bring them to a local mission or support while you work your ass off at a bad, low paying job. You’ll rise up and be a beacon to the boy and he’ll escape. Go to your church and they’ll show you”. I know it’s tough as hell, but you fathered them.
My comments come from thoughts that looking to the government to make a social illness go away, and counting on crooked politicians who’ll sabotage a Bill that even they agree with just to get a political advantage is not only barking up the wrong tree, but foolish.
The guns are inanimate objects. Blaming them is childish but regulating their use can be appropriate if it’s done prudently. The biggest hole I see is the lack of accountability for them. If I own a gun and it’s used in a crime both the user and I should pay a price that tells everyone “don’t let this happen to you”.
Excellent post
The Uvalde shooter had parents, albeit maybe imperfect ones. He had been living with his mother until recently when he had a falling out with her. He then moved in with his grandparents and had a falling out with his grandmother . He then shot her in the face and went to the elementary school where she worked and you know the rest. My mother used to say when you are having problems with the whole world, it's probably not the world. As for the shooter's mental illness or red flags, there was no evidence which would have disqualified him under either theory. There was some abuse of animals on his social media and he made comments within the last two months on social media but all of that came to light after the fact. Some people are just bad. Very, very bad.
Nope, he was living with his grandmother because his mother was a drug addict. So basically she was not in his life, and who knows where the father is. Reports say he was off making money for the family in anther state, but he never sent that money and this kid hasn't seen him since he was a baby. So basically a deadbeat Dad.
He also had a looooooong track record of violence and mental health issues, including checking into a mental health facility inpatient, and those were not on his record.
Why do you say his mother was an addict? Yes he was living with his grandmother but only recently from what I have read. Also my understanding is that the father was in his life. Both parents gave statements to the press almost immediately. And how do you know he had a lo-o-ong history of violence and mental health issues, much less that he had checked into an inpatient mental health facility that does not appear of record? All of this is completely contrary to what I read.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-adriana-reyes-texas-elementary-school-shooter-salvador-ramos-mother-opens-deceased-son
"Reportedly, Reyes struggled with drug use and kicked her son out of her home, which forced Salvador Ramos to move in with his grandparents."
"Ramos' classmates said he would engage in fights and threaten fellow students. They also stated that Ramos displayed disturbing behavior over the past two years, where he threatened a classmate and stalked others. Meanwhile, his friends told reporters that Salvador Ramos was distraught and often lashed out."
And I know a lot of people who struggle with drug use, much of it prescription, that do not have kids that have shot up a couple of classrooms of elementary school kids. From what I have read, from reliable sources, he was an asshole who treated people badly. That does not make him mentally ill nor does it justify blaming his mother, or the police, or for that matter the guns. Let's blame the person at fault - the shooter. But if that doesn't work for you let's blame the first person shooter games I would wager he played. He went for head shots.
I'm not blaming his actions solely on his mom, but I do blame her for drug use and I do blame the cops for standing outside and arresting parents while the killer massacred kids. I don't think drug users are horrible people but they are destructive and bad parents. Has accountability gone right out the window? "Well she drinks a lot and kicks her troubled son out of the house to do drugs, but that doesn't make her a bad parent!" YES, it does.
You have got to be kidding me. A sports news website, based in India, that derives its revenue from advertisements? That is your source? Do you believe everything on the internet?
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/28/uvalde-shooting-gunmen-teen-girls/
https://nypost.com/2022/05/25/details-emerge-on-texas-school-shooter-salvador-ramos-behavior/
https://www.newsweek.com/salvador-ramos-had-multiple-blowups-his-mom-texas-neighbor-1710009
Facts that are inconvient to you are still facts.
Yes he was insane. But his mother, according to reports I have read, was a drug addict, obviously not a good parent.
Why do you say he was insane?
because of his behavior.
I think he was just plain old evil.
Current failure to prosecute gun law violators is rampant. New York had an effective means of getting guns off the street and out of the hands of criminals - the so called “stop and frisk” law. After that was declared unconstitutional, gun crimes and murders exploded.
Law enforcement and prosecutors must aggressively put violators away, rather than pleading out the gun charges to get an easy guilty plea.
In Chicago, less than 50% of homicide cases by gunfire are cleared; car jacking, usually gun related, has less than 10% convicted.
So, the first thing, enforce current laws aggressively. We might be surprised at how that works out!
Any reason you didn't talk to Dr. John Lott? This is his area of expertise, probably more so than your two guests.
I noted that Rajiv seems to understand the context of the Second Amendment better than most Americans: distrust of the government. And why is that so hard to grasp these days? Over the last 20 years, the government has given us LOADS of reasons to not trust them. One would be stupid to assume that if the right to self defense was eliminated that our elected representatives would start acting like angels. No, they would quickly escalate their abuses of power, and in very short order we would have a dictatorship in place. Oh, we might have elections in which 96.6% of the people vote for the person already in power.
But let's address what no one really wants to address: the increase in fatherless families brought on by democrat parties in urban areas. That's about as close to a social laboratory as you can get since almost all urban areas have been run by Democrats for decades. That's one variable you don't have to worry about. That will take a couple of generations to fix, if anyone ever has the fortitude to take it on: which I highly doubt.
I would second the John Lott recommendation. I cannot even fathom how the left envisions this surrendering of weapons would go for this very reason. Folks that don’t trust the government and own several guns often don’t have them all registered to them and at least in our case, have them stored numerous different places. Would this be a door to door search and seizure? And what army is going to volunteer for that job? We thought summer of 2020 riot control was dangerous for law enforcement, it would be small potatoes compared to that task. The Australia approach referenced in the podcast would never work in the U.S. and any attempt would be violating more than just the 2nd amendment.
Of course there was. John Lott would have actually presented a contrary view. Instead she did what the NY Times trained her to do: get a Leftist and a moderate and say you're going to have a debate. Then you spend the whole time asking the moderate which of the Leftist proposals his side (which he doesn't really represent anyway) can get on board with.
Here we go again. A discussion about guns and “gun violence” without a balanced advocacy. An anti-gun nut paired with someone who “understands” people who have strong feelings about gun ownership. And more Orwellian “Newspeak”. I guess Bari wasn’t liberal enough for The NY Times. But that doesn’t mean she’s not liberal. This whole article is a setup.
First of all, the use of the term “gun violence”. Guns are an inanimate object. They don’t get violent. But if they do, I suppose we have “knife and fork violence” that causes deadly health diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Or in the news room, how about “paper violence”? After all, the false narratives of the MSM gets a lot of people all riled up causing them to get violent. Ask Steve Scaliese. They played a big role in the 2020 summer riots in concert with their Democrat friends to try to undermine the election. Oh, and paper causes paper cuts too….
The pen is mightier than the sword. The sword, in the wrong hands can cause grievous damage, so maybe it requires licensure too. How about the purveyor of words, like publishers of newspapers, magazines, blogs, Substack, tv shows, movies, music, etc? They certainly are the vessel that shapes the culture, which can cause grievous damage. Why not license them? I’d love to.
Think about the effect a corrupt media has - causing all sorts of false information to circulate to help or harm, candidates who in turn have tremendous power. Who controls positions in the dog catchers office to the White House is affected by the media, why shouldn’t they be licensed and regulated?
Ah….but you NEVER hear anything about that.
I am a responsible gun owner and am very careful about my weapons. I never wanted a gun until I had a business dispute where the losing party literally threatened to kill me. He shot up what he thought was my apartment. He took over a business with a load of weapons - hand guns, rifles, weapon style knives, bullet proof vests and the like and held off the police for hours.
And then? The liberal judge gave him a conditional guilty plea attached to a few years of probation. If he behaves during probation, his guilty plea is expunged and he’s free to buy more weapons. No record of his crime. Liberals like that. Why ruin his life for one silly incident?
He has enough money to pay someone to do his dirty work and travels with the kind of people who would.
So I apply for a concealed carry permit with the NYPD. Denied. Why? Well, if you see him harassing you, call the police. As if you can call the police in between the shot and it’s impact….
It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to ultimately get my permit. And I’m not just an honest citizen, I’m an officer of the court in five states.
Then I went to apply for one in NJ since my family has a home there as well. NJ is funny. First you go to the chief of police in your town. He can just say no. If he says yes, then a Superior Court judge can say no. When you get to the PD, the PD almost always says no. Period. NJ issues next to no licenses other than to retired law enforcement officers. And I say, well, I’ll appeal. And the chief reminds me that when I go to renew my NYPD li mess, I have to disclose that I was denied an application by another state, which is grounds for non-renewal in NY. So, with a smirk on his face, he said I should think twice before handing him my application. He threatened my NY license if I dared to try to defend myself from a violent felon. Amazing.
Now this violent felon has mental problems. Established mental problems.
That’s the thing that Bari and her guests - and all anti-gun nuts - never address.
As to the mass shootings, almost without fail, the person has mental illness. No one - NO ONE - in the anti gun world even thinks to ask “why is America producing so much mental illness? Why are so many people feeling dissociated from society? Why are so many people so VIOLENT, with bats, knives, guns, pushing people into traffic or in front of trains?”
Perhaps it’s because all of the above is a product of liberal policies and an examination of them will never do.
LBJ’s Great Society has undermined the nuclear family unit. Free money, food stamps/snap cards, housing allowances - you want to get out of your mother’s house? Have a baby!
No father in the house? No example to set for young boys growing up. Mothers too busy working to watch them or worse, mothers too stoned on crack or meth watching tv as they use their snap cards for cool ranch Doritos and soda. Liberals have purposefully entrapped “people of color” (another made up new age Newspeak phrase - do you wear jeans of blue or a shirt of white?) in urban plantations overrun with crime, violence, drugs and lousy schools, intentionally denying them real opportunity because they want them dependent on them for their daily needs which they gladly trade for their votes. They want them just where they are. Wading in drugs, violence and worse. It’s the softer version of slavery. Some POC see this, and that scares the daylights out of libs.
This is the result of the Great Society and all that followed in its wake and it’s no mistake. So much of the death by gun results from these dysfunctional cities and neighborhoods, but they refuse to do anything about it, other than doling out more freebies. Now they give up all pretense - equal opportunity (equality) is not enough. Now they want equality of outcome (equity).
Sex is trivialized - it’s transformed from the most tender manifestation of love to a physical act. Those who oppose guns have no problem in defending partial birth abortion. Oh, it’s just a small percentage of abortions. Hmmmm. Death by rifle is only 4% of gunshot death. Uh-oh….can’t have that conversation.
Movies, tv, music, video games - most of which are produced by liberal coastal elites - are filled with violence. Look at all the violence in the Marvel Universe movies that get mindlessly churned out - all by former family company Disney. Time was sex never came up on tv. Now, you can turn on Peacock by NBC and the first three lines of the first episode of the remake of Queer as Folk are all related to a receiving partner asking for his rectum to be violated more and more and more. Go watch a 10 year old episode of Law and Order and you’ll see voluptuous women in their underwear or even worse naked but mostly hidden engaging in simulated love acts.
Turn on the radio or your streamer and listen to the dominant music of the day - rap and gangster rap and all of the violent messages it carries. And you wonder why octogenarians from the 60s are still touring? When was the last time a true musical group which wrote their own stuff and performed it came to the fore? I saw Billy Joel’s Last Play At Shea and he marveled that he could sell out a 55,000 seat stadium without having had any new music in 30 years.
The left has proudly announced how they play the politic of identity which by its very nature turns large groups of people into opponents. They use divisive language like “pay your fair share” even as a huge part of their base pay noth8ng for their share and then they double down by using the 1% and lead people into the green monster of envy and anger because people who work hard have nice things while people on the dole do not.
And you wonder why there’s violence in urban centers causing the highest proportion of murder by any weapon and especially guns? And you wonder why it continues and spreads when you turn the police into enemies? Why crime escalates when police pull back as a result?
Liberals NEVER consider anything but guns when violent crime arises. They don’t examine their role in it.
They change the subject.
Assault weapons? None are for sale to civilians but they keep talking about it. An AR-15 has the same capabilities as a hunting rifle sold in 1950. It just has a different look to resemble a military weapon. That’s all the libs need to LIE about the rifles. And oh, of course, forget about the fact that only 4% of death by firearm comes from any kind of long gun. In 1965 Charles Whitman shot dozens of people from a tower in Texas with a rifle that was more powerful than an AR-15.
But we didn’t have so many people thinking they needed guns back then. And we didn’t have so many crazy people shooting up schools and night clubs. Yet the left refuses to ask why so many people are angry and dissociated. They just yell guns guns guns.
Sad.
Golfer, as much as I want to agree with you on the dangers o Australia...
Australia murder rate: 0.9 / 100K
US murder rate: 5.0/ 100K
I did.
Rates per 100K people (Australia vs USA):
Robbery - 40 vs 86
Assault - 292 vs 246
https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Crime-Statistics/Assaults-Kidnapping-Robbery-Sexual-Rape/Assault-rate
https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Assault-rate
https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Crime-Statistics/Assaults-Kidnapping-Robbery-Sexual-Rape/Robbery-rate
https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Robbery-rate
I'm not trying to be nit picky, I just don't see the evidence that you do for the idea that Australia is, overall, an equally or considerably more violent society than America.
The most important statistic I know of for overall criminality is the total incarceration rate. On that count, USA vs Australia: 629 vs 167.
I'm a gun owner and staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. This is probably the most balanced discussion on the topic that I have ever come across. Well done, Bari.
You must have read this in your sleep. No discussion of what liberals call the. “Root causes”. No advocate who values gun ownership, just someone who has studied the subject and “Understands” us. Nah.
R.D, I am also a gun owner, and we read two different interviews. The one I read was a bunch of questions asking why conservatives won't get behind "common sense gun laws" that the Left proposes, and none about why the liberals won't get behind "common sense gun laws" that the Right proposes (things like gun safety in schools, national CCW reciprocity, etc...)
A moderate and a progressive, by definition, can't have a real debate about any issue.
More importantly any discussion should include - probably as the primary issue - why there is so much more mental illness and societal alienation that causes so many people to wig out
I think we have to move the age for gun ownership, military service, and voting to 21. If your brain isn't fully formed, you shouldn't be doing any of those things.
This seems like where we are heading. "What is an adult?"
What’s an adult? If we can’t even define ‘what is a woman’, defining ‘adult’ will be damn near impossible.
Then you shouldn’t be shipped off to the forever wars either
Last I checked, that's called "military service."
And, of course, sex changes.
The problem is, neither party's base will let them do it. The NRA wants to initiate kids as young as 8 or 10 on firearms; some Democrats want 16- year- olds to vote. That's the problem with the two party system we now have; the most partisan call the shots --what's best for the country doesn't have a chance.
I'm up for that too Susan. If the Democrats don't trust them with a gun, I don't trust them with a ballot. After all, the pen is mightier than the sword.
I disagree. The military is an excellent option for many teenagers. Both my best friend and my brother enlisted at the age of 17 with parental consent and it was the best path for both of them. I can only imagine what kind of havoc they would have wreaked on society had they been forced to languish in the real world until 21. They likely would have hung with the wrong crowd, acquired criminal records, and gone on to be at best, leachers of the system and at worst, doing hard time. They are now an RN and a local sheriff deputy. You are right that their brain was not fully formed at 18, but the military offered a disciplined structure that kept them busy and out of trouble until it was fully formed.
I was drafted, and I have to say the military was very good for the development of character. I was pretty good going in, if I must say, but I was better going out.
Thank you for your service.
Licensed gun owners have a lower arrest rate than the police. If you want to solve the gun violence problem, enforce existing gun laws and actually prosecute the offenders. Operation Exile in Richmond was started in 1997 and was very successful (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg66358/html/CHRG-106hhrg66358.htm) in that it directly targeted criminals by adding a mandatory federal sentence when a criminal was caught with a gun. Richmond is a predominately black city; the majority of criminals and victims were black, leading to a disproportionate number of young black men being incarcerated through this program. Although Operation Exile significantly reduced gun violence; it raised disparate impact concerns that eventually led the city to abandon the program.
Therein lies one of the biggest problems in fighting gun violence - our politicians and court system need to identify and address the problem, whether it’s criminality or mental illness, then have the gonads to follow through on treatment or incarceration. Don’t hold your breath.
if the laws were enforced in a completely fair and colorblind manner, probably the number of incarcerated black males would be even higher.
Which is precisely the problem. It LOOKS "racist," regardless of the facts, so it can't be allowed.
THIS. We know what to do. Enforce existing gun laws + protect soft targets.
There is an inherent conflict in calling for strict enforcement and no disparate treatment at the same time.
Absolutely
I note that Bari & Co. skirted around the demographic component of gun violence. If you can’t talk about that, what’s the point of all this chin pulling about the Second Amendment?
Inner city gangbangers aren’t purchasing their weapons at gun shows. Almost all are obtained illegally. There are laws on the books that would enable the authorities to crack down on that illegal market, but for various reasons—bureaucratic inertia and progressive ideology—they’re not rigorously enforced. Congress can pass call the laws it likes but unless they’re enforced, they’re perfectly useless.
I have a hard time accepting that progressives are sincere in their desire to reduce gun violence. Let’s just say that their anti-police rhetoric and policies are not helpful. Demanding new laws and regulations while reviling law enforcement betrays a certain disorganization of thought.
When one considers that almost all gun violence in this country is perpetrated by criminals or head cases, it seem a bit wooly-headed to spend so much time obsessing over America’s “gun culture.” Relative to the number of firearms in private hands, the gun homicide rate is not excessive. So perhaps it would be better to concentrate on the actual, real-world problem instead of engaging in social science theorizing of dubious utility.
It would be no complex task to secure our schools against mass shootings. Simply treat it as a military problem and identify the passive and active defense measures needed to prevent or repel an attack. It’s not that the solution is complicated, it’s that many people refuse to accept a grim reality: If a shooter gets inside a school, the result will be a massacre if there’s no on-site armed defense.
While I don’t oppose them, enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks & etc. are not to be relied upon. They’re too dependent on an elephantine bureaucracy that lets too much fall through the cracks. Ditto spending more on mental health: It’s hard to imagine a less efficient, less cost-effective method of preventing mass shootings.
Finally, let’s quit comparing America to other countries like Britain, Germany, etc. that actually are very different from our own. By and large, we can’t solve our gun violence problem by importing foreign laws and regulations. What Australia did would never be tolerable or even workable here. And as the pandemic revealed, Australia is not exactly the model of a liberal democracy.
Rajiv Sethi: "I wouldn't shed any tears if we got rid of the Second Amendment."
Of course. You're a liberal professor at Barnard (a part of Columbia University in New York City). If you actually said anything supportive of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you'd probably be swarmed and harassed out of your job by angry know-nothing college students supported and backed by the woke administrators.
Seriously. Academics can never be considered objective. Bari has done an exemplary job of illustrating what happens to rational, open minded academics. They shouldn't even be part of the discussion, or described as 'experts', as they have very significant restrictions on what they can opine, without putting their job in jeopardy.
Another example of those that can, do; those that can't, teach.
I mean, I don't care what attachment Rajiv Sethi does or doesn't have to the Second Amendment? Why does that matter? Who the hell is he to decide whether my rights, which generations of my ancestors have been defending in this country since its founding, are personally pleasing to him or not?
Reciting that type of catechism is a requirement for him to keep his job.
It's like during 2015-2020 when every liberal -- politician, actor, newscaster, commentator -- was required to say "I hate Donald Trump!" before proceeding with whatever drivel they were to spout.
His overall view was that while he personally wouldn’t shed a tear, but that in the real world the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 2A cannot be wished away. He said that repeal through amendment was the only intellectually honest approach to those who believe the 2A is some fossil from a prior time. His own suggested policies accept the current state of the law as well as the fact that repeal is a fantasy.
And, for what it’s worth, Barnard is an autonomous part of Columbia. It has its separate administration (from President on down) and should not be confused with, say, the Law or Medical schools, let alone departments within the University structure. Does its faculty tend to be of the Left? Sure, but it’s more persuasive to make a reasoned argument than deploy a label as if that alone were a drop mic moment “proving” your point