Crime and Wonderment: The Real Cause of ‘Gun Crime’

“If the death penalty wasn’t a deterrent, the mob wouldn’t use it!” – Nate Kirkwood, Security Consultant

An Internet meme that has been making the rounds lately seems to take the “gun-crime” debate head on. It reads: “America will never solve her gun crime problem, until we admit that it’s largely a Black and Hispanic gun-crime problem …” (ACONVERSATIONABOUTRACE.COM 2014)

It goes on to claim that, “In New York City in 2012, 96% of all shooting victims and 97% of all shooting suspects were Black or Latino.”

Assuming the statistics to be accurate, what can we learn from this? Is it that simple? Can this be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

My first day in Statistics as a Political Science Major at the University of Illinois, Chicago, my professor came right out and taught us how to lie with numbers, and to do so from seventeen different positions. The lesson, “Homicides in Texas”, was to demonstrate how facts could be “massaged,” “show-cased,” and “taken out of context” in order to blame guns, alcohol, whites, or the weather and set up our “candidate” or our “cause” for the upcoming “campaign.”

A long list of possibilities were listed with the “how-to” behind each one, yet I kept expecting that at any moment, the other shoe would drop and the professor would smile and say, “Of course, to mislead voters about such important issues would be completely unethical and utterly despicable, so don’t try this at home.” The shoe never did drop, not even by the end of the semester. It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was no other shoe. This was my introduction to “higher learning.” Luckily, my best friends growing up were Sicilians so I learned, as Lewis Grizzard would say, “You can’t pull no boogie-woogie on the King of Rock ‘n Roll.”

Could the cause for homicides in any big city really be as simple as the color of one’s skin? – The darker the skin, the more violent; the more pigment, the less value for life or law?

A similar case could be made that it is a “gang problem,” as the vast majority of these crimes are one gangbanger against another. We can also argue for “ignorance,” as most of the perpetrators are not Harvard educated. “Poverty,” as the majority come from a poor upbringing, is another strong argument. The “lack of a father” in the home, the war over “drug turf,” the “dense population” of the inner city, “pride,” “greed,” “hopelessness” and “recidivism” can all stake a claim to be the cause imprimis of gun crime in the big city. “Guns” themselves are the favorite target of tyrants and simpletons; but all these are symptoms or factors of a deeper issue. This meme may contain “truth,” but it is not “the whole truth.”

A racist may cling to the “Black and Hispanic” facts; a cop or D.A. to the “gang” truth. A sociologist may argue for “poverty,” though The Great Depression didn’t have high crime rates and Blacks in the fifties were terribly poor but did not commit violent crime at these high rates.

Maybe, the Rumble Fish defense? – That people act barbaric because they’re cramped together, living on top of one another in the projects? But people live on top of one another in the John Hancock building, and I’m sure a good number of them have issues with pride and greed, with virtually no “gun-crime.”

Our good friend, Alan Keyes, wrote in his book Masters of the Dream that the black family survived intact, for the most part, throughout slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, only to be devastated by the liberal policies of The Great Society. And there you have it!

The root of excessive gun crime is not race, class or education; we don’t have a “density” problem or a “gun” problem, we have a “liberal” problem.  It is liberal policies that have stripped the inner cities of hope, driving fathers from the home and young men into street gangs. Liberals in the teacher’s unions have ruined the schools and their conspirators in the Democratic Party have stripped parents of choice in education. And where there is no hope, the people perish.

Liberals turned what was once the diamond of the Midwest into Detroit, culminating in another popular meme that shows Detroit and Nagasaki in 1946 and now; concluding that it would have been better to be nuked by the Allies 68 years ago then to allow liberals to govern you in that same time. Liberals have saturated the courts, making the cop’s job harder and the streets more dangerous. The only gun laws that the liberal wants enforced are ones against the law abiding.

So what is the answer? First off, get rid of the liberals. Expose them, drive them out, vote them out, mock them, sock them, impeach them and indict them.

Then, if the American people and the courts had the will to carry out real penalties against those who use guns violently, our “problem” would end tomorrow. It’s one reason that “conceal and carry” states are seeing huge drops in gun violence and murder. This meme pulls the Band-Aid off of the scab but it doesn’t truly expose the deeper problem: that we don’t utilize capital punishment in the way that God prescribed! – “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” – Genesis 9:6

Those that use guns in crime should never see the light of day. Hard labor should be the price they pay. Those that take life should have their life taken. The result would be a greater respect for life and for the law, and no recidivism.

First offenders and gray area cases get parked in prison. Non-violent offenders get to go home to their families at night and work off their debts during the day; it serves no purpose to put them in a cage. How is it sensible to take a man who stole from another man and put him in prison and send the victim the tab? Why should the convict get free college when the man he stole from has to take out student loans? Reparations make a lot more sense. And why punish the non-violent criminal’s family by stripping them of a father or mother and a necessary provider only to make them wards of the state or the welfare system? That’s a method that breeds victims and hardens perpetrators.

No man should live in a cage! Cages are for animals! In the Parson’s world, only violent offenders get parked behind bars and that’s when they’re not farming their own food and working manual labor. As for the hardcore violent offenders, those that take life, that rape life and that hurt kids – they die! And it shouldn’t take fourteen years to get there as most cases involving recidivist animals are open and shut. I say, shut the cell and shut the coffin but keep your damn, dirty hands off of my guns!

Image: Courtesy of: http://www.theswellelife.com/swelle_life/2009/01/faye-dunaway-thirties-style.html