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Jewish World Review Jan 23, 2013/ 12 Shevat, 5773 Gun crime facilitators are the ones pointing fingers By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Liberals blame "gun nuts," the "gun lobby," and the National Rifle Association for gun violence. They should be pointing fingers at each other. The NRA offers "a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "It's outrageous and unsettling" that the NRA won't support gun control legislation in the wake of the massacre in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in December, said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The emphasis white liberals put on gun control is racist, said Cornel West. "Not a peep; not a mumblin' word when the black folk getting shot. But now Newtown, vanilla side, low in behold we got a major conversation." The Princeton professor thinks just about everything is racist, but he has a point. Most murder victims -- and most murderers -- are black. In 2007, the homicide rate among blacks was 23.1 per 100,000; 2.7 for whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half of all murder victims are African Americans, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. More than 90 percent were murdered by other blacks. Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, the New Century Foundation found in a 2005 study. They are three times as likely to use a gun while committing a crime of violence. There were 200 more murders in Chicago last year than there were U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan. There's been as many homicide victims this month as there were in the Newtown massacre. Black New Yorkers are 13 times as likely to be murdered -- or arrested for murder -- as whites, says the NYPD. Two-thirds of all murders with firearms last year took place in the 50 largest metro areas. Nearly all those cities are governed by Democrats. America doesn't have a gun violence problem. Democrats do. They facilitate gun violence. • The seminal event in criminology was the 1972 study by Marvin Wolfgang of the University of Pennsylvania that indicated just 7 percent in the cohort he studied committed more than two-thirds of violent crimes. For each offense for which they were caught, these chronic offenders committed eight to 11 other crimes. They were rarely punished. Had these "Dirty 7 Percenters" been sent to prison for just a year after their third offense, there'd have been 7,200 fewer serious crimes in Philadelphia, Mr. Wolfgang calculated. Subsequent research here and in Europe has confirmed his findings. The rate of violent crime has fallen by nearly half since publication of Mr. Wolfgang's study, chiefly because more chronic offenders are being sent to prison for longer periods. It would have fallen further, but liberals fought against longer sentences. • Most gun crime is committed by gang members. Most gang members come from single parent families. Thanks chiefly to liberal policies which undermine traditional marriage, the proportion of blacks born out of wedlock has risen from 25 percent in 1965 to 72 percent now. • The number of mass shootings (four or more victims) has risen from 18 in the 1980s to 87 in the 2000s. People like Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, would have been committed to a state mental hospital. But liberal policies emptied them out. All but one mass shooting in the last 50 years has taken place in a "gun free" zone. Shooters choose them because they know there won't be an armed citizen there to cut their murder spree short. Gun violence could be reduced if more who lied on the background check form were prosecuted, the NRA's Jim Roberts told Vice President Joe Biden last week. "We don't have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form," Mr. Biden told him. They only have time to punish the innocent. But gun control laws haven't reduced violence in Chicago and New York. Violent crime soared in the District of Columbia after a gun ban was enacted. It "emboldened criminals because they knew that law-abiding District residents were unarmed and powerless to defend themselves," said Jeffrey Shapiro, a former prosecutor there. To reduce gun violence, we must focus on the people who commit gun crimes, not on the law abiding. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2011, Jack Kelly |
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