Monday, November 30, 2015

"...no political will in the country to address inner-city violence."

As I've said here and on other fora, if you really want to do something about homicide by firearm then you need to pay attention to who's doing the killing, who's doing the dying, and where it is taking place.  ProPublica has an article out, How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives, on this topic, and the title to this post is THE pullquote from it.

Some other choice selections:
In 2012, 90 people were killed in shootings like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. That same year, nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns.
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Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence. But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.

Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.

Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need — and often struggle to get — is political support and a bit of money.
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Lost in the debate is that even in high-crime cities, the risk of gun violence is mostly concentrated among a small number of men. In Oakland, for instance, crime experts working with the police department a few years ago found that about 1,000 active members of a few dozen street groups drove most homicides. That’s .3 percent of Oakland’s population.
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Two weeks after Obama unveiled his plan, (Pastor Michael) McBride and dozens of other clergy members, many of them from cities struggling with high rates of gun violence, met again with staffers from Vice President Biden’s task force.

The mood at the January 29 meeting was tense. Many of the attendees, including McBride, felt the president’s agenda had left out black Americans.

“The policy people working for Biden worked with the reality of Congress,” said Teny Gross, one of the original Boston Miracle outreach workers who now leads the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “What they were proposing to us was very limited and was not going to help the inner city.”

Gross said he “blew a gasket.” The clergy members in the room were pleading for help. “We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

A staffer said that the political will of the country was not focused on urban violence, several ministers who attended the meeting recalled.

“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said the Rev. Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas — schools where white kids were killed.”

The Rev. Jeff Brown, from Boston, was angered by the administration’s calculated approach. “When you say something like that and you represent the President of the United States, and the first African-American President of the United States, you know, that’s hugely disappointing,” he said.
It would seem that Obama's a huge disappointment to a lot of people.

RTWT.  And especially the comments.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Friday, November 20, 2015

This is Interesting

In 1998 the Massachusetts legislature enacted Chapter 180, a gun control law requiring residents to acquire a Firearms ID card before owning any weapon.  "Weapon" being defined as anything as or more potent than pepper spray.  The FID card application cost $25.  There was a pre-existing law requiring a "license to carry."

That cost for the FID was raised in 2003 to $100.  Some time after that, the permit fee for chemical sprays was reduced back to $25, but firearms permits remained at $100.

As a result:
If the intent of the Gun Control Act of 1998 was to discourage the sport of hunting and competitive target shooting and to disarm Massachusetts citizens, it must be considered a howling success. In 10 years since its passage, the number of licensed gun owners has decreased from 1,500,000 to 220,000, an 85 percent drop, according to figures provided by the by the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee.
Of course, supporters of the law made claims like:
"Fewer firearms on the street makes life safer for everyone," said Robert F. Crowley, Quincy's police chief. "The average citizen who has a gun 24-7 I don't believe has the experience, knowledge, and training to know when and if they should use a firearm."
And
“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”
And
The author of the law, state Senator Cheryl Jacques, was pleased that the Bay State’s stiff new restrictions had made it possible to “weed out the clutter.”
Nice to know that the majority of legal gun owners were considered "the clutter."

But the reality?
If the intent was to reduce crime, then that law must be considered a miserable failure. Based on incidents per 100,000, gun-related homicides are up 68 percent, assault related gun injuries up 72 percent, assault related hospital discharges up 160 percent, gun assault Emergency Dept visits up 222 percent and gun assault outpatient observations up 538 percent. Keep in mind that these increases occurred when there were 1,280,000 fewer licensed gun owners in the state.
And:
Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month — “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong.
We know better than that. The philosophy cannot be wrong!
 
But now there's better news:
The number of legal gun owners in Massachusetts is growing. The 22News I-Team obtained and analyzed state data showing how many people have a license to carry from 2009 to September 2015.

378,642 people or one in every 14 adults has a gun license in Massachusetts. Up from 227,612 in 2010. A 66% increase.
Still a far cry from 1.5 million, but things are finally moving in the right direction again.

As always, the stated intent of "gun control" laws is to increase public safety, but the result of these laws is to disarm the general public, and public safety suffers.  After all, the mantra of The Other Side™ is that "the number of guns" in circulation is "the problem."  Therefore "the solution" must be to reduce that number to a level indistinguishable from zero.

Never forget that.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Why We're Winning

Somebody once said:
I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.
I think this guy gets it (seen on the streets of Tucson):

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Quote of the Day - Sudden Jihad Edition

From Sean Sorrentino on Facebook:
If we keep pretending to ourselves that this takes "Extensive pre-planning and training," then we fool ourselves into believing that it can't happen. The real limiting factor is finding about a dozen psychos who are so mentally whacked that they think that this is a good idea, but are still composed enough that they can work together effectively. The tools and the tactics are easy to pick up. It's the broken, yet not shattered brains that are in short supply.
RTWT.

Iowahawk Scores Again


The man is a national treasure who should have his own monument on the D.C. Mall.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Yes, This Is a Perfect Representation of Modern Edumacashun


This does explain the recent actions at Yale and the University of Missouri.

Tough history coming, indeed.

Sunday, November 08, 2015

Maryland Scraps its IBIS System

Maryland scraps gun "fingerprint" database after 15 failed years.

A surprising admission of reality.

If you're interested in the "Why" behind the (extremely overdue) decision, read my 2005 post, Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (and Won't) Work.