America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Democrat
Problem, by Daniel
Greenfield, 1/6/16 Politichicks
America’s mass shooting capital
isn’t somewhere out west where you can get a gun at the corner store. It’s in
Obama’s own hometown.
Chicago is America’s mass shooting
capital. There were over 400 shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of
those shootings, 3 or more people were shot.
2,995 people were shot in Chicago
last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al
Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is
still in the running. Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in
common, they’re all run by the party of gun control which somehow can’t seem to
manage to control the criminals who have the guns.
The murder rate in Washington, D.C.,
home of the progressive boys and girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The
capital of the national bureaucracy has also been the country’s murder capital.
These cities are the heartland of
America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in
McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill
rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.
Gun violence is at its worst in the
cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham,
St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for
the crimes of their own voters.
Chicago, where Obama delivered his
victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher
than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find
itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.
Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09 per
100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, but it does look like
the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To
achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a
bloody genocidal civil war.
But Chicago isn’t even all that
unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be St. Louis with 50 murders for
100,000 people. If St Louis were a country, it would have the 4th highest
murder rate in the world, beating out Jamaica, El Salvador and Rwanda.
Obama won St. Louis 82 to 16
percent. New Orleans lags behind with a 39.6 murder rate. Louisiana went red
for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17. Obama won
both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne
County 73 to 26.
Homicide rates like these show that
something is broken, but it isn’t broken among Republican voters rushing to
stock up on rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them;
it’s broken among Obama’s base.
Any serious conversation about gun
violence and gun culture has to begin at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New
York City, in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.
Voting for Obama does not make
people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle. So what is happening in
Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell?
A breakdown of the Chicago killing
fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago in one year had criminal
records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans,
it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as
many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.
Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s
gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed
because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico.
And Democrats pander to those gangs because it helps them get elected. That’s
why Federal gun prosecutions in Chicago dropped sharply under Obama. It’s why
he has set free drug dealers and gang members to deal and kill while convening
town halls on gun violence.
America’s murder rate isn’t the work
of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores
and at gun shows, and whom the media profiles after every shooting, but by the
gangs embedded in urban areas controlled by Democrats. The gangs who drive up
America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban
white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza,
like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.
National murder statistics show that
blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more
likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th
on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with
various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America
has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have
murders.
Our national murder rate is not some
incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools,
the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult
males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same
age and criminal past.
If this were going on in Rwanda, El
Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would have no trouble knowing what to make of it,
and silly pearl-clutching nonsense about gun control would never even come up.
But this is Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to
see that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble
spots in the world.
Lanza and Newtown are comforting
aberrations. They allow us to take refuge in the fantasy that homicides in
America are the work of the occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in
one of those perfect small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or
Stephen King novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something
American about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism
and bad mothers.
But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go
where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart. There is a war going on in America
between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their
counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight
for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.
America’s horrific murder rate is a
result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Gun violence largely consists of criminals
killing criminals.
As David Kennedy, the head of the
Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, “The majority of homicide
victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the
world of criminal homicide works. It’s a fact.”
America is, on a county by county
basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not
vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken
families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire
country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even
though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as
the War on Drugs.
Obama’s pretense that there needs to
be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and
cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and
politicians like him have sat on for generations.
America does not have a gun problem.
Its problem is in the broken culture of cities administered by Democrats. We do
not need to have a conversation about gun violence. We need to have a
conversation about Chicago. We need to have a conversation about what the Democrats
have done to our cities.
(A version of this article
originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.)
Follow Daniel Greenfield’s daily blog Sultan Knish.
http://politichicks.com/2016/01/daniel-greenfield-america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-democrat-problem/
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