I know race is outside the purview of this article, but I think it's reprehensible that virtually no black lives killed in day-to-day gang violence and homicides are protested by Black Lives Matter activists, since the victims are killed overwhelmingly not by the police and not by whites but by other blacks, and therefore serve no narrative purpose.
In the United States today, a young black man has 15x the chances of dying from violence as his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Black youth between the ages of 10-17 were killed at 11x the rate of white youth in 2020.
I want to state first and foremost that violence in this country is a serious problem. In fact, a friend from my hometown in Alabama was shot and killed outside his house just this past weekend. It was a tragedy.
However, I think this article is absurd. "220 Americans were killed by guns"? Gun violence is a ridiculous notion. Violence can be committed by any number of objects. Guns certainly make committing acts of violence easier, but they are simply the tool used by a person.
To focus on guns instead of the larger societal factors leading to higher crime rates ("Defund the Police" comes to mind), is, if I may be excused for using a crude analogy, like focusing on the clogged toilet when the septic tank is full.
This article has no real substance. Again, I do not doubt that each of the shootings is a tragedy. That is not in question. What is in question is what precisely this article is supposed to present other than a general lament of how violent our society is.
I applaud Maya for her efforts here. The statistics are alarming. But as part of the learning experience, please realize 220 Americans were not killed by guns this weekend: they were killed by other people. People were also killed in stabbings, beatings, and by a car driven into a fireworks stand. We have a violence problem, fueled by drugs coming almost unimpeded across our wide-open southern border. We have a problem with lawlessness, fed by Marxist-inspired movements to delegitimize our system of laws and their enforcement. We have massive corruption in some of our major cities that turns a blind, social-“justice” eye to criminality. Where there is no justice, to coin a phrase, there is no peace.
Keep thinking, writing, and I hope your internship is an enlightening experience away from the woke campus of your college.
Corrections: More than 220 Americans were killed over the holiday by people who used guns. Guns don't kill by themselves. It would make more sense to write about the cultural and mental health issues that lie behind these shootings.
But which shooting received the most front page headlines and media coverage? A Black man shot by the police in Akron, Ohio. The Washington Post in bold headlines reported that police officers fired 60 rounds at the victim and appeared to continue firing even after he had been killed. Buried in the story was the indisputable FACT that the man opened fire at the police and the officers responded in kind. The Post gave front page coverage to this story for three days which clearly was designed to drum up anti-police anger and repeat the George Floyd hysteria of 2020. As usual, the media gave extensive coverage to interviews with friends and family members who described the victim as a peace loving, compassionate and dedicated family man. In my opinion, the liberal media's anti-police bias is responsible for the skyrocketing crime plaguing our cities. As a consequence, the police are demoralized and reluctant to combat crime because when they do, they are portrayed as the villains rather than actual criminals.
The second amendment is still a net good. Without the right to keep and bear arms the elite cabal would be even more oppressive, we would be living in a totalitarian country. All the guns keep them from talking the next step: peace through strength.
In the early 60s I went to Stephen F. Austin high school in Houston, Texas. I was in ROTC because I hated gym and jocks. We had a rifle range on campus, and I was on the rifle team. You could buy a gun at a local hardware store or mail-order, few or no questions and no background check. These shootings were not happening back then. Society has changed, not guns.
No need for me to write a comment - the most eloquent observation about "gun violence" I have ever read was from the late Walter Williams:
The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem. The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.
I support background checks, banning assault rifles, safety mechanisms on guns, red flag laws, etc.
But, the vast majority of murder in this country is black on black killing in the inner cities. According to the FBI, blacks are 12.5% of the population but are committing 56% of homicides — mostly against other blacks, mostly in inner cities and mostly with illegal guns.
We have a highly effective means to stop it: stop and frisk — a small inconvenience to a community versus innocent people being shot and killed. Think about it, if you might randomly be stopped and quickly checked to see if you are carrying an illegal gun, and arrested and put in jail if you are, would you risk it? The answer is no. In the 1990s, like today in many large cities, NYC was overwhelmed by gang killings and stop-and-frisk got guns and their carriers off the street. New York became the nation’s safest large city.
But in 2013, after a campaign by progressives to stop it, even though it was focused on dangerous black neighborhoods that were under siege, a federal judge declared stop-and-frisk “unconstitutional” and put the police under a federal monitor. Then came BLM villianizing police and calls to “defund the police”, the only line of defense to save black lives, and police have understandably become less proactive in these dangerous areas. And shootings and killings with illegal guns have been surging since. The people most hurt: innocent black people.
Tucker Carlson nailed it last night. Whether the Highland Park shooting - or the others in Chicago that took place but about which Democrats stayed silent even as they used Highland Park for partisan purposes - all share one thing common. These shootings are carried out by alienated, disaffected, hopeless young men. This transcends race, creed or national origin. Face it - we have a crisis in this nation. Women (mostly leftists) screech about being second class citizens and glass ceilings and other such complaints, even while 60% of women comprise university attendees and we've had equal pay laws for years as women advance in the professions and climb the ranks of management. Meanwhile all we hear is "toxic masculinity" and "the patriarchy" and how gender is fluid and boys are just damaged girls. And who spreads this nonsense? Most teachers - especially of the young - are women who are steeped in this poisonous cant. You may not like it but boys are not girls. Manly virtues are not antiquated, quaint notions. Boys need fathers. They need discipline. They need tough love and instruction. They need to do things. Build things. Create things. Without this they are lost. And the result is the mayhem we see now. There were plenty of guns in the 1950s but families were intact and the traditional virtues were honored. And we had none of this carnage. Think about it.
Once upon a time, I would have cried off the rooftops that the guns have got to go. Especially the high-powered guns that spray bullets into as many bodies as possible. There really isn't any need for this sort of weapon outside a battlefield, and even then...
However, during the BLM Riots, I changed my mind. In particular when that rabid crowd came up on the house in St Louis, I think it was, and the owners fended them off with guns. (They were labeled "white supremacists" for defending themselves.) During the BLM riots, it became clear to me how quickly lawlessness can take over -- and be SANCTIONED BY POLITICIANS. Many of my friends, who wouldn't have considered gun ownership in the past, went out and got themselves armed in order to protect themselves.
The only way to stop black men from killing each other is for the so-called "black community" to come up on valuing their own damned lives. Just as we can't control COVID 19 by hiding in our homes, we can't stop guns / weapons from getting into the hands of those intent upon using them. A white baby boomer in a black neighborhood, here's where I've witnessed my first gunshots. The only other time I saw a gun pulled was when a "cracker" pulled one out in sexual frustration (long story, to be featured in my forthcoming Substack, "My Dumb Postfeminist LIfe") -- he was quickly taken away by police, and I learned a valuable lesson...
Which brings me to these alienated males (usually white) who get hung up on annihilation.
There's a sick narrative coursing through our system. I'd like to see this narrative snuffed out. It's OK to kill babies in the womb. Life is not sacred there. Me, me, me. MY RIGHTS. Men are TOXIC. Kill the patriarchy. Sex is bad. Get married and have children and she'll find some flimsy reason to divorce you and keep you from seeing the kids that you're paying for.
This is an alienating "society." We need to openly state new values. While it may have been stifling to have to get married young and start a family, frankly that's what obligated people to grow the hell up. Black or white, that's a problem. And isn't it interesting how, in a culture that is so frothing at the mouth ANTI BULLYING, we have so many BULLIED YOUNG MEN eager to kill as many people as possible.
People only care about a problem when ‘it could be them’. Inner city violence has been just fine (if not just a political weapon / talking point) to most everyone - we only start talking about guns when it’s the places WE go...a parade, a school, a movie theater, a grocery store.
So we aren’t actually worried about guns; we’re worried about ourselves.
If we were actually worried about guns, we’d be talking about the root of the issue - moral decay in our society (as a whole). Guns are like everything else - they’re tools. Just like knives and cars and baseball bats and fists. They have multiple purposes. It’s less challenging to focus on the tool than to look deeper at the moral decline of our society.
It would be interesting to see the racial breakdown of these incidents, both shooters and victims. Everything else is ‘racialized’ why not these stats?
I would like to know how many of these shooters are members of a gun club or NRA? I am a gun club member and safety and serious of using a gun is demonstrated and discussed all the time. Gun ownership is not taken lightly in these groups. I think knowing that stat would shed light on what is considered "gun culture."
Every single time there was a human behind the tool. EVERY SINGLE TIME!
Guns do not kill, people do, when you understand this simple FACT you can then start to comprehend the problem and maybe, just maybe start to find a solution.
I know many of you don’t want to hear it but the answer is not that mysterious
“You shall say to them, ‘This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God or accept correction; truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.” Jerimiah 7:28
The solutions have been handed down to us but we have turned away from the wisdom of our ancestors.
I know race is outside the purview of this article, but I think it's reprehensible that virtually no black lives killed in day-to-day gang violence and homicides are protested by Black Lives Matter activists, since the victims are killed overwhelmingly not by the police and not by whites but by other blacks, and therefore serve no narrative purpose.
In the United States today, a young black man has 15x the chances of dying from violence as his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Black youth between the ages of 10-17 were killed at 11x the rate of white youth in 2020.
I want to state first and foremost that violence in this country is a serious problem. In fact, a friend from my hometown in Alabama was shot and killed outside his house just this past weekend. It was a tragedy.
However, I think this article is absurd. "220 Americans were killed by guns"? Gun violence is a ridiculous notion. Violence can be committed by any number of objects. Guns certainly make committing acts of violence easier, but they are simply the tool used by a person.
To focus on guns instead of the larger societal factors leading to higher crime rates ("Defund the Police" comes to mind), is, if I may be excused for using a crude analogy, like focusing on the clogged toilet when the septic tank is full.
This article has no real substance. Again, I do not doubt that each of the shootings is a tragedy. That is not in question. What is in question is what precisely this article is supposed to present other than a general lament of how violent our society is.
I applaud Maya for her efforts here. The statistics are alarming. But as part of the learning experience, please realize 220 Americans were not killed by guns this weekend: they were killed by other people. People were also killed in stabbings, beatings, and by a car driven into a fireworks stand. We have a violence problem, fueled by drugs coming almost unimpeded across our wide-open southern border. We have a problem with lawlessness, fed by Marxist-inspired movements to delegitimize our system of laws and their enforcement. We have massive corruption in some of our major cities that turns a blind, social-“justice” eye to criminality. Where there is no justice, to coin a phrase, there is no peace.
Keep thinking, writing, and I hope your internship is an enlightening experience away from the woke campus of your college.
Corrections: More than 220 Americans were killed over the holiday by people who used guns. Guns don't kill by themselves. It would make more sense to write about the cultural and mental health issues that lie behind these shootings.
But which shooting received the most front page headlines and media coverage? A Black man shot by the police in Akron, Ohio. The Washington Post in bold headlines reported that police officers fired 60 rounds at the victim and appeared to continue firing even after he had been killed. Buried in the story was the indisputable FACT that the man opened fire at the police and the officers responded in kind. The Post gave front page coverage to this story for three days which clearly was designed to drum up anti-police anger and repeat the George Floyd hysteria of 2020. As usual, the media gave extensive coverage to interviews with friends and family members who described the victim as a peace loving, compassionate and dedicated family man. In my opinion, the liberal media's anti-police bias is responsible for the skyrocketing crime plaguing our cities. As a consequence, the police are demoralized and reluctant to combat crime because when they do, they are portrayed as the villains rather than actual criminals.
The second amendment is still a net good. Without the right to keep and bear arms the elite cabal would be even more oppressive, we would be living in a totalitarian country. All the guns keep them from talking the next step: peace through strength.
In the early 60s I went to Stephen F. Austin high school in Houston, Texas. I was in ROTC because I hated gym and jocks. We had a rifle range on campus, and I was on the rifle team. You could buy a gun at a local hardware store or mail-order, few or no questions and no background check. These shootings were not happening back then. Society has changed, not guns.
No need for me to write a comment - the most eloquent observation about "gun violence" I have ever read was from the late Walter Williams:
The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem. The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.
Guns haven’t changed. People have changed.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2018/06/guns-and-past-vs-present-americans-walter-williams/
I support background checks, banning assault rifles, safety mechanisms on guns, red flag laws, etc.
But, the vast majority of murder in this country is black on black killing in the inner cities. According to the FBI, blacks are 12.5% of the population but are committing 56% of homicides — mostly against other blacks, mostly in inner cities and mostly with illegal guns.
We have a highly effective means to stop it: stop and frisk — a small inconvenience to a community versus innocent people being shot and killed. Think about it, if you might randomly be stopped and quickly checked to see if you are carrying an illegal gun, and arrested and put in jail if you are, would you risk it? The answer is no. In the 1990s, like today in many large cities, NYC was overwhelmed by gang killings and stop-and-frisk got guns and their carriers off the street. New York became the nation’s safest large city.
But in 2013, after a campaign by progressives to stop it, even though it was focused on dangerous black neighborhoods that were under siege, a federal judge declared stop-and-frisk “unconstitutional” and put the police under a federal monitor. Then came BLM villianizing police and calls to “defund the police”, the only line of defense to save black lives, and police have understandably become less proactive in these dangerous areas. And shootings and killings with illegal guns have been surging since. The people most hurt: innocent black people.
Bring back stop and frisk.
Tucker Carlson nailed it last night. Whether the Highland Park shooting - or the others in Chicago that took place but about which Democrats stayed silent even as they used Highland Park for partisan purposes - all share one thing common. These shootings are carried out by alienated, disaffected, hopeless young men. This transcends race, creed or national origin. Face it - we have a crisis in this nation. Women (mostly leftists) screech about being second class citizens and glass ceilings and other such complaints, even while 60% of women comprise university attendees and we've had equal pay laws for years as women advance in the professions and climb the ranks of management. Meanwhile all we hear is "toxic masculinity" and "the patriarchy" and how gender is fluid and boys are just damaged girls. And who spreads this nonsense? Most teachers - especially of the young - are women who are steeped in this poisonous cant. You may not like it but boys are not girls. Manly virtues are not antiquated, quaint notions. Boys need fathers. They need discipline. They need tough love and instruction. They need to do things. Build things. Create things. Without this they are lost. And the result is the mayhem we see now. There were plenty of guns in the 1950s but families were intact and the traditional virtues were honored. And we had none of this carnage. Think about it.
Once upon a time, I would have cried off the rooftops that the guns have got to go. Especially the high-powered guns that spray bullets into as many bodies as possible. There really isn't any need for this sort of weapon outside a battlefield, and even then...
However, during the BLM Riots, I changed my mind. In particular when that rabid crowd came up on the house in St Louis, I think it was, and the owners fended them off with guns. (They were labeled "white supremacists" for defending themselves.) During the BLM riots, it became clear to me how quickly lawlessness can take over -- and be SANCTIONED BY POLITICIANS. Many of my friends, who wouldn't have considered gun ownership in the past, went out and got themselves armed in order to protect themselves.
The only way to stop black men from killing each other is for the so-called "black community" to come up on valuing their own damned lives. Just as we can't control COVID 19 by hiding in our homes, we can't stop guns / weapons from getting into the hands of those intent upon using them. A white baby boomer in a black neighborhood, here's where I've witnessed my first gunshots. The only other time I saw a gun pulled was when a "cracker" pulled one out in sexual frustration (long story, to be featured in my forthcoming Substack, "My Dumb Postfeminist LIfe") -- he was quickly taken away by police, and I learned a valuable lesson...
Which brings me to these alienated males (usually white) who get hung up on annihilation.
There's a sick narrative coursing through our system. I'd like to see this narrative snuffed out. It's OK to kill babies in the womb. Life is not sacred there. Me, me, me. MY RIGHTS. Men are TOXIC. Kill the patriarchy. Sex is bad. Get married and have children and she'll find some flimsy reason to divorce you and keep you from seeing the kids that you're paying for.
This is an alienating "society." We need to openly state new values. While it may have been stifling to have to get married young and start a family, frankly that's what obligated people to grow the hell up. Black or white, that's a problem. And isn't it interesting how, in a culture that is so frothing at the mouth ANTI BULLYING, we have so many BULLIED YOUNG MEN eager to kill as many people as possible.
People only care about a problem when ‘it could be them’. Inner city violence has been just fine (if not just a political weapon / talking point) to most everyone - we only start talking about guns when it’s the places WE go...a parade, a school, a movie theater, a grocery store.
So we aren’t actually worried about guns; we’re worried about ourselves.
If we were actually worried about guns, we’d be talking about the root of the issue - moral decay in our society (as a whole). Guns are like everything else - they’re tools. Just like knives and cars and baseball bats and fists. They have multiple purposes. It’s less challenging to focus on the tool than to look deeper at the moral decline of our society.
It would be interesting to see the racial breakdown of these incidents, both shooters and victims. Everything else is ‘racialized’ why not these stats?
I would like to know how many of these shooters are members of a gun club or NRA? I am a gun club member and safety and serious of using a gun is demonstrated and discussed all the time. Gun ownership is not taken lightly in these groups. I think knowing that stat would shed light on what is considered "gun culture."
Every single time there was a human behind the tool. EVERY SINGLE TIME!
Guns do not kill, people do, when you understand this simple FACT you can then start to comprehend the problem and maybe, just maybe start to find a solution.
I know many of you don’t want to hear it but the answer is not that mysterious
“You shall say to them, ‘This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God or accept correction; truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.” Jerimiah 7:28
The solutions have been handed down to us but we have turned away from the wisdom of our ancestors.