H/T to Col. Ron who lives on another creek.
Go figure.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
The Guns of Obamerica
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
Forget
Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will
not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store.
They won't have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.
You won't find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.
67%
of firearm murders took place in the country's 50 largest metro areas.
The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7,
more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder
rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers
are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.
Those
are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most
restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the
places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and
immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world
bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places
that have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost
as long as they have been broken.
Obama
won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt
Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory. He won
New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than
the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per
100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as
any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won
it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the
murder rate is three times the statewide average.
These places aren't America. They're Obamerica.
In
2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was
responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are
disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the
people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally
buying a gun is all but impossible.
Mayors
of Obamerican cities blame guns because it's easier than blaming people
and now the President of Obamerica has turned to the same shameless
tactic. The NRA counters that people kill people, but that's exactly why
Obamerican leaders would rather talk about the guns.
Chicago,
the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It
has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers.
Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their
campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their
members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their
biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of
gang violence.
80%
of Chicago's murders are gang-related. But in 1999 when a bill came up
in the Illinois State Senate to try anyone carrying out a firearm attack
on school property as an adult, a law that would have affected gang
members who often bring weapons to school, the future leader of
Obamerica voted present. Had he not voted present, it is doubtful that
he would have been reelected in an area where gang leaders wield a great
deal of influence.
The
majority of murders in the cities with the worst homicide rates are
gang-related. And while it isn't always possible to be certain whether a
killing was gang-related, the majority of homicide victims in city
after city have been found to have criminal records.
In
2010, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States and over
2,000 known gang-related killings, over 90% of which are carried out
with firearms. Since 1981, Los Angeles alone has had 16,000 gang related
homicides. That's more than twice the number of Americans killed in
Iraq and Afghanistan and it's more than the number of Americans who died
in the Mexican-American War.
This
is what Obamerica looks like. It's a place where life is cheap and
illegal guns are as available as illegal drugs. It's a series of war
zones whose problem is not the supply of guns, but their own social
dysfunction. It's the war that we aren't talking about, because it's
easier to talk about the inanimate objects being used to fight that war.
Reformers
in the twenties blamed the plight of the slums on the availability of
liquor. They rammed through Prohibition for the entire country to fix
the cities. The liquor went on flowing and the slums went on being
slums. Gun control has been just as successful in healing the slums as
whiskey control was. And like the dry reformers, gun control advocates
insist on trying to apply their solution on a national level, when the
problem is not nationwide.
There
are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that runs
pretty well on its own. Gun sales in America do not lead to bursts of
homicide. If the power goes out for an hour, there is no epidemic of
looting. The new year isn't rung in at the morgue. Social dysfunction
exists but it never affects the majority or even a sizable minority of
the population.
And
then there's Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of it
is. Obamerica has a big gap between the rich and the poor. Its middle
class is always on the run. Its upper class retreats to fortresses. Its
lower class is broken and constantly growing as its political machines
feed off human misery and exploit social dysfunction to gain votes.
America
does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has
a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem
and a broken family problem. These social ills cannot be solved by
banning something. The War on Guns is not going to fix the inner city
just as the War on Drugs didn't. Rigid law enforcement can keep the
numbers down, but does not deal with the causes of the violence.
Obamerica
is a bad place. It has great restaurants and night clubs. It has a lot
of noise and a lot of light. The next big thing in music will probably
come out of there. It's where your kids probably dream of moving to when
they're teenagers. But for all that it's fundamentally broken.
Democratic
leaders and machines, combined with liberal social workers and justice
crusaders have run Obamerica into the ground. Obamerican cities used to
be the homes of industry and progress. Now they're places where young
Black and Hispanic men kill each other in growing numbers.
In
America, guns are used for target practice and for hunting, and on rare
occasions for self-defense, but in Obamerica guns have only one
purpose, as so many liberals have pointed out, like so many of the young
men who walk the streets of Obamerica, they exist only to kill. The
guns get blamed and the killers rotate through the revolving doors of an
overburdened justice system. And then the politicians who sit around
the table with gang leaders announce that they have a new initiative to
get guns off the streets.
America
does not need gun control. It is a mostly law-abiding place. And gun
control cannot help Obamerica. Not when its murder rate is driven by
gangs who have no trouble obtaining anything; whether it's legal in the
United States or not.
What
can help is talking about Obamerica. AIDS prevention was sabotaged by
the claim that the disease was a general problem spreading through the
population. It wasn't. Neither is gun violence. Despite the occasional
exception created by high profile suburban shooting sprees, this is not
an American problem. It’s an Obamerican problem.
Adam
Lanza is as much of a plausible poster boy for gun violence, as Ryan
White was for AIDS. A better poster boy for gun violence might be Jay-Z,
who boasts of having been a drug dealer and claims to have shot his
brother at the age of 12. The drug dealer to millionaire rapper is the
Horatio Alger story of Obamerica. And Jay-Z can be seen partying with
Obama, the political king of Obamerica touching base with its cultural
king.
If
Obama really wants to get serious about gun violence, then all he has
to do is turn to the man standing next to him. But Obama, like every
Chicago politician before him, don't want to end the violence. The death
toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about
dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that
heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica
as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.
That's
what Obama is doing now. Hiding behind Newtown and adorable little kids
is the grim specter of Obamerica's death toll. It's buried inside the
gruesome figures of how many Americans are shot each year issued as an
indictment against the entire country in general and gun owners in
particular. But those numbers are not an indictment of America. They are
an indictment of Democratic mayors and Liberal social policy. They are
an indictment of Obamerica. They are an indictment of Obama.
This
country does not need to have a conversation about how many bullets
should go in a clip. It does need to have a conversation about how many
parents should go in a family. It needs to talk about the ghettos of
Obamerica and have a serious conversation about broken families and
generational dependency. It needs to have a conversation about funneling
new immigrants from broken parts of the world into areas already
suffering from high levels of unemployment and street violence.
Most
of all this country needs to have a conversation about the direction
it's headed in. We need to set aside the same old tired social justice
rhetoric that has done nothing except train .001 percent of the young
men and women of Obamerica to be community organizers and race card
wielders and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with New
Orleans, Detroit and Chicago.
Obama
has become a role model to millions of people in the Black community.
You can see posters and photos of him in every barbershop. If anyone can
address these problems, it's him. But instead of trying to solve the
problems of Obamerica, instead of doing something about the high levels
of unemployment, the broken families and the glamorization of drug
dealing and violent crime, he wimped out and picked a fight with the
rural Americans that he derided as gun-clingers.
In
the same hollow tradition of macho posturing common among the men
responsible for much of the violence in Obamerica, he chose to show his
power in a fight for dominance with a perceived rival, rather than give
back to his community. Rather than looking to the hearts and minds of
his followers, he went after the guns of those he sees as his enemies.
That is what distinguishes a thug from a leader. Leaders uplift their
people. Thugs use them up as cannon fodder in their own private power
struggles.
The
legacy of Martin Luther King reminds us that a leader speaks difficult
truths even to his own people. There are such leaders in the Black
community today. Obama is not one of them.
The
guns of America, by and large, are not a threat to the innocent. The
guns of Obamerica are. And the conversation that we need to have is
about what can be done, not about the guns of Obamerica, but about its
hearts and minds.
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