ScreenHunter_01 Jul. 16 10.37

“City officials have suspended operations of the Safe Streets anti-violence program in East Baltimore after police officers found seven guns and drugs stashed inside the Monument Street office,” The Baltimore Sun reported Tuesday. “The program has had trouble in the past, with offices previously suspended in 2010 and 2013 amid criminal allegations against employees.”

On the surface, the idea behind the program sounds like it could have merit: Take people who came from a crime-infested neighborhood and who know youths likely to engage in such activities, and have them act as intermediaries to head off violence. As often happens, especially when mediators are thugs themselves, practice doesn’t always work out as theorized. And as generally happens, it’s all made possible by Opposite Day “progressives,” with a financial boost from (“redistributed” from the productive sector) government plunder.

And of course, the finest cheerleading money can buy….

“In 2007, the Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) obtained a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to replicate Chicago’s CeaseFire program,” the John Hopkins Bloomberg (the guy has his hand in everything, doesn’t he?) School of Public Health’s Center for Prevention of Youth Violence documents in its “Evaluation of Baltimore’s Safe Streets Program” report.

The acknowledgements note “Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” an apparent workaround to Congress telling CDC it couldn’t use tax dollars on anti-gun propaganda following the stink after Dr. Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, publicly advocated “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol, cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly and banned.”

Naturally, the Safe Streets report relies heavily on terms like “gun violence,” intentionally assigning causation and blame to inanimate objects rather than to human actors. Naturally, claims like “Gun violence has been shown to spread similarly to an infectious disease” bolster a narrative the antis desperately want to exploit.  The “report” cites “authorities” such as Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, who, in her capacity as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health advocated “My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns — and cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.”

So much for the “Nobody wants to take your guns” trolls. Of course they do, and perverts of science are leading the charge. And they’re getting way more money and press than true healers trying mightily to spread the truth about guns…

In spite of the Johns Hopkins/Bloomberg report’s use of graphs, and charts, and all kinds of egghead-speak to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about, at the end of it all, the results have been — putting things generously — inconclusive. They “estimate” fewer homicide incidents, but can’t definitively prove even one. And where they didn’t get the results they wanted, they blame “unfortunate coincidental timing of program implementation and the eruption of gang violence in that area of East Baltimore.”

But that doesn’t stop them from urging more hands in taxpayer pockets to badmouth guns.

“Using survey data, economists have estimated that U.S. residents are willing to pay a cumulative $1.2 million for every shooting that is prevented,” they close on their con. “Because gun violence extracts such enormous loss of life and social costs, efforts to prevent it should be high priorities, even when public and private resources are scarce.”

Hey, it’s not their money. Besides, that will get them more grants to write more reports advocating nonsense like “We believe the CeaseFire program model represents a very promising strategy for reducing gun violence and changing social norms surrounding violence.”

Yeah, shall we take a look at that?

“Chicago Drops CeaseFire from Anti-Violence Strategy,” PBS Frontline reported in 2013. It seems, as in Baltimore, some of the “interrupters” needed to be interrupted themselves. Fast-forward to the present, and Ilinois Gov. Bruce Rauner wants to cut their 2016 funds by “almost 60 percent.”

And as for that “promising strategy” playing out in Baltimore?

“It’s a war zone down here.”

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15 COMMENTS

  1. The “report” cites “authorities” such as Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, who, in her capacity as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health advocated “My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns — and cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.”

    Simple. People own guns (especially those evil black rifles) because it scares pathetic little communists like you lady.

    • I don’t own guns because of people like her. I own guns because I enjoy building and shooting them.

      I read TTAG; donate to NRA, SAF, GRNC and the like because of “pathetic little communists like her”.

      • I know. And that’s not the only reason I own guns, but I do donate to and am an NRA member.

  2. “[E]conomists have estimated that U.S. residents are willing to pay a cumulative $1.2 million for every shooting that is prevented.”

    Frankly, I don’t think that many Baltimorons are willing to spend $1.2 million so that some gangbanger doesn’t get shot. Just the opposite.

  3. Besides the typical gun control group hpocrisy involving being criminals and having guns, this brings up another fallacy that the same prohibitionists pushing gun bans refuse to discuss. Gun related homicides in America are almost always compared to other European or British descended states as proof of the violent gun culture and need for new gun laws. However, the same side never breaks that data down because it destroys their argument.

    Black Americans represent around a 14.4 per 100k homicide rate, while whites are 1.9 per 100k. If the issue is “easy access to guns” because of the laws not being tough enough, why is there such a large disparity? Especially when one considers how so many blacks live in large cities with gun bans or pseudo bans, why are the numbers for white homicides so low in comparison?

    The next time you see some gun banner quoting the high murder rate per capita in the U.S. in comparison to Britain or Australia as proof of the need for more gun laws, ask why it is that the white rate is so similar to the rates in those nations. The same leftists who love to quote numbers will suddenly become upset at their own numbers being broken down considering they have supported policies like the welfare state that greatly contribute to the problem. The discussion will be over and you will suddenly become a racist, even though gun control sugar daddy Bloomberg has made the same point a number of times.

      • That will not be taking place until a Greek style economic collapse happens. That is why issues like the welfare state and mass immigration have a huge impact on the 2nd Amendment, despite what the NRA says.

  4. Any Baltimore subject who hasn’t learned from the last riot and armed themselves deserves whatever happens to them in the next riot.

  5. The day Bloomberg dies will be a good day. These type of people has all the money in the world to spend to promote societal improvement, to study conflict resolution, to understand better the cause of unrest. But they confront not the thrower of the stone, but the stone itself. The last time I had a conversation with a stone it wasn’t too responsive. How is it the supposed highly educated of society have a problem with this?

    • I don’t. It’s the statists, many with less education than I in useless disiplines like “education” , polysci & philosophy . They think they are superior and they in their infinite wisdom know what is best for you and me, the proletariat (peons).

      Being well educated isn’t the problem.
      it’s their superiority complex that is the problem leading them to think they can tell us what to do and what is good for us.

  6. This is how Safer Streets works: taxpayer monies are appropriated to fund the program, including paying ex convict felons a salary to conduct their drug dealing inside taxpayer funded leased Safer Streets offices, where they stash their guns and drugs, while going around advocating against guns. There is a circular beauty here, tax monies paying gun toting drug dealers to push drugs while simutaneously undermining the RKBA and the civil society. All praises to Barack!

  7. Funny that when a relative attended medical conference at JH they were instructed on day one to not go more than 2 blocks from campus.

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