By Kyle
“So what . . . do you want to do nothing about gun violence?” Actually, I absolutely want the nation to take steps to reduce gun violence. But the only time I ever hear calls for that are when a bunch of white people get killed, and I’m sorry if it’s uncomfortable to talk about but shootings in public places like schools and movie theaters do not make up a significant fraction of gun violence in this country . . .
Everybody now knows James Holmes’ name because he shot a bunch of white people. Just like everybody now knows Adam Lanza’s name. He committed the cardinal sin of shooting white children. But if you wave a magic wand right now and no more Aurora- or Sandy Hook-style shootings happened ever again, you know what you would have done? You’d have saved a few dozen lives a year. Because the real gun violence problem in this country is not committed with black rifles with drum magazines in shopping malls, it’s perpetrated primarily with inexpensive handguns in inner cities.
By far the largest portion of victims of gun violence are young black and Latino men. Liberals are so very quick to talk about white privilege and social inequality, the stacked deck that racial minorities in this country face and the systemic discrimination that keeps them there. And they are right. But when they talk about ending gun violence, they aren’t talking about making changes to that system so young minorities have more opportunity to reach their full potential instead of being cut down by the violence associated with gangs and drugs. Instead, they’re talking about banning the guns that crazy white people use to kill other white people.
It’s incredible that the gun lobby is so often accused of being racist when before Sandy Hook there were over one thousand gang-related homicides committed in this country and nobody’s said a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a media frenzy over the death of Trayvon Martin . . . it’s really easy to get excited about a story about a “white” man hunting down and killing an innocent teenager because of the color of his skin. That’s drama, right there, regardless of how true it is.
If any of you who wore hoodies for a month last year could name any of the other young black men shot on the same day as Trayvon Martin I will buy you all the skittles and iced tea you can handle. We simply do not care about gun violence in this country until there’s a dramatic story with a clear bad guy. When the bad guy is the system and when you are a white person in America and, as such, you are the system and thus the bad guy, those stories won’t be told on the evening news.
So if you tell me you want to fight gun violence in America, for the love of God, please do. But you will do far, far more good by working to fix issues of racial and social disparity, by recognizing privilege and how deeply ingrained it is in our society and by figuring out ways to fight for equality tooth and nail.
That’s not as easy as giving gun control another try, or as saying “guns are bad” and washing your hands of it knowing you’re on the side of the good guys. And it’s not as easy as rallying around a school full of dead children. It’s a lot harder to admit that you’re part of an ugly society that, despite improvements, is still wildly stacked against minorities and that for every white person who dies in a school shooting there will be scores of bodies in city morgues whose names you will never know.
But if you want to make a serious impact on gun violence in America, the freaks and loons committed to becoming celebrities by going for a mass shooting high score aren’t the place to start.
I think this could be considered a general consensus by all of those who are educated enough to understand this country.
The color of my skin does not make me the system nor the bad guy, he doesn’t know where I live and the things I do and the way I treat those around me. There’s a vast difference between the ruling class and myself and my family, we are down here in the trenches fighting tooth and nail just like anyone else.
Ditto. Good to know that there are still some Black folk out there that think ‘Whitey’ is doing fine and dandy. I didn’t know that already.
The editorial accuses ‘the system’ of caring more about white victims of gun crimes, which seems to be the case in effect, or at least the system, as it were, seems to ignore the very large amount of everyday gun related homicides which largely concern non white people.
The article does not however accuse all whites of being part of said system.
Can we please stop using terms like “gun violence”? That’s gun-grabber propaganda to demonize our self-defense tools, please stop helping them. There’s no such thing as “gun violence”. Guns are not violent, people are.
You don’t even get what the writer is writing.
I have been pointing this out to antis also. No one seems to mind hundreds of African American youths dying each months across the nation. One school filled with white kids gets hit? Now all of a sudden the whole nation loses its mind. The soft racism of the American progressive.
The country would have been equally horrified if this had happened in a black majority elementary school. I will even contend that the white-guilt media of this country would have blown that up even bigger than Newtown. I don’t want to see kids of any race harmed. Not everything has to be viewed through a race-based lens. I certainly have no problem enforcing current law in inner-cities. But don;t look at me to bail everyone out. The adults living in inner cities have made conscious decisions to live in inner-cities. And elections have consequences.
You summed it up pretty well. Shoot twenty kids and sh*t gets real. The “racists” sure didn’t like that poor Afghan girl getting shot or the Indian girl being gang raped. DiFi’s crowd and the fluffer MSM mouthpieces were just waiting for a tragedy.
I believe you are correct that, no matter what, due to the victims being children there would have been national pain and outrage. However, I simply don’t believe the backlash would have been the same. Middle and upper-middle class Whites have been at *perfect* peace with thousands of dead African American kids each year. How often do we see the image of a crying African American mother whose little girl gets hit in gangland cross-fire? All. The fvcking. Time. One image of a heartbroken, attractive white woman crying out in pain hits the internet after a shooting? Well la-dee-da… that’s the GD image seen around the world.
I agree that a lot of things are oftentimes viewed through a racial lens when they shouldn’t be. This is not one of those times. The number of minorites who persish in our inner cities are a holocaust when compared to the number killed in spree killings.
The reason this story didn’t die and go off the air a week ago was because those were mostly white kids. Those were “CT” kids; A state overflowing at the brim with progessive liberals. It wasn’t 1000 faceless, nameless latino or black kids. Those kids reminded progressives of THEIR kids. As such, a call to action… for the children! It’s just mighty convenient that its what they’ve always wanted to do with private arms anyways.
If progressive liberals had an honest bone in their bodies they would be freaking the fvck out about gang violence and the minority youths killed by it. Just because they don’t all die in the same room at the same time by the same bad guy doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic. Hypocrites the lot of them. That is what this is about.
Unfortunately trends don’t arouse passions quite like spontaneous tragedies. Also, you’re projecting your own rationality onto anti-gunners. Stop it. They aren’t rational. Anti-gunners don’t care that auto-erotic asphyxiation kills people at the rate “assault rifles” do. They don’t care how many kids are strangled by psychotic mothers, poisoned, or drown in swimming pools. Antis have a narrative. Statistics won’t refute it or enter seriously into their mental processes.
whites are devils and the chickens have come home to roost on them via the 3rd and 4th generation.
You hit it out of the park, with bases loaded, Kyle. Good on ya. Now if we could just get the other team to recognize your wisdom and insight, we might make some real progress. Sadly, I’m not at all hopeful.
“But you will do far, far more good by working to fix issues of racial and social disparity, by recognizing privilege and how deeply ingrained it is in our society and by figuring out ways to fight for equality tooth and nail.”
And this is why I don’t vote Republican.
Most Democrats don’t want to solve the aforementioned issues, either. After all, if everyone was truly equal, what would they have left to campaign for? The reality seems to be that politicians wave their fingers at each other in a mocking attempt to find solutions. When reelection time comes, they can then talk about how hard they “tried” and how the “other side” is to blame for the resulting inaction.
We should take a long hard look at both parties and stop supporting professional politicians, regardless of their affiliation. They’ve shown time and time again that their own interests and agendas outweigh the needs and desires of their constituents.
When you find the answer to that one, please let me know.
But, personal responsibility should be expected of people in a free society after they reach a certain age. There are “two communities”, and all that, but, it is just too simplistic to assume “privilege” because of majority status. Very easy to look at someone who has it a little better and assume it was all acquired by accident of birth. The lure of easy riches in our society attracts far more than can be rewarded. Most people just do that old go-to-school/work and pay the bills thing. Last I heard, anyone can still sign up for that.
He speaks the truth.
Tackling inner city gun violence doesn’t further the statist agenda of disarming America. The state isn’t scared of gang members with .22-caliber pistols and .38-caliber revolvers. They’re scared of you and your .223 “assault weapon” and .30-06 “sniper rifle”.
I don’t believe the media circus that follows events like Newtown and Aurora have anything to do with the victims being white. Rather, it is because the perpetrators are using weapons that are predominately owned and favored by law-abiding, Constitution-believing, independent-minded Americans.
Plus, the media can make these weapons, especially assault weapons, seem extra dangerous because they look like the weapons used by the military. This connection makes it SO much easier for Americans to swallow the lies that the media feed them because, according to the liberals, military style weapons are too dangerous for civilians and designed only to kill as many people as possible. Thus the media can make the weapons used in the shooting, and through these all weapons, seem like tools of mass murderers and mass murderers only.
“especially assault weapons”
Assault weapons are what the military uses. They have been heavily regulated since 1934 and we peasants can’t own one that was manufactured after 1985. What the gov and press is talking about banning are semi-automatic rifles. They change the language to suit their purpose. When we buy into their languate we help them with their agenda.
We need to better enforce the laws we have. All the time in Chicago when you look at the criminal history of the people being arrested for murder you see the following:
Lifelong criminal.
Sentenced to 10 years in 2000 for violent crime
Sentenced to 5 years in 2004 for drug crime
sentenced to 5 years in 2006 for another drug crime
sentenced to 20 years for murder in 2009….
Anyone else see the pattern?
Most of the time these guys are getting light sentences off the bat and they are lucky to serve HALF the time!
When all you know is getting wrist slapped, how long is it going to be before you kill someone? Even then if you are lucky you get out in 10-15 years!!!!!!!!!!!
That is the problem.
The Governor of Illinois will not hire enough prison guards, we have new prisons sitting empty because we can’t afford the upkeep. Yet we have a prison overcrowding problem so we have to release inmates early? Insanity!
Lock up the violent criminals and keep them locked up longer; enforce the laws we have!
This is a more accurate reason for sky high violence in urban areas. The liberal judges are convinced that it’s not the minorities fault for commiting the crimes and then they’re influenced even more by the politicians who don’t want to commit more funds to corrections. It’s well documented that liberal welfare started in the 1960’s led to this state, especially in Chicago. The history channel actually produced a good documentary on this. There is no easy answer to fix this problem which has been decades in the making. And gun control is NOT the answer.
Yeah, but the BATF got the criminal who’s gun fired twice at the shooting range with a single trigger pull. He had an unregistered machine gun & went to jail for 3 years, so there is some justice once & awhile, sarc. off, Randy
Urban minority youth die one at time and rate a paragraph in the “police blotter” section of the local paper, but a bunch of white kids all at once is tragedy of the highest degree? 60,000 men, women, and children dead in Syria, and where is the cry to intervene? A congress cheering itself over avoiding a fiscal cliff they created and a nation with first world problems just doesn’t want to be bothered. It’s not the POTUS, or the media, it is the culture. We need a dynamic shift in our thinking. More testing doesn’t make kids smarter, more laws don’t end crime.
+1,000 Amen.
Nailed it. The same system that tells inner city youth only have 2 ways out – playing basketball or rapping. Give em an Independence card, a crumbling neighborhood and an equally crumbling school then say “good luck!”. And we wonder why the cities are so violent? We never hear about the murdered Black and Latino children who are mowed down by stray bullets from stolen handguns in our inner cities either.
And they call us crazy.
That’s funny. I live in Cleveland and I hear it everyday. We just passed a law that raises our taxes to a school that my kids will never see because we home school but hey, let’s talk privilege.
As I an Chicago ex-pat I can guarantee you that the only reason that the Chicago establishment is “concerned” about the violence on the south and west sides is because it is spreading into the wrong neighborhoods. If the violence stayed where it belonged Rahm and Co wouldn’t care less about it.
Black and Latinos are useful for only one thing. Voting (D) on Election Day and you know what? Even if you are dead you still get to vote in Chicago. Nothing will change until the people who live in the inner city realize that getting a welfare check in exchange for their vote is just a scam designed to keep them on the plantation.
This.
Big time this. An adult living in the inner-city is making a conscious decision to live in the inner-city. Plenty of other places to live in this country that are better places to raise children. My White Guilt Bank has closed.
Right on! As a Chicago non-ex-pat this is certainly the case. No one here gives a rat’s @$$ about minority children and young adults, but are more then willing to show their “concern”.
A huge majority of the violence that happens day after day never makes the news either. I listen to the police scanner every so often and you wouldn’t believe the crap that goes down and in the supposed nice parts of town too. The mag mile is a virtual free for all on nice evenings during the summer with wildings, fights, robberies, shoplifting, etc…. And 99.99% of all perp descriptions are “male black, 18-24, etc…” Have yet to hear a wanted description for a “female white, 40, 5’2″, 110lbs, etc…”
European immigrants have been getting welfare since the enactment of slavery. Europeans were indentured servants doing slave labor before they stole Black people from their land to do their dirty work and rape and murder. You Europeans are so ignorant, pick up a book and read about your history and the history of this country.
Kyle, well said. Gun violence will be reduced when social inequities and the cycle of poverty are given the attention it deserves. Nothing any of the politicians are talking about will reduce the murder rate in Chicago in any way shape or form.
+1000 bazillion.
A new Gallup poll seems to agree with your argument that nobody cares about gun violence in the US. At least not compared with anything else.
Bull-f***ing ***t.
It’s the goddamned Drug War, which almost every control freak psychopath in power keeps on pushing, that’s destroying black communities. Prohibition has made it extremely profitable yet risky to engage in the drug trade. Why get a job when you can make more money dealing in an hour than you could all day working for the man?
Instead of using a tragedy to push gun control you’re using it to push your own idiotic racist “gimme everything” agenda. Clearly the problem is that there’s not enough people dependent on government! Or enough money or affirmative action!
FLAME DELETED
Well said Outlaw. “Social inequities” is just excuse for allowing people ot set on their butts all day.
The Drug War is social inequity, or at least a big part of it. In some states, the fraction of black men aged 20-35 who were incarcerated in 2000 topped 30%, a meteoric rise since 1970. The biggest contributor to this increase has been the war on drugs. Such wholesale removal of this demographic from society has huge ramifications – I don’t know how any community can withstand it. When there aren’t enough men to go around in the marriage market, it not only implies some women will have to remain unmarried, it also means the remaining men don’t have to offer as much to a potential mate. Add in to that the crippled earning power of men returning to society after having been incarcerated, and the results are predictable: broken families, with fatherless children growing up in poverty.
I agree that the war on drugs is a big problem but it is not the cause of the problem. It is just a symptom. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the cause of women from this demographic remaining unmarried. There are plenty of men from this demographic that had the integrity to get out of the situation and make a better life for themselves. Apathy and lack of self-respect has more to do with inner city violence than anything else. It would be difficult growing up with Jesse and Al telling you that making it in the “white” world is impossible and if you try you’re an uncle Tom. Jesse, Al, other supposed black leaders and most Democrats prey on minorities. They make a living keeping them down and dependent.
Ask and ye shall receive
Besides which, it’s foolish to pretend we can make a neat little pile of “symptoms” over here and “causes” over here, because this is a feedback loop. By criticizing the character of young minority men you implicitly raise the question of whose job it was to shape their character, and why they failed, or rather often why they weren’t there to shape it at all.
And once you get arrested, tried and convicted of a drug crime, noone will ever hire you, because it’s still quite legal to Discriminate on Felons.
Yep.
And why would a bunch of guys who have pretty fatalistic views want to stick around and make their communities better?
Many bangers and dealers in the hood are convinced that they’re going to die young or go to prison. If there was no real money to be made (or significantly less) making and distributing drugs they might look for real jobs. They’d have more stable relationships, they’d have kids, hell they might even get married instead of living life fast and hard.
And a bunch of these illegitimate entrepreneurs could easily become legitimate ones if there was economic incentive to do so.
More government isn’t the answer. Less government is.
Not only that, but consider the case of a felon who actually wants to turn their life around. How many government licenses and forms does it take to turn the skills of say a handyman or plumber into your own business? And how many of those will turn a felon down flat, or raise such difficulties that someone who wants to build a business and aspires to employ others has an unending series of roadblocks in front of them?
I don’t know what the solution to this is, felonious crimes are still felonious. Honestly, I wouldn’t want a convicted rapist in my house to do work when I wasn’t home and I’m not sure there are a lot of other people who would. But the longer the list of government approvals, the more tape for a felon to be caught in even if they are trying to do the right thing. Smaller government may well be an answer here, but in a place like Chicago if you don’t have to ask permission from the city to cross the street there isn’t nearly as much opportunity for graft.
yup and the war on drugs benefits some big players on wall street and our own government; at the expense of all innocents from every walk of life in our country.
The CIA gets its black operations money, Wall Street gets the excess of 1.5-2 trillion in investments, and the security-military industrial complex profits immensely from the boogeyman. everybody wins (except Americans and the citizens of the respective countries that are affected).
You dare question how Progressives and the media view
minorities?! They need help and protectors because they
obviously can’t succeed on their own. We ended the
problems in inner cities with affirmative action, forced
racial diversity (i.e. quotas), and unrestricted welfare
schemes. You just don’t seem to understand just how
much we care.
You racist you.
I agree, if anyone really wanted to fix what the real problems are, the focus would be the criminals. A man tried, and convicted for murdering his wife, gets a taxpayer funded sex change operation? We seem to care more about the criminal, than the victim, more about animals, and insects, than humans. There is a real bad virus going around. Why are we not looking at private gun ownership by upstanding citizens as a resource for local law enforcement? Why are the local agencies not tapping this valuable resource for qualified volunteers to work, and train with for casual, and emergency situations? This would make more sense than demonizing them, and attacking their rights.
This article speaks truth. Hard, uncomfortable truth, but truth nonetheless.
Well said, Kyle.
And one of the best solutions to this problem? Ending the War on Drugs.
This was tough medicine, and like all tough medicine, it was hard to swallow. Harder still to swallow is that the “culture of violence” is perpetuated by the people who are most victimized by it. Black men and women, I love you and I’ll fight for you but this sh!t must stop.
Every poor, underserved and despised minority in America has “made it” within two generations. The same Hispanics in America who couldn’t get a job except for mowing lawns two generations ago are now running multinational corporations. The same much-despised Italian immigrants who arrived here with two lira in their pockets and no English are prosperous and much-loved. Asians who arrived here with nothing are business owners who work their @sses off and succeed. I could go on and on, but why bother. The point is made.
Stop having six children by six different men whose names you have forgotten. Stop shooting each other over a glassine envelope of white powder. Stop putting sh!t into your veins. Those black men and women who did ascended the ladder, and who do will also rise up, and damn fast, because the world needs them badly. Those who don’t have no business telling me how bad it is to be black in America.
Well put, Ralph.
Ralph, I agree, and disagree. We aren’t all equal and most can’t match the better of our peers. It’s grand to admire and respect those who excel but that is not the measure of the norm, the median. Let’s allow that given equal circumstances many of us might fall short. We the fortunate did not create the advantage we were born in to, so we best not judge the lot of those starting from the bottom. Your examples offer hope but don’t reflect the whole of any group.
I think this may be one of the most significant posts to date on this site. Let’s see what is offered in the comments here. This is worth our attention.
“Ralph says:
January 15, 2013 at 16:19
This was tough medicine, and like all tough medicine, it was hard to swallow. Harder still to swallow is that the “culture of violence” is perpetuated by the people who are most victimized by it. Black men and women, I love you and I’ll fight for you but this she!t must stop.
Every poor, underserved and despised minority in America has “made it” within two generations. The same Hispanics in America who couldn’t get a job except for mowing lawns two generations ago are now running multinational corporations. The same much-despised Italian immigrants who arrived here with two lira in their pockets and no English are prosperous and much-loved. Asians who arrived here with nothing are business owners who work their @sses off and succeed. I could go on and on, but why bother. The point is made.
Stop having six children by six different men whose names you have forgotten. Stop shooting each other over a glassine envelope of white powder. Stop putting sh!t into your veins. Those black men and women who did ascended the ladder, and who do will also rise up, and damn fast, because the world needs them badly. Those who don’t have no business telling me how bad it is to be black in America.”
I couldn’t agree more, Ralph. My wife’s family moved here from India not 45 years ago. Couldn’t speak a word of English, didn’t know a thing about business (what 20 and 19 year old, just married couple does?). Within days they both had jobs working menial jobs wherever they could. Prepping food for a vegetarian cooking show on a local, public broadcast, picking fruit for a local canning business, doing laundry and house keeping for hotels wherever they could pick up work. Within less then one year both could speak English. Within the year both could read and write it (I should add that they had no formal training – who with no money or assistance can afford education?) and had a healthy amount of money put away AND a place to call their own. Within less then two years these two kids from India had a house! A house! Two kids who knew neighbors and family who lived in blue tarp huts. Three more years down the road both had their own successful business and permanent resident status for the next ten years. Five years later they sold that business and bought another one! They literally upped income for their household by about six times what they were making the previous five years. They had two kids and have been going on with life ever since.
Now. Tell me that 45 years ago two folk from India that didn’t know a word of English didn’t face racial difficulty, hatred and general un-acceptance. Go ahead and someone tell me that. In those years both their kids had the pleasure of private schools, BMWs as their first cars and trips to France, Italy, Spain and to India every year to visit family. Someone tell me that they are privileged.
I have lived here for five years. I am a White male aged 18-35. I am from Canada. I am an immigrant. I have an advanced degree in Compute Sciences. I have been told that ‘We don’t like your kind ‘round here!’ during an interview by a Puerto Rican in Cleveland AND a Latino in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have since taken my lot and become a work at home dad who homeschools his kids. Am I privileged?
“Stop having six children by six different men whose names you have forgotten. Stop shooting each other over a glassine envelope of white powder. Stop putting sh!t into your veins. Those black men and women who did ascended the ladder, and who do will also rise up, and damn fast, because the world needs them badly. Those who don’t have no business telling me how bad it is to be black in America.”
This is straight fact from the life I have led thus far. My wife having lived here before me was already attending what she called a church. It was a black church and at first we loved the folk there (about 2 and a half years) but soon came to realize we needed something more. The kicker for us was not the constant giving of services and funds more so then the rest of the congregation combined but that we were made to feel guilty of my wife’s hard work in getting to where we were at. We popped the zit when we were told to take our blessings once news of my wife being pregnant got around. Blessings being welfare. The ‘Pastor’ actually told my wife to quit her job and take her blessings or they would never come again and it will be harder to get for everyone else if we didn’t go on ‘the dole’ as I like to call it. Good times. We left that place in the decaying dust of it’s existence….just saying. We found out about two years after leaving (from the pastor’s wife) that our former ‘pastor’ that they had separated. He was on to a new family now. Literally on this third family. He had already had kids with another lady, married this poor lady and hung around for 6 years and is now ‘sowing seeds’ with another lady. Good times. I did that. Me, the privileged.
“Those black men and women who did ascended the ladder, and who do will also rise up, and damn fast, because the world needs them badly. Those who don’t have no business telling me how bad it is to be black in America.”
Please, God. If only. I couldn’t tell you how much me and my wife would love for a true leader to come, or many, this isn’t working and it hurts.
if they were white, what would your racist ass being saying about them. you are another ignorant white devil
If they were White I would not be able to stand them just as much. Being from Canada and seeing this new entitiled generation of parents is one of the reasons I left the country. Men 18 and 19 years old thinking the world owes them all because they graduated highschool or got a GED. Entitled to live on welfare or off disability because they have a headache. I left that place behind. I didn’t expect to see it so worshipped here.
White devil.. lol… good luck with that one, Bro.
As a sidenote, Bro. I don’t know one white guy where I grew up with three baby mommas… I haven’t met a black guy down here with any less then two… just saying… read a book, study some research papers… look at what other black folk say about inner city black folk in College… good luck. You need it.
This is a smart piece. Violence in general is of course a much more complicated issue than access to its implements, regardless of type. The campaign against gun violence via “gun control” has been and will be emperically ineffective. So, why not call it what it is and use the term we gun rights proponents have recued from history: civilian disarmament? It’s harder to sell that.
We live in a culture that worships the military and advocates civilian disarmament in the same breath. Not new.
“citizen disarmament”
Gang violence serves the state. It’s an excuse to disarm flyover America, increase fedgov influence, continue the War On Drugs, and expand the prison-industrial complex.
I agree completely. Think about it: as crime increases and the public becomes more feeble, the more government people will want. And what’s the best way to empower criminals and make the public feeble? Take firearms away from the public!
You have got to be kidding me!
You actually believe the “white privilege and social inequality” keep minorities poor?
I’ll tell you why black and hispanics are so much poorer than whites, thier culture.
The black gangster culture and a little less the hispanic culture is why they are poorer as a group than whites.
When a black person gets a good education the BGC puts them down and makes fun of then for being “like whitey”; when they get a good blue collar job they a called an Uncle Tom; the only to get respect in the BGC is to get rich in music, sports and being a gangster, you get the most respect if your a gangster rapper.
It’s some what the same in the hispanic culture, a good education is not a prioprity, here in NM, better than 50% of the hispanic population drop out of hi school with out graduating and there is some street cred for being a gangster.
But your just being RACIST, the progressives cry, Uhm, no, it’s just the facts ma,am.
I’ll give the example of a good friend of mine, a first generation Vietnamese woman; she moved here with her family when she was very young, the father spoke a little english, her mother more so, the father did construction, her mother had a corner convenience store, the three girls and one boy now have two masters and two bachelors between them and they are living the middle class American dream.
I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s the culture of hard work, good education and good family values that make the difference, not skin color.
ThomasR, I should have read your post before I posted above.
This. I stopped reading this article about halfway through because of the blatant racism against whites. Yes, he has a very good points that the majority of deaths are minorities in inner cities using handguns and that none of the proposed bans would do anything about it. But that point is lost in the sea of hatred for whites.
Yessir, ThomasR. Look up the Hmong. A people from China who were moved here some time ago. They didn’t even have their own written language. Now they are some of the more successful Asians in this country. They got like that from the privilege of being hunted by their own government, hey?
The key to seriously reducing violence (note I did not not say gun violence because the idea that one kind violence is somehow more abhorrent is an absurd lie perpetuated by the hoplophobe.) is better education. Better education earlier in their lives can give many inner city children better opportunities than becoming a drug dealer or robbing their neighbor.
This is such a well written piece. Great job, Kyle!
So now that everyone knows how to actually reduce assaults and murders (where the attacker uses a firearm), why is anyone still pushing for citizen disarmament?
To paraphrase the Joker:
“If I told you inner city minorities would slaughter each other on an industrial scale or Mexican civilians would die by the truck load nobody cares because it’s all part of the plan. Shoot up a school of white kids and everybody loses their minds”
Not that shooting up a bunch of white kids is cool, either. Or the inner city folks or Mexicans. Obviously
Not even close.
First of all: yeah, liberals couldn’t give a crap about minorities. This is an epiphany?
But I don’t buy the notion that the deck is stacked against minorities anymore. If anything, there’s been decades of systemic discrimination (and trillions of dollars spent) in their favor. It has done no good. Why it has done no good is a question that has many competing answers, and I’m sure THAT discussion is discouraged here.
But the real reason you don’t hear about all these minority killings is this: it’s not so much that liberals only care when whites get shot…it’s that they only care when whites are the shooters. The Trayvon Martin case demonstrated this dynamic perfectly: thousands of blacks are shot by other blacks every year…but when one is shot by a white man, it becomes national news. And when the white man turns out to be actually Hispanic, the news media very carefully begins describing him as “white Hispanic,” because the devil must have his due. And the devil is white.
See, if you’re white, you’re racist. Period. If you’re white and you shoot a black man, it’s a racist killing. Period. Calling white liberal anti-gunners “racist” isn’t going to faze them at all…they know they are. They admit as much in everything they say and do. And they’re doing penance just as fast as they can, by agitating for victim disarmament, so there will never again be a white shooter in America.
And, of course, as soon as we’re disarmed they’ll be free to set up the re-education camps.
This.
“as soon as we’re disarmed”
So it’s a forgone conclusion and you’re going to let them disarm us?
I was representing THEIR point of view, not mine. As for me, I’ve spent too long in becoming educated to go through it all again, so I won’t be playing along.
Excellent diagnosis
Most people’s first response after hearing about kids getting gunned down is: “It couldn’t happen to my kids”. They come up with differences between their own lives and the lives of those killed. I live in a safer neighborhood. I am not in the high risk group like the other guy was. Shootings in a good school with a low rate of crime makes it very difficult for me to convince myself that it couldn’t happen to me. That is very scary to me.
Brilliant.
Most are interested in creating the illusion of safety vis a vis guns, not real safety. And those people are generally ignorant about the very facts that matter. And they are the worst kind of ignorants: they aren’t even aware of how much they don’t know.
Great post. This elaborates in this topic a bit more. http://www.letstalkaboutit.info/2013/01/beyond-banning-bad-guns-and-arming-good.html?spref=fb&m=1
From the link:
Hear, hear.
I have the attention span of a gnat but that article kept my full attention to the end. I had a couple of quibbles but overall that is by far the best breakdown of the problem I’ve read yet. Thanks.
I seem to recall years back Bill Cosby said something to the effect that the Black community needs to quick blaming everyone and everything else and get their shit straight when it comes to Black on Black violence. I also recall he got raped for daring to say so.
He’s been pretty quite on the subject since then I believe.
With the number of people saying this is a great article, it’s not hard to understand why Obama thinks he can get away with dictitorial gun control.
My thoughts exactly! The OP made some good points but also threw in a lot of bullshit.
It makes me laugh. In Italy with minor paperwork a citizen can by an AR, or even 10 AR’s, as sporting rifles. But in the US with its supposed “gun culture”? No, “nobody needs an AR.” Especially not the middle class who will be increasingly forced to pay for the poor in a US economy that really doesn’t need poor uneducated people. The financial elite that owns the politicians is going to make you pay for the poor even as your living standard declines. Darn right they want your effective defensive arms before you start to understand that. They have the Fed to prop up equity markets for them. The poor have Medicaid, SNAP, free education, and housing subsidies. And you have? The right to tow the f#@g line or else. You aren’t rich, so you can’t move to Switzerland for six months and negotiate if the government comes after you. You aren’t bone poor living densely in cities, so you can’t riot. You can’t do anything. They have the money, and they have the votes, paid for with stuff on your tab. Of course they want your AR’s. You aren’t serfs if you have effective defenses. The Framers understood that. The rich, the tenured, the physicians having 52% of their bills paid by taxpayers, the generals aspiring to be Senators, they all want your guns. Surprise. They aren’t anything like the Framers. They’ve got their deals. It’s going on your tab, 16+ trillion and counting, and they don’t want you f##’g up their good thing, “screw the Constitution, pal. That’s your problem!” They understand things. It’s obviously the medium-income family that doesn’t. The rich are keeping their 200,000+ tax-stamped machine guns. The poor will keep their mugger’s special revolvers. Fine. They just want your middle-income AR’s. Get it?
Black people are getting shot because other black people are shooting them. Still other black people are shooting (and raping) white people in numbers hugely disproportionate to their representation in the population. The reverse is not true- by and large, white people are shooting very few black people, and raping literally none. It’s all in the UCR; it’s not hard to find if you choose to do so.
What’s wrong with Mexico? It’s full of Mexicans. What’s wrong with Africa? It’s full of Africans. Haiti? East St. Louis? Memphis? Detroit? Atlanta? Birmingham? We all know the answer.
Perhaps at least part of the reason black folks getting shot is not bigger news is because black folks shoot each other with depressing, numbing frequency. They accept it as part of their life; killing each other is fundamental. Funerals? Gun battles. Basketball? Kaboom. Formerly sedate street festivals? Yo, take some of this fo dissin me.
Look in the UCR. Numbers don’t lie. And today, your own lying eyes don’t really lie. Any sensible soul able to withstand the withering contempt of progressives pushing their social Marxism, their tikkun olam or whatever- that soul stands a chance of being aware, able to see, and prepared to stand their ground.
They use the White English language to continually blame Whites for the behavior of non-Whites…
Such as it is when it comes to guns. Guns made to & by the dimensions of craft filtered down through the ages of White civilizations once misused by non-White actors it becomes a White person problem.
What joy we would discover if our civilization were’nt blighted by the cancer of alien racial crusades and forcefully gerrymandered tribes brought into turf warfare as economic agents of destruction and discord.
Racial segregation is the only solution.
You are disgusting! What joy we would discover if our civilization weren’t blighted by racists!
White privilege, social inequality, cycle of poverty, no one cares about dead black and hispanic kids, attractive white woman crying. OK, I’ve had my B.S. quota for the day.
New gun restrictions are not going to reduce gun (don’t forget knife and blunt instrument) violence. It will make the liberal establishment feel better about itself though. Millions of additional dollars poured into corrupt inner-city school districts and corrupt social welfare programs is not going to end the cycle of poverty. It will secure minority votes though. What will prevent young Black and Hispanics from shooting each other and anyone else who gets in the way? Recognizing that these cities are war zones and disarming the felons and drug pushers by military force would work but that would be unacceptable to most Americans. Short of that I see no external solution. We’re too far gone. The concept of personal responsibility and morality has to make a come back.
I agree that urban gang and minority violence is swept under the rug and that it is the source of far more loss of life than spree shootings, but I disagree that it’s due to ‘social inequalities’. We have the most opportunistic society ever realized by mankind. The answer to blacks and hispanics rising out of poverty requires local and individual responsibility and good decisions. This is impossible to achieve with a government program, which has been proven every year since the War on Poverty began. It’s the lack of a family that contributes the most to their circumstances economically and morally, and it can be primarily laid at the feet of AWOL dads. They’ve been told there are no consequences for their sexual escapades, so the majority of black babies are killed before they see the light of day, and hundreds of others only a few years later. Ironically the people telling them this are the same ones benefitting from their votes politically, and the ones advocating the taxpayers coin to provide them stuff (while telling them that we don’t expect them to do better – society is so unfair to you and won’t let you succeed). This has robbed them of their dignity and left them dependent and despondant at their lack of earned success. In this state of mind and circumstance violence is bred.
Everybody now knows James Holmes’ name because he shot a bunch of white people. Just like everybody now knows Adam Lanza’s name. He committed the cardinal sin of shooting white children.
It isnt because the victims where white, it is because the perpetrators where white.
By far the largest portion of victims of gun violence are young black and Latino men.
Just as the largest portion of the perpetrators are the same.
I will buy you all the skittles and iced tea you can handle.
TM had Arizona watermelon juice (I’m serious) not iced tea.
But you will do far, far more good by working to fix issues of racial and social disparity, by recognizing privilege and how deeply ingrained it is in our society
Where is this privilege? When can I win settlements from discrimination because I’m a white man? Anti-racist is simply a code word for anti-white.
When did the white community make the decision for the black community that education was optional or to be derided? When did the white community make the decision for the black community that intact two-parent families were optional? There’s a huge gulf between the average black household and the average white household in terms of income and net worth, but when Thomas Sowell looked at the subset of black middle class families that were married in “The Vision Of The Anointed” the difference in net worth dropped to a few percent at most.
It’s worth arguing that the very government programs designed to decrease racial economic differences and advanced by liberals are making those societal problems worse by subsidizing single parenting and by penalizing low-income mothers who would actually choose to get married. Unintended consequences, yes, but consequences nonetheless. If minority kids can do well in school there are great opportunities in higher education for them, but affirmative action seems to help as much as it hurts by putting minority students into colleges and universities where their secondary schools’ inability to prepare them puts them well behind the power curve. Failing out of Harvard or Brown really doesn’t help anyone.
Industrial and technological changes have greatly reduced the number of unskilled labor jobs available, which is pretty much all that you can get if you can’t even make it through high school. Our secondary education system is designed around a “college-prep for all” mentality, when the truth is that vo-tec education would get a lot of our students jobs that cannot be exported, like plumbing and electrical work. If you can weld well, there’s a job for you above a shale formation somewhere in the US no matter your race or which zip code you come from.
Neither of your points are well served by trying to combine an anti-gun control message with a race-privilege argument, Kyle. I get that you think the violence issue has a racial component, and statistics bear you out on this. There is a 24x higher chance of being killed with a firearm if you’re black male rather than white, and a 6x higher chance if you’re a Hispanic male. These things are indisputable. I don’t believe that anyone is putting forward the ridiculous suggestion that death does not affect the black or Hispanic communities as much as the white community. But blaming “white privilege” for violence in the black community is, funny enough, like starting to address gun violence by banning some rifles you don’t like — it’s the wrong end of the statistical curve if you want to see changes. I might buy into this if we didn’t have data like the Shaker Heights study that showed a culture of antipathy against education from the black community even when they were in a majority-white and wealthy community like Shaker Heights, OH. Fine, maybe white privilege plays A role in this — but street culture plays a much, much greater role and seeing as we have had nearly 50 years of Great Society programs forcing solutions from well-intentioned white people on minority communities, maybe it’s time to give that horse a rest.
I will agree with you that “white privilege” explains the selective outrage, seeing Chicago-level violence in a bastion of white-wealthy privilege like Newtown does tend to get the outrage flowing more than the drumbeat of violence from Chicago. Or Memphis. Or New Orleans. Or the other two-dozen most violent cities in the US where the violence is concentrated in the minority communities. The thing is, I think the white privilege angle works differently than you believe. The violence is extra-offensive not because these are the communities where the whites live, it’s because these are the communities where The Media live, and so they have a hissy because it’s in THEIR backyard, it calls into question the value of all the things they feel they have done RIGHT in their lives. The right school, the right degree, the right job, the right income, the right suburb — all of that was not enough to protect the children of Sandy Hook, or the folks that went to a movie in Aurora? Well then, Something Must Be Done. The outrage is selective because the media are selective. THEY feel threatened and they want the TV-watching public to feel as threatened as they do so that Something Must Be Done.
Covetous wretch.
O.E, Huh?
Your entire dissertation is based entirely upon wealth speculation.
Money is potential energy in our society. It’s also a storage form of energy. I work, I get paid. I convert my skills and knowledge and effort into money, and I can convert that into other things that I want. The ability to not work for a while should I choose, the ability to eat, the ability to have shelter, etc. Money is one of the greatest conceptual improvements in civilization ever, because in a barter society I have to track down people who want my services and whose services and products I need and trade directly with them. This is remarkably inefficient. Instead, I work for a notional concept (money) and trade that notional concept as it suits me. Money is not evil, but the heedless pursuit of it certainly can be.
When the OP talked about “opportunity” I read that as more or less a code word for either money or the opportunity to make money. If people in the street culture had the idea that they could do something other than their role in the street culture I think that all but a small minority of true sociopaths would choose to do so, from that standpoint I agree with the OP that economic opportunity and the educational opportunities that allow people to take advantage of those economic opportunities are important.
Giving people money, though, is probably a bad idea. I have several decades of data to call on in this regard, we’ve fought a War on Poverty for nearly three generations now and Poverty is doing pretty well. The solution is not to give money, the solution is to give opportunities and let people benefit from mutual exchange like the rest of the economy.
I talk about money because a) a lot of the folks who object to the lack of “opportunity” for the inner-city poor actually mean the difference in income and wealth, and b) the same kinds of habits and choices that people make to allow themselves to take advantage of those “opportunities” (as opposed to transfer payments) are the ones I discussed in the first two lines. Perhaps you think I am ceding the terms of the debate by using money as a proxy, but in general it’s hard to get and hang onto money without having habits that make you more likely to be successful than not. Education and stable families are the foundation of economic independence and the ability to create economic opportunities for others. Get education (in something people want to pay you for, either technical or professional), stay married and you can end up making money and having economic freedom (what the OP was discussing) and the inequities that are so decried by people who want to blame everything on racism will disappear over time. Stay ignorant and have a string of baby mommas/daddies and your chances of remaining part of the underclass rise substantially. A good look at the Underclass comes from Theodore Dalrymple’s “A View From The Bottom”, it’s a rather good book and highly recommended. Basically, externalize your locus of control and fail to take responsibility for yourself and you’ll end up on the dole and accomplish little to nothing, whether white or minority.
I don’t happen to subscribe to the argument that poverty is the cause of crime, in part because our crime stats are still worse than those during the 1930s when a large majority of the US found out what it was like to be poor. We didn’t have as much crime because we still valued as much education as we could get (my grandfather got through 8th grade and would have gone farther except for economic need) and we still valued intact families. Walk away from personal responsibility and it gets a lot easier to blame your situation on powers beyond your control and convince yourself that you are due compensation by means fair or foul.
I do subscribe to the idea that the ability to manage money is a marker for the ability to manage yourself, that discipline is maybe the most important component of success (networking and interpersonal ability is probably a close second) and that a wanton lack of self-discipline and rejection of cultural mores is probably the root cause of a lot of crime moreso than poverty per se.
And finally, in order to covet something I would have to not have it. I have a great wife that it has been my joy to be married to for 21 years, I have a terminal degree from a fairly well-regarded medical school and I work (hard) in a highly-competitive field I enjoy with more than adequate compensation. My home is in one of those nice neighborhoods where Bad Things shouldn’t happen. The difference between me and the Media and the Politicians on the left is that I don’t labor under the delusion that Bad Things cannot happen to me because my family and my job and my zip code exempt me from random violence.
If that makes me a wretch in your eyes, well, so be it.
Care to elaborate?
Guns are not the problem, GANGS are the problem.
Bingo, Darren.
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This is the kind of article I was hoping for from this site, one that combined an interest in and respect for self defence and gun ownership with a charitable, unifying vision of society, and a respect for the complexity of social problems. Thanks for this (and for many of the comments).
Man…y’all some muthaeffin racist ass white people.
Gun-grabbers take note.
Gun Free Zones Kill.
Therefor, lawmakers are killing us.
Therefor the gun-grabbers who knowingly vote for them, kill.
Is there more than that? YOU are the problem!
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