Baltimore Safe Streets Gun And Drug Bust Highlights Ongoing Anti-Gun Fraud

“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.”