Gary Younge’s book, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives chronicles young people who were shot during one day in November of 2013. After the failure of President Obama’s push for more infringements on the Second Amendment, he decided to pick one day at random, determine the details of each shooting victim, and put a human face on them. It must have seemed like a good idea, a way to mix activism and make a buck while pushing the anti-gun agenda.
The problem is that Younge is honest enough to tell the truth of what he found, as much as he could, given his false assumptions about the nature of reality.
He found that the gun control movement is based on lies. Not that Younge’s above stretching the truth himself. He calls 18- and 19-year-old adults “children.” He has to do this, of course, to get to the numbers that the gun haters use in their propaganda.
The vast majority of “children” killed with guns are young males between the ages of 15 and 25, nearly all of whom are victims of gang violence. Most are gang members themselves.
He found that parents in the ghettos where these killings occurred don’t think that gun control is the answer to the problem.
Which brings us to the second thing that struck me while talking to these families about the 10 young deaths of November 23: When I posed an open-ended question to the victims’ parents about why they thought these tragedies kept happening, not a single one mentioned guns. When I asked a more leading question about what they specifically thought of guns, they would always be more forthcoming. Almost all of them saw the ubiquity of guns as a problem. But it did not necessarily follow that they saw getting rid of guns as a viable solution.
As is usually the case with so-called progressives, Younge blames the killings on the guns, not the people who wield them. He uses the old “developed nation” scam to claim that it’s the very presence of guns that cause the killings. But that dodge depends on the reader never checking out the facts about international comparisons. It’s all about selection bias.
If you cherrypick countries you classify as “developed” you can make any case you want. The truth is that other nations have many more or less homicides and many more or less suicides, per capita, than the United States. But the number of guns has little influence on those numbers.
If you look at individual nations before and after gun control laws were implemented, there is little change…except murder rates tend to rise slightly after controls are imposed. Younge, however, didn’t have to investigate international comparisons for this book, so he just spouts anti-gun dogma.
As a “progressive”, it’s not surprising that Younge puts forward the usual excuse of racism for the high level of criminality in the communities where violence is concentrated. But any community where the rule of law is not trusted will tend toward higher levels of violence.
The same result is found all over the world, in communities in Africa, South America, Europe, and Asia. Where there’s no reliable rule of law, people revert to tribalism. In the U.S., the tribes or proto-tribes, are gangs. The commonality is the lack of an effective rule of law, rather than race. The cure is to rebuild trust in the rule of law. If the high crime rates in black urban areas are going to be reduced, people who live there must come to understand that the rule of law is real and will be enforced there. It is precisely what has worked in the approach promoted by David Kennedy from Harvard.
Pushing the idea that black people cannot rely on the rule of law creates the conditions that multiply crimes and criminality in predominately black neighborhoods. Claiming that endemic racism is the cause instead of the lack of the rule of law only makes matters worse by creating distrust and an unwillingness to cooperate with the authorities. We are seeing that problem playing out with the Ferguson effect, all across the country.
The tone of the article in The Nation is refreshingly pessimistic. Younge doesn’t have any solution to the intractable problems he found. The facts are against the imposition of gun control in the United States.
People don’t blame the actions of criminals on the guns that they use. People who don’t live in ghettos don’t see the ghetto problems as their problems. People who don’t face a high risk of violent crime don’t see a need for infringements on the Second Amendment. And people who face a high risk of violent crime find the idea of being armed perfectly reasonable.
I am not going to buy Younge’s book, at least not now. Maybe in a few months, when it’s featured on the remainder table. I already know the reality far better than he does, because I have studied the issue for decades. But “progressives” who have some degree of intellectual honesty, if they check out the facts, may realize the narrative they have been sold is a false one.
©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Gun Watch
That’s exactly what happened to me. I never was progressive (more of a proto-libertarian), but I voted for Democrats and mostly believed their progressive talking points. I didn’t understand why so many of the progressives around me behaved like authoritarian bigots — we liberals were tolerant and…well…liberal, weren’t we? — but I chalked it up to a few bad apples. (A few…ha! Wishful thinking.)
Eventually I bought a .22, and then some other guns. One of the happiest memories I have is of shooting that Marlin Model 60 — MY gun — for the first time, and then seeing the joy on my son’s face when he put my instruction into practice and hit a pop can dead center with his first shot.
But hadn’t I been told that these things were bad and wrong and dangerous?
Being curious and not enjoying the cognitive dissonance, I did some research…and the more independent facts I confirmed, the faster the narrative crumbled. I went to all the original sources I could find and compared them to what the anti-gun and pro-gun sides claimed. One side was wrong about virtually everything that was possible to confirm as fact, and the other was surprisingly truthful about its information.
Every ideology lies to itself in some way, but the progressive left takes both narrative deceit (of self and others) and deliberate falsehood to a new level.
The white liberal is the worst kind of human being. They are racist pigs. It was white liberals who created the welfare system we have today, that has destroyed the traditional black inner-city family. This was no accident.
It was white progressives who wrote the rules saying only single mothers with children could live in government housing. And that housing was a gun free zone.
Today generations of black children have grown up believing they can’t own guns because where they lived the government said ccouldn’t. That was and is a fact of life for them.
So the black father was replaced by the white Uncle Sam man’s welfare check. And you get a check as long as you stay gun free and don’t get married. You can have children from 3 or 5 different men and still get a check.
Amazing how they support homosexual marriage but not heterosexual marriage.
White socialist, progressive, liberal or what ever they choose to call themselves are the enemy that the founders spoke about. They will smile at you as they call the police they hate so much to come and arrest you for wanting the freedom and liberty the Bill of Rights speaks about.
Google “45 Goals of Communism” (today it’s Cultural Marxism) it’s spelled out in detail. Progressives are ALL about taking over and destroying our “institutions” ie. the Bill of Rights, education/academia, sciences, medicine, the Catholic Church & marriage (Wikileaks John “Skippy” Podesta/Jennifer aka “John” Palmieri emails), industries in fact everything and anything that we hold dear and keeps society together.
Yep. They believe that by destroying the basic foundations of society, they will step in as the only control entity available. But the key statement that they forget is that they are not the “foundations” of society. They are a parasite that lives off the wealth created by the true foundations of society. Those foundations begin with the family. They are the soul of society that teaches the children the core beliefs, ethics and morals that guide the society when those children mature and become the next generation of mothers and fathers carrying the load of civilization created by their fore bearers.
So when the Progressive/statists destroy the family, they destroy the pipeline that passes on the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years passed to the next generation of what makes a society and culture grow and prosper.
So the end result of the attempt to destroy the family and replace it with the state as the sole authority; is the destruction of society itself. And the next dark age begins.
Because this is not a new development. This attempt to replace the authority of the family with the authority of the state has been repeated through all of history, with the endless result of dark age after dark age.
Have we got enough understanding of this process to reverse it and stop the next cycle of collapse? I believe we will see within a few short years. But if we don’t, well, the pain of what we will endure will be so severe, those that survive might finally “get it”, and rebuild with this understanding burned into the soul of their cultural consciousness, that they will not make the same mistake again, as they go forward.
“But “progressives” who have some degree of intellectual honesty, if they check out the facts, may realize the narrative they have been sold is a false one.”
I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. One thing I’ve learned from observing progressives is that they don’t really believe in the concept of ‘truth’. It’s all relative to political outcomes they want. If factual data comes our that contradicts their worldview, at best they ignore it and announced their pre-determined conclusions as if the facts actually supported them rather than contradict them. They are hopeless…and unfortunately, in charge.
“The cure is to rebuild trust in the rule of law.”
Hahahahahahah! Good luck with that.
First, you have to make sure The Law is worthy of trust.
In reality, a Law worth trusting, was the first victim of the progressive movement.
You can only rebuild it if you understand why it was injured and address those factors.
One way to not reinforce rule of law is to abandon it; yet that’s exactly what is happening in those (liberal) cities where the most violence is ripping families apart.
Progressives are blinded by their admiration of Europe. They fail to understand that the US is more like Mexico than Europe. We have a history of criminal gangs going back to the mid 19th Century. Disarm the citizenry and you get Mexico’s murder rate, not what you see in the UK, France or Germany.
You can add the population of those three countries and it will still be less than ours. It doesn’t change percentages, but it’s comparing apples and oranges. The US is almost 2/3 the size of the whole EU in terms of population.
Exactly. Plus we already have a number of very large, well-organized, well-established street gangs who would jump headfirst into the arms market (more so than they already are) should any sweeping gun ban be implemented.
Yeah, let’s consider gun control after the war on drugs has successfully been completed. Otherwise, why bother, why waste the paper?
Gun owner control activists are the real racists. They go after assault rifles which are used in more middle class white deaths and avoid calling for increased handgun restrictions which are used in more minority deaths. These people care more about white middle class deaths then the deaths of poor and minority’s.
They use data from White European countries and disregard data from countries that are not majority white as 3rd world countries. They call for diversity and preach benefits of diversity yet they will not use data from diverse countries.
“They go after assault rifles which are used in more middle class white deaths and avoid calling for increased handgun restrictions which are used in more minority deaths.” This is an interesting point; I hadn’t thought of that.
We ought to think more along these lines; i.e., identifying the sub-constituencies among the gun controllers. Once we identify the racial make-up of victims of rifles and suicides we ought to ask minorities why they support AWB or UBC on long-guns. Minorities need to concentrate on trafficking in hand-guns. Get the data on suicides. How many suicides used an AW? How many suicides were prohibited persons who bought their suicide gun illegally? Gun-controllers concerned with suicide ought to be more interested in screening for mental illness (particularly depression) and getting these patients the psych help they need. Neither AWB nor UBC will reduce suicide. To the ACLU types we ought to ask why law-abiding citizens ought to be subjected to cosmetic limitations or malum prohibitum laws. Likewise, the ACLU (minorities and suicide sympathizers) types ought to be invited to explain in detail how larger magazines are more dangerous than smaller magazines and how magazines of a particular size could be successfully kept away from criminals.
Can the various anti-gun interest groups maintain their anti-gun solidarity when – in fact – their respective interests ought to be sharply focused on particular facets of the diverse range of gun-related problems?
I’m suspicious that most of the guns involved in minority deaths are best described as “stolen”.
They’re not going after AWs because of any crime or violence considerations. They’re going after AWs because they are the easiest of all guns to convince the ignorant masses to let them ban. Once they have succeeded in making the ban of one gun legal, there is precedent, and it’s open season on any other gun they want.
eh I wouldn’t say that they avoid going after handguns. They have different tactics they have tried over time. For years- decades even- they attacked handguns in particular. They succeeded in severely restricting them. Now they want to do the same with rifles and have found a foothold in the discourse because so many people see black rifles and see them as WMDs because they connect them with the military.
“The cure is to rebuild trust in the rule of law.” Yes, perhaps. See Gary LaFree’s “Losing Legitimacy – Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America”. In particular, his charts on pages 102 and 103. He associates crime increases with: political distrust; economic inequality; and, family disintegration. Political distrust is the novel independent variable. If LaFree is correct, then American society is doomed to uncontrollable street crime.
Setting aside suicide and accidents, the majority of homicides are black-on-black. If LaFree’s political distrust variable really is significant then the victims and perpetrators of most homicides must be persuaded (somehow) to have trust in our politicians. The Democrats they elect can not take actions that will earn blacks’ trust. The Republicans won’t bother to compete for blacks’ votes. Thus, economic equality will also persist. Government solutions will exacerbate disintegration of the black family; and, the black community probably won’t figure out how to restore the 2-parent family.
UBC won’t cure this problem. AWB won’t cure this problem. Respect for the rule-of-law is impossible to restore given the “quality” of the criminal justice system as perceived by its minority users.
“The death of America” is a result of the Leftist takeover of our country. That should be the only topic this election.
It’s not so much the leftist takeover as the dissemination of power into a democratic model from a republican model. In democracies one finds a tendency for capriciousness, aggression and corruption. The people having all the power is never a good idea. The people will quickly identify members of their own polity as enemies if they can’t find any externally. Representative republics don’t sacrifice the purpose of government to the desires of, for lack of a better term, a mob. Representative republics realize that power must be delegated to a few that have expertise and time to devote to running things. The people willingly hand over some power to their representatives with the understanding that violating the trust of the people is a high crime.
Somewhere about 20 minutes after we won the Revolutionary War we found out that representative republics also have a fatal flaw, they don’t operate outside the presence of elites. Elitism and social hierarchies have been continually eroded since the founding of our country and so those elites are now skilled only at corruption and self interest because they don’t see themselves as aristocracy but simply as above the law. Instead of being responsible in their own minds to their constituency, they’re responsible only to their own desires and interests.
Our country is dying. The tree of liberty is nearly dead and someone salted the ground it grows in. Once both are dead they will never be known to the world again. Cherish what we have left. It’s all going away before our eyes.
You might like this essay:
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/10/revolt-against-american-aristocracy.html
“People don’t blame the actions of criminals on the guns that they use.”
Leftists do. They have a gun fetish – in the original meaning. Fetish: an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence
They think a gun magically turns a mild-mannered, intelligent and gentle human being into a bloodthirsty mass murderer.