Democrats and Republicans can’t agree about how to regulate guns, Zaid Jilani notes, but they have succeeded in ”hardening” schools — putting more law enforcement in schools, implementing measures like metal detectors and reinforced doors, and requiring students in dozens of states to do active shooter drills:
And all of this is being done for a type of shooting that is actually very rare.
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The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.
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But this cycle of being terrorized and reacting to that terror can be self-defeating. A few years ago, I reported on a study showing that mass shootings seem to correlate to news coverage of mass shootings — when a big shooting happens and gets a lot of press coverage, we see a cluster of shootings pop up after that. We may be experiencing mass shootings in clusters the same way we see suicide clusters.
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But most of America’s gun violence comes in two forms: suicides and routine homicides.
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We are accustomed to the kinds of violence that takes place in certain neighborhoods of Chicago. There were 617 homicides in Chicago in 2023, (most of them committed with guns) and that’s a city of just over 2.5 million people. There were about 900 murders in the nation of Japan the same year. Japan has a population of 125 million people.
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But it’s not a coincidence that America’s gun homicide problem is so heavily concentrated in a few places. Maine or Vermont, which have very few gun laws, are some of the safest states in the country.
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From the 1990s through the 2010s, America cut gun murders in half.
How this happened is still debated to this day, but the consensus is that more effective policing played a big role. And this policing happened in an environment where gun restrictions didn’t get all that much tougher. So cracking down on serial violent offenders and more effectively addressing homicides by catching killers to reduce cycles of violence can work. Honor culture is most prevalent in places where people don’t trust the cops. So better policing can also help reduce the cultural factors that drive violence.
Can gun restrictions work? The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference. America’s big killer is the handgun — ask any police department in America. And nobody’s proposing banning that (and it’s not clear our current courts would even allow us to).
But there are some gun reforms we can make on the margins that have been proven to work. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children and increasing the age of purchase can help reduce accidental gun deaths and gun suicides. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers also seems to help, as does reducing the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws.
America does not have a gun problem. It has a black problem. Over 55% of all gun murders, and over 75% of all mass shootings are committed by underclass black men between 15 and 30. Without young black men, America’s crime statistics would be pretty close to Switzerland’s.
People like Zaid Jilani are a major problem themselves, as they are committed to obscuring the problem and diverting attention away from the cause, which is black genetics.
The RAND corporation is wholly Leftist, and the conclusions it arrives upon are those it was paid to produce.
The inclusion of “stand your ground” when discussing murder seems to be an attempt to preclude self-defense.
Bob Sykes:
As an antiwhite racist, what if America’s real problem is that white men between fifteen and thirty don’t have the stones to use America’s guns for anything more than cheap entertainment?
The purpose of a system is what it does. The powers that be desire to more thoroughly institutionalize the public children. Thus, the schools are made ever more thoroughly into prisons, aesthetically, functionally, and socially. Stupidity is insufficient to explain why, for example, the U.S. government makes you take your shoes off at the airport because an Arab boarded an airliner in Paris with an explosive in his shoe twenty-three years ago. Why does the U.S. government scan your naked body or record your phone calls or force your children to be around “police” (a class of “people” utterly foreign and inimical to the Founding Fathers and their intended civilization)? The rationalizations that the regime may employ are invariably paper-thin and designed to humiliate you; the truth is that the regime wants to inflict indignities, humiliations, and violations upon you for their own sake.
Sadism is its own reward.
Yours Truly:
As a problack, antiwhite racist, when I contemplate that the bureaucrats are, to a low-T man and high-T woman, physically cowardly poltroons, my mind is completely and utterly boggled to imagine America as it would be were they in the slightest danger of catching a stray fist or accidental discharge from those whom they abuse, enslave, and dehumanize.
Let us reinstitute the ancient and noble tradition of dueling.
Dueling is as American as apple pie. Alexander Hamilton himself died in a duel. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Right to Fight any bureaucrat to the death in the name of Manly Honor.
For the avoidance of doubt, in the category of bureaucrat I include all holders of bar cards. The pretence that attorneys exist in a quantum superposition of public agent and private principal until it is discovered which status benefits them more is ridiculous and absurd.