If We Had Morals, We Would Not Have Random Killings

The Real Reason We Have

 Mass Shootings

Walter E. Williams / @WE_Williams / March 21, 2018 / comments

Students are evacuated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after a shooter opened fire and killed 17 people on Feb. 14. (Photo: Mike Stocker/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

COMMENTARY BY

Walter E. Williams@WE_Williams

Walter E. Williams is a columnist for The Daily Signal and a professor of economics at George Mason University.

One of the unavoidable tragedies of youth is the temptation to think that what is seen today has always been. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in our responses to the recent Parkland, Florida, massacre.

Part of the responses to those murders are calls to raise the age to purchase a gun and to have more thorough background checks—in a word, to make gun purchases more difficult. That’s a vision that sees easy gun availability as the problem; thus, the solution is to reduce that availability.

The vision that sees “easy” availability as the problem ignores the fact of U.S. history that guns were far more available yesteryear. With truly easy gun availability, there was nowhere near the gun mayhem and murder that we see today.

I’m tempted to ask those who believe that guns are today’s problem whether they think that guns were nicer yesteryear.

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What about the calls for bans on the AR-15 so-called assault rifle? It turns out that, according to 2016 FBI statistics, rifles accounted for 368 of the 17,250 homicides in the U.S. that year. That means restrictions on the purchase of rifles would do little or nothing for the homicide rate.

Leaders of the gun control movement know this. Their calls for more restrictive gun laws are part of a larger strategy to outlaw gun ownership.

Gun ownership is not our problem. Our problem is a widespread decline in moral values that has nothing to do with guns. That decline includes disrespect for those in authority, disrespect for oneself, little accountability for anti-social behavior, and a scuttling of religious teachings that reinforced moral values.

Let’s examine elements of this decline.

If any of our great-grandparents or even grandparents who passed away before 1960 were to return, they would not believe the kind of personal behavior all too common today. They wouldn’t believe that youngsters could get away with cursing and assaulting teachers. They wouldn’t believe that some school districts, such as Philadelphia’s, employ more than 400 school police officers.

During my primary and secondary schooling, from 1942 to 1954, the only time one saw a policeman in school was during an assembly period where we had to listen to a boring lecture on safety. Our ancestors also wouldn’t believe that we’re now debating whether teachers should be armed.

There are other forms of behavior that would have been deemed grossly immoral yesteryear. There are companies such as National Debt Relief, CuraDebt, and LendingTree, which advertise that they will help you to avoid paying all the money you owe. So after you and a seller agree to terms of a sale, if you fail to live up to your half of the bargain, there are companies that will assist you in ripping off the seller.

There are companies that counsel senior citizens on how to shelter their assets from nursing home care costs. For example, a surviving spouse may own a completely paid-for home that’s worth $500,000. The costs of nursing home care might run $50,000 a year.

By selling her house, she could pay the nursing home costs, but her children wouldn’t inherit the house. There are firms that come in to shelter her assets so that she can bequeath her home to her heirs and leave taxpayers to foot the nursing home bill.

In my book, that’s immoral, but it is so common that most of us give it no thought.

There is one moral failing that is devastating to the future of our nation. That failing, which has wide acceptance by the American people, is the idea that Congress has the authority to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another American. That is nothing less than legalized theft and accounts for roughly three-quarters of federal spending.

For the Christians among us, we should consider that when God gave Moses the commandment “Thou shalt not steal,” he probably didn’t mean thou shalt not steal unless you get a majority vote in the Congress.

"Broken Windows" Works And Chicago Proves It.

Black Lives Matter gets what it wants in Chicago — and crime is skyrocketing

Carlos Garcia 4 hours

Demonstrators protest the fatal police shooting of Paul O'Neal Aug. 7 in Chicago, Illinois. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

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Law enforcement advocate Heather MacDonald documented some new statistics in the New York Post that challenge the narrative coming from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Focusing on Chicago, America’s petri dish of liberal policies, MacDonald reveals that arrests and overall policing is in decline in the city:

Arrests are down 28 percent this year in the Windy City, the lowest since at least 2001, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and less than half what they were in 2010. Drug arrests are down by half. Pedestrian stops were down 82 percent by early fall.

But rather than launching it into a new golden age of peace and prosperity, Chicago is experiencing a renaissance of crime:

So far this year, 4,334 people have been shot in Chicago: one person every two hours. Almost all the victims have been black. The police have shot 25 people, virtually all armed or otherwise dangerous — less than .6 percent of the total.

This is a drastic increase from last year, when 2,989 people were shot, and there were 492 homicides. Shootings have increased 45 percent over last year, and homicides have increased 56.5 percent, according to the Chicago Tribune. Less than 1 percent of the shootings have been by the police, and yet Black Lives Matter focuses on this minuscule number instead of the real threat to the black community represented by the rest of the 99.4 percent of shootings.

MacDonald says the real culprit is what academics and social justice groups have actually advocated as the solution to high crime rates: de-policing and the undoing of “broken window” policies that help deter greater crimes by targeting lesser criminals before they get a chance to expand their criminal activities.

She hopes that this will highlight the devastating consequences of de-policing to prevent other cities from implementing the policies that have caused so much misery in the beleaguered city of Chicago.

When One Makes Police The Enemy, When President Blames Police Automatically Bad In Black Victim Cases--One Can Only Expect A Bad Result.

What’s led to spike in violent crime? Viral videos of police brutality, of course! FBI head says

Published time: 25 Oct, 2015 03:56

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What could possibly be behind the surge in violent crime in the US? Quite surprisingly, according to FBI Director James Comey, the answer is – citizens filming viral YouTube videos of police brutality.

“I’ve been told by a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video,” Comey said as he was talking to law students, faculty, staff and some police officers at the University of Chicago Law School, according to the New York Times.

He went on to say that such statements have sent a chill through police departments, making cops feel “under siege.”

“In today’s YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime,” he said. “Our officers are answering 911 calls, but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns,” Comey said, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.

According to the FBI director, this has had a negative effect on law enforcement’s ability to reduce crime, because “what may appear on YouTube to be police officers harassing people on the street is actually genuine crime deterrence,” reported The Daily Dot.

“Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence, and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you guys doing on this corner at 1 o’clock in the morning?’ policing,” he went on to say, adding “We need to be careful it doesn’t drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences.”

READ MORE: Video of cops tasing handcuffed man goes viral on Twitter, police say suspect tried to escape

The FBI Director arrived in Chicago for a Conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. His statements came during a discussion on the “crisis of violent crime” at the University of Chicago Law School, in which he talked about the factors fueling the recent crime spree.

Homicides in 35 big US cities are up 19 percent on average this year, and non-fatal shootings are up 62 percent, according to a police association survey.

However, another issue on the table remains police brutality: the number of police killings so far in 2015 has been estimated at up to 891 as of October 9, according to The Guardian.

Nevertheless, only 54 officers have been charged for fatal shootings during the last decade.

When the Washington Post analyzed what had brought those cases to court, they concluded that in order for police officers to be indicted, some kind of special circumstances must be involved, such as a victim shot in the back, incriminating testimony from other officers, allegations of a cover-up, or a video recording of the incident.

For Those Looking For Murder Statistics Involving Illegal Aliens, Texas Has Released Their Results. It Isn't Pretty.

Illegal Alien Crime Wave in Texas: 611,234 Crimes, 2,993 Murders A PJ Media exclusive.

by J. Christian Adams July 22, 2015 - 6:40 pm

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The murder of Kathryn Steinle on the Embarcadero in San Francisco by an illegal alien is the most familiar example of a crime committed by an alien.  But an unreleased internal report by the Texas Department of Public Safety reveals that aliens have been involved in thousands of crimes in Texas alone, including nearly 3,000 homicides.

PJ Media obtained a never-before-released copy of a Texas DPS report on human smuggling containing the numbers of crimes committed by aliens in Texas.   According to the analysis conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety, foreign aliens committed 611,234 unique crimes in Texas from 2008 to 2014, including thousands of homicides and sexual assaults.

The report describes an alien crime wave of staggering proportions exacerbated by federal officials unwilling to enforce immigration laws.

The Texas DPS report says well over 100,000 individual criminal aliens have been booked into Texas jails:

From October 2008 to April 2014, Texas identified a total 177,588 unique criminal alien defendants booked into Texas county jails. These individuals have been identified through the Secure Communities initiative, in which Texas has participated since October 2008.

There are almost certainly more criminal aliens who haven’t been identified as aliens.  The 177,588 criminal aliens identified by Texas through the Secure Communities initiative only can tag criminal aliens who had already been fingerprinted.  Arrests of illegal aliens who have not been fingerprinted prior to arrest are not included in these arrests numbers derived from the Secure Communities initiative.

That means that the already stratospheric aggregate crime totals would be even higher if crimes by many illegal aliens who are not in the fingerprint database were included.

Confessed Texas killer Juan Vasquez

The Secure Communities initiative is an information-sharing program between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. Presumably, both departments would have data on the number of fingerprint searches conducted that revealed a criminal act involved an alien.

Texas has been ground zero in illegal alien crossings into the United States.  The Texas DPS report shows that in the Rio Grande Valley, 154,453 illegal aliens were apprehended in 2013.

Total illegal alien apprehensions by sector. (Source: Texas DPS report).

Other Texas sectors saw approximately 86,000 illegal aliens apprehended.  All other sectors combined on the southern border only saw approximately 170,000 illegal alien apprehensions in the same time period.  The Obama administration releases a sizable portion of the illegal aliens captured.