Off the Editor’s Desk – 1-6-2016

A GUN CONTROL THAT WORKS!

Are you ready for President Obama’s midnight executive orders on private gun sales? They are coming. “The White House will likely go around Congress and require background checks for all in the business of selling firearms.” So reported Blooming News’ Paul Brandt.

I want to reprint the following article penned by Don Todd, who is the Director of Research of Americans for Limited Government. It is about a program that I had never heard about. It is worth reading.

“The President, Hillary Clinton and their type in the legacy media have devoted much time to advocating the disarming of law abiding Americans and labeling the National Rifle Association as a terrorist organization. Their claim is that if the Congress would only enact common sense gun safety laws our long national nightmare would soon be over.

The problem is that none of the gun schemes they advocate have a logical connection to the problem. Many cities including Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit, have become weekend shooting galleries with most of the victims being black males and some collateral damage of a number of five-year-olds and other innocents caught in the crossfire.

While no one policy would solve this problems there is one that has proven itself to have a tremendous positive impact. It is called, ‘stop, question, and frisk.’ It is a law enforcement program designed to take illegal guns off the streets and thereby reduce the number of gun homicides. People engaged in suspicious activity are stopped, questioned, and if necessary, frisked. If they are found to have an illegal gun in their possession, they are eligible for a three-year mandatory prison sentence. It works. The number of guns on the streets dropped dramatically.

Following the crime ridden reign of Mayor David Dinkins, New Yorkers elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani instituted the program and it was continued, by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The results are stunning. The number of homicides in New York City went from 2,605 in 1990 to 414 in 2012. With this kind of record you would think that the Black Lives Matter movement would be on the streets demanding that the program halted by Mayor De Blasio be reinstated since the murder rate is predictably rising since the program ceased.

But no. The leftist solution to the rising urban crime rate is to release thousands drug dealing merchants of death back on to the streets and take the guns away from otherwise defenseless law abiding Americans.

The reason Clinton, Obama, De Blasio oppose a program that actually works is the same reason they oppose most effective law enforcement, political correctness. While a majority of those stopped and questioned are not frisked, no one likes to be frisked.

The left also goes to absurd lengths to deny the effectiveness of the program. Take this quote from Mother Jones as reprinted in the Washington Post. As Kevin Drum says in Mother Jones, the thing driving the drop in crime in New York, as everywhere, might not have anything to do with policing. It’s likely the removal of lead from gasoline and house paint, he argues.

The piece continues, ‘New York’s lead removal efforts are commendable and are a more than adequate explanation of why its seen sharper crime drops than other cities. There’s no reason to credit alienating policies like stop and frisk here.’

Really? And now that the program has been halted and homicides are going back up it is no doubt because lead has been snuck back into the gasoline supplies of New York?

Since the residents of urban black neighborhoods are more likely to be victimized by crime, naturally police concentrated on protecting them. This is known as racial profiling which in the mind of the left cannot be tolerated. Better that they be victims of homicides than they be profiled.”

That’s a great piece and it tells it like it is and that is what we need in a leader.

Thanks for reading!       ~Carlton