It’s magic by Tom Reynolds
Every Monday, we read about the number of weekend killings in Chicago and many other major cities. The Left is filling newspapers and web sites with propaganda blaming guns for the increase in murders, while also painting career criminals as victims.
Someone once said, killing one person is a tragedy but killing one million is just a statistic. The number of murders seems to be just a statistic to be exploited by the gun grabbing left. But beyond the statistics, there is grief and heartache that will never go away. Those murdered were someone’ son or daughter or maybe a husband, wife, brother, sister, father or mother. Lives are snuffed out leaving behind others to grieve. To the Left, the victims and those left grieving are just collateral damage on the road to abolishing the 2nd Amendment.
If the Left was serious about doing something about the violence, they would admit that soft-on-crime policies are a major factor in increased violence. It's not any one policy that has created this mess but the entire soft-on-crime package. Taking a pass on riots where arson, looting and even murder were committed sends a more powerful message to criminals than all the gun control laws in the books. Catch-and-release bail reform does not discourage criminals but it must certainly discourage law enforcement, who see their efforts going for nothing. Are criminals missing the fact that police are not being aggressive in pursuing crimes because police are practicing C.Y.A. and they also can’t escape the feeling of “why bother, the D.A. isn’t going to do anything”? Putting a dollar threshold below which theft crimes are virtually ignored sends the message that crime does pay. And leaving the southern border open not only facilitates crime but also sends a message about crime.
The basis of this warped philosophy is the Left’s drive to blame American society for all that is wrong. But, four decades ago, Reagan got it right when he said: "We must reject the idea that each time a law's broken, society is guilty- rather than the lawbreaker. It's time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."
It’s said that the secret strategy of magicians is to keep the audience looking at their right hand, not their left. Joe Biden and the radical left use the same principal to hide their growing list of failures. You are a racist if you point out their failures and by extension it’s your racism that becomes the focus and not their failures.
It would be hard to miss the mass brainwashing that the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) have been currently pushing: more gun violence means more gun laws are needed. Deaths due to firearms rose dramatically in 2020 and preliminary figures indicate 2021 will also be high. Don’t look at the Left’s soft-on-crime policies in the left hand as a cause, just focus on the gun in the right hand.
Some of the reasoning is so sophomoric that it would be comical if it wasn’t so serious. USA Today’s February 3rd article on gun violence started by quoting an 18 years old girl in Poughkeepsie, obviously an expert, “Young people get bored and have nothing to do…’So they go out into the street and they have gun violence’”. Sure. Bored? Go kill someone. Another part of the article quoted a pawn shop owner from Anguilla, “This is the most stressed I have ever seen kids in my life”. If any of this were true, shouldn’t the article have been about ending the boredom and stress induced by Covid restrictions or delving into a culture where young people put so little value on human life? Nope. It’s the guns; we need more gun control.
In another case of look at my right hand and not by left, the white house web site says: “Black and brown Americans are disproportionately harmed by the direct and indirect consequences of gun violence”. The indirect message is that guns are racist! But the White House failed to mention that the overwhelming number of black and brown people who are harmed are harmed by other black and brown people! But let’s not go there, since Biden’s White House loves charging racism as the root cause of everything that goes wrong.
In decrying the surge in legal gun purchases, Biden will never mention that a significant number of these guns are being bought by black and brown people. (Perhaps as protection against other black and brown as well as white and Asian people - and not because they are bored?) If the Left was truly interested in helping minority communities, it would drop the racist labelling and pay attention to minority against minority crime.
The purpose of this current media blitz is to create panic amongst the uninformed in order to ease the way for more gun laws. Read long articles spreading panic over gun violence and you will be lucky to find even one paragraph that alludes to soft-on-crime issues as maybe a contributing factor. But if the media were really being honest – and if they really cared - it would explore soft-on-crime policies and its effect on crimes as a whole, not just gun violence.
Who are not victims in all this? The elite liberals in gated communities with their own security. Nor is it editors, publishers and owners of media organizations. They may cry false tears but they don’t want or need answers that disagree with their own beliefs; those other answers are just statistics. Unfortunately for the rest of society, those statistics had names.
