Freedom Line Blog

As Dennis Prager neatly illustrates, is now really the time for Joe Biden and other leftists to be advocating “Defund the Police?”

Not the Time to Defund Police

If the problem is too many guns, explain this…

Is the U.S. a particularly violent nation, one that stands as an outlier in terms of murder rates or gun violence?  No.  Unfortunately, Second Amendment restrictionists like Barack Obama hastily trot out that tired claim whenever they attempt to politicize the latest highly-publicized crime to advance their agenda.

The actual numbers tell a far different story.

The U.S. is by far the world’s leader in terms of firearms per capita, but its murder and violent crime rates aren’t particular outliers.  Fortunately, the Crime Prevention Research Center provides a helpful set of five data graphs illustrating these facts in vivid terms that even the most hardened Second Amendment opponents can understand (even if they won’t admit it).  It provides an invaluable and instant rebuttal to their attempts to spread misinformation and cliches, so please share it far and wide.

Leftists constantly claim fealty to “science,” except on issues like Second Amendment rights and U.S. crime rates when the data completely undermines their agenda.  Fortunately, groups like the CPRC help set the record straight.

Although we support criminal justice and prison reform, we have cautioned against abandoning the tougher policing and sentencing reforms that resulted in such a remarkable and unexpected drop in American crime rates over the past two decades:

The U.S. homicide rate has been cut in half since 1992, from 9.3 murders per 100,000 people to 4.7.  That is its lowest level since 1963.  Violent crime rates reached 80 per 1,000 in 1993, but are down to 20 per 1,000 today.  No city represents that improvement more than the one most associated with broken windows policing and get-tough policies, the formerly dystopian New York City.  In 1993, the city’s murder rate  reached 26.5 per 100,000 people, and accounted for almost 8% of all U.S. homicides.  After twenty years of broken window police tactics, the rate has plummeted to 4 per 100,000, tourism has increased, famous public places are safer and the city has enjoyed an economic and lifestyle renaissance.

Disturbingly, however, two decades of plummeting crime rates have paradoxically allowed a popular sense of complacency to return, at least among political leaders seeking street cred with electoral subgroups and media indulgence.”

Unfortunately, we’re already witnessing early consequences of that movement.  In New York, as detailed today by The Telegraph, crime has already risen 26% this year, prompting the return of something to which we became accustomed in the ugly days of the 1970s and ’80s there:

With their bright red jackets and berets, the Guardian Angels were once a common sight in a city riddled with violent crime.  And this week they made a pointed return to New York’s Central Park for the first time in more than two decades, citing a 26 per cent rise in crime there so far this year.”

If nothing else, the sense of security that had returned to New York is already slipping away.  Meanwhile, even CNN reports today that a police officer pistol-whipped unconscious last week in Alabama deliberately hesitated to use appropriate force in the face of attack out of fear of being accused of racism.

While prison and criminal law reform are somewhat severable from tough policing as policy issues, this is simply not something on which we can remain complacent, lest the bad old days return.

Here’s the immigration reform version of “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”

Speaking to attendees at the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual conference, Esther Olavarria, the White House’s director of immigration reform, highlighted some provisions of the Senate’s bill that she would like the public to ignore.

Making it easier for illegal immigrants convicted of crimes to stay in the country got special attention.

In Olavarria’s telling, the Senate bill reverses a 1996 law that says any criminal conviction can serve as the basis for deportation. The new language would exempt convictions followed by a suspended sentence, meaning that deportation would not be an option if the offender gets probation instead of jail time.

Bear in mind, the conviction referred to is for a crime separate from illegally entering the country.

Thus, if passed, the Senate bill would not only excuse the foundational illegality of unlawfully entering the country, it would further protect from prosecution those who have been convicted, but not yet served jail time.

But if you haven’t heard about this controversial change in law, Olavarria explains why.

“We haven’t played [them] up because we want to be able to maintain them as we go through the legislative process,” she told the conference attendees. “The bill has a number of other important provisions that have stayed under the radar, and we’d actually like to keep them under the radar.”

That’s because the White House knows it can’t win an open and honest debate about granting illegal immigrants not one, but (at least) two free passes when it comes to breaking the law.

This subterfuge is yet another reason to scrap the Senate’s bill and start over.

H/T: The Daily Caller

Don’t we ever learn?

Within seconds of initial reports leaking out about Tuesday’s attack that left the apparent killer and 12 others dead in the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C., liberals and anti-gun activists took to Twitter to demand tougher gun controls laws.

Apparently in their haste to exploit a tragedy for political capital, these gun opponents didn’t take the time to recognize that the shooting took place in a gun-free zone — in the city with the most restrictive gun laws in America.

In fact, the mass shooting sprees at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech, the Cinemark Theater in Aurora, Colo., and Tuesday’s appalling episode at the Navy Yard all occurred in gun-free zones.

The reality is that mass gun violence almost only occurs in gun-free zones. Economist John Lott, recently discovered that “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

Why are gun-free zones so ineffective? The answer is obvious:  A gunman knows the innocent people inside gun-free zones will be sitting ducks, unable to defend themselves or mount a resistance against someone carrying a gun.

No matter how much gun opponents want to claim otherwise, implementing more silly gun control measures or increasing the number of gun-free zones will only lead to more mass shootings. The easiest way to prevent tragedies like the Navy Yard shooting is to allow more responsible adults to take guns more places.

This story would be slightly less depressing even if we hadn’t all seen it coming for years:

Detroit on Thursday became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, as the state-appointed emergency manager filed for Chapter 9 protection.

Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy expert, was hired by the state in March to lead Detroit out of a fiscal free-fall and made the filing Thursday in federal bankruptcy court.

A number of factors — most notably steep population and tax base falls — have been blamed on Detroit’s tumble toward insolvency. Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that in the 1950s reached 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000. Much of the middle-class and scores of businesses also have fled Detroit, taking their tax dollars with them.

This, of course, doesn’t take the analysis back quite far enough. The population and tax base are symptoms, not causes. Why did people actually leave? Well, there were local officials intent on driving out part of the population on racial grounds, the dominance of unions that ended up choking the auto industry, overwhelming crime rates, and a spate of corrupt politicians.

For decades now, Detroit has been a laboratory of liberalism. Today’s news only makes explicit what many of us concluded long ago: the experiment has failed.

When the United States Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms and overturned Washington, D.C.’s prohibition, Mayor Adrian Fenty predicted, “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.”  But that’s not what happened, which comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention to decades of real-world data.  In the famous words of Dr. John Lott, “More Guns, Less Crime.”

Today, The Wall Street Journal noted that the D.C. saw its fewest number of murders since 1963.  What’s more, the decline occurred even as its police force has declined:  “Washington, D.C., last year recorded 108 murders, its fewest since 1963, despite 230 fewer uniformed officers than in 2009.”  More stubborn facts to debunk strangely persistent anti-gun hysteria.

Two federal government reports released within the past week again refute the toxic, persistent myth that poverty is the root cause of crime.

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that the nation’s poverty level jumped from 14.3% in 2009 to 15.1% for 2010, the highest rate since we emerged from the Jimmy Carter hangover in 1983.  The overall number of poor Americans rose to 46.2 million, the highest total since poverty estimates began 52 years ago.  Those numbers justify Newt Gingrich’s observation that Barack Obama is the “Food Stamp President.”

Now this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that crime rates continued to plummet last year.  Violent crime rates declined for the fourth consecutive year, while property crimes declined for the eighth consecutive year, even as the nation’s economic malaise deepened.  Moreover, the lower crime rates occurred amid local budget reductions that have affected police departments.

These statistics confirm the timeless reality that criminality is not some sort of involuntary act to which helpless souls are driven by economic adversity.  Rather, criminality is a voluntary choice on the part of the culpable criminal.  The latest data won’t stop the political left from repeating their discredited dogma, but the facts as usual refute them.

Should the range of potential punishment for leaking classified Afghanistan data include the death penalty?

The statute codifying the subject offense, Title 18 U.S.C. Section 794(b) specifically includes that possibility:

Whoever, in time of war, with intent that the same shall be communicated to the enemy, collects, records, publishes, or communicates, or attempts to elicit any information with respect to the movement, numbers, description, condition, or disposition of any of the Armed Forces, ships, aircraft, or war materials of the United States, or with respect to the plans or conduct, or supposed plans or conduct of any naval or military operations, or with respect to any works or measures undertaken for or connected with, or intended for the fortification or defense of any place, or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.”

Such sober voices as Tony Blankley, who actually opposes the Afghan war, suggest that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be protected “from being prosecuted and possibly executed by the U.S. government for wartime espionage.”  Whatever one’s opinion on the war itself, Assange’s conduct has clearly jeopardized American troops’ lives, not to mention the lives of Afghans (and their families) who have taken great risk in assisting us against the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Indeed, Assange should pray that his punishment comes at the hands of U.S. authorities, not some vengeful person horribly affected by his crime.