The 2 Percent and the 80 Percent

At its best virtue signalling only wastes time, prioritizing guilt reduction over crime reduction.  At its worst it squanders limited resources that could have been used to enact real solutions.

Few have applied reason and evidence to the gun controversy better than Kevin Williamson. In National Review he writes What the Gun Debate Misses:

These are real shortcomings in the system. But, even with that being the case, I should reiterate here that the data very strongly suggest that people who buy firearms from firearms dealers very rarely commit crimes of any kind with those firearms — less than 2 percent of the prisoners in the federal system and about 13 percent of those in the state systems had a firearm obtained from a retail source when they committed their crimes. (And even those figures may overstate the prevalence of retail-sourced firearms in that they probably include some straw purchases and firearms stolen from retailers.) Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them?

In contrast to those modest figures of 2 percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is targeted at this group.

If you have not bought a gun from a gun dealer, then you might not appreciate just exactly how law-abiding and how i-dotting and t-crossing you have to be to make the purchase: Not only are you excluded for a felony conviction, you also are excluded for misdemeanor convictions involving domestic violence or any other misdemeanor for which you could have been sentenced to more than one year in jail, irrespective of the sentence you actually received; you are excluded if you are a “fugitive from justice,” meaning someone with an active arrest warrant who has left the state to avoid arrest; you are excluded if you have been dishonorably discharged from the military; you are excluded if you are a drug addict or a user of illegal drugs; you are excluded if you are an illegal alien or an alien legally present on a nonimmigrant visa; you are excluded if you have been judged mentally deficient by a court of law or committed to a mental institution; you are excluded if you are subject to a restraining order; you are excluded from purchasing a handgun if you are not a resident of the state in which the purchase is being made; you are excluded if you are buying a gun for anyone other than yourself; you are excluded if the information on your government-issued identification does not match current records and the information on your application, a provision that is enforced with such exactitude that an application may be rejected if it says “111 Main St.” instead of “111 Main Street.”

As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we are talking about matters mostly because it is a way of not talking about something else.

In the 2020 cycle, the NRA was not among the top 1,000 political donors or among the top 250 in lobbying outlays. It is true that the NRA is currently in a weakened condition after a series of self-inflicted wounds, but even back in 2012 it was No. 301 among campaign contributors and only No. 181 on lobbying outlays. The NRA’s strength has never been its pocketbook — it has always been the fact that it represents millions and millions of American gun owners who prioritize Second Amendment issues when they go to the polls. The NRA’s political clout has always been of the most genuine kind — the kind you cannot purchase. If you think clout like that can be bought, ask Mike Bloomberg about his efforts on the gun-control front.

If this were a matter of public policy, the thousands of people who were standing outside the convention center in Houston to shout obscenities at the NRA would be standing outside the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Chicago and raising absolute hell about the failure — about the refusal – of the federal government and most big-city DAs to prosecute straw-buyer cases. If this were about policy, Joe Biden would be in New York with Kathy Hochul in a headlock demanding to know why career criminals arrested on murder charges are being released — without bail! — into the streets of our largest city. Or, short of that, President Biden could take a brief walk down the street to the ATF headquarters and find out why the agency won’t even bother to go around and pick up guns in sales that it knows were wrongly approved. But none of that happens.

The reason none of that happens is that this is not about crime — it is about culture war and cultural enemies.

 



Is the Mass Shooter Problem Exaggerated?

The Uvalde shooting of young school children is heart wrenching and tragic. We are left with despair and outrage, and while these are normal reactions they are a poor basis for public policy and effective solutions.

The George Floyd murder soon after the Arbury killing in Georgia and Breonna Taylor killing in Louisville led to such extensive coverage that most people thought the incidences of police killing unarmed Blacks was rampant.  This did not happen thousands of times a year as so many thought; the incidents of cops killing unarmed Blacks was extremely rare, less than 15 times in 2019.  Unarmed does not mean harmless; more people are killed by fists than assault weapons.

Yet this misperception led to riots, billions in property damage and dozens killed. It also led to defunding the police, lower prosecution in some urban areas and restraints of law enforcement as cops just watched buildings burn. This led to an increase in victims of over 100 per week. Obama is right, misinformation kills.

My previous post opines on solutions that take into account our gun problem, our mental health problem and our police problem.  Cheap political attacks such as attacking the NRA and Republicans are worse than useless; they obscure effective solutions.  Using this tragedy to kill the Senate filibuster (AOC) is reprehensible.  Virtue signaling to just do something solves nothing.

Are we making the same mistake with Uvalde that we did with George Floyd?  Is the real threat exaggerated by the hyperbolic and extensive coverage? Isn’t our Congress designed to overcome passion with reason?

From Kevin Williamson in National Review, Explaining the Gun Debate:

We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of the worst school massacre in American history, which happened in Bath, Mich., in 1927, and saw the deaths of 44 victims plus the perpetrator. The outlines of the Bath attack are in some ways familiar — the perpetrator, who was the treasurer of the local school board, was known to be troubled, had financial problems, and killed his wife before going to the school — and in some ways different: The killer was 55 years old, and he mostly used bombs instead of guns.

Americans buy more guns today than they did in the 1990s (the number of National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) checks performed in 2021 was about four times the number of NICS checks performed in 1999), but violent crime has decreased radically since those years, with homicides falling almost by half between 1991 and 2020 (from 9.71 per 100,000 to 4.96 per 100,000). In 1990, New York City had 2,605 murders; in 2021, it had 485, meaning that the murder rate was reduced by about 80 percent. Most other American cities saw large reductions in murders over the same period. There isn’t much reason to believe that the increase in gun ownership led to less crime, but it is a matter of historical fact that it was not accompanied by more crime.

In spite of the panicked emoting you hear in the media and online, the number of Americans living in households in which there is a gun present has actually declined quite a bit over the past several decades: In 1973, only a minority of Americans (49.5 percent) lived in a household with no firearm, but by 2014 almost two-thirds of Americans (64.3 percent) did. So the typical American is less likely to reside in a household with a firearm in it today than 50 years ago.

At the same time, the total number of firearms owned by Americans has climbed substantially over the past few decades, with today’s gun-owning Americans likely to own more guns than gun-owning Americans did a generation ago. Much of this is driven by the popularity of shooting sports and recreational shooting; some of it is driven by collectors; some of it is driven by fear. There is not much reason to believe that a lone psychopath with 50 rifles is much more dangerous than a lone psychopath with one rifle.

A good deal of the increase in the American domestic arsenal has been driven by women’s acquisition of firearms. In 1973, the rate of gun ownership among men was 40 percentage points higher than the rate of ownership among women; as more women have become gun owners, that lopsided figure has declined by almost half, to 23 percentage points.

The important variable does not seem to be guns. Americans shoot each other to death at a much higher rate than do citizens of most other countries, but they also stab each other to death, beat each other to death, burn each other to death, etc., much more frequently than do citizens of other countries. In fact, the number of murders committed by Americans armed with nothing more than their bare hands each year exceeds the number of murders committed by Americans with so-called assault rifles. The United States has unusually high rates of criminal violence across the board rather than just an unusually high rate of gun-related violence.

My conclusion: The problem with America isn’t that it is full of guns — the problem with America is that it is full of Americans.

Both gun-control advocates and the National Rifle Association support stronger enforcement of “straw buyer” laws, meaning laws against buying a firearm on behalf of someone who is legally prohibited from purchasing one himself. But we don’t enforce these laws in most instances. Local prosecutors don’t want such cases, because they involve a lot of sympathetic defendants — mostly the girlfriends, grandmothers, and nephews of gang members and other career criminals — and federal prosecutors won’t touch them because they’re deemed a waste of time unless they are part of a bigger, sexier organized-crime investigation. As I first reported years ago and have been shouting about ever since, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (meaning Chicago) declined to prosecute these cases as a matter of publicly stated policy.

Our police and prosecutors also decline in many cases to arrest people and prosecute them for violations such as illegal possession of a firearm. A very large share of our murders (more than 80 percent in New York City, according to the New York Times) are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior criminal convictions, and in a considerable number of cases by people with prior arrests on weapons charges. We keep letting them walk until they kill somebody.

Some criminal-justice-reform advocates worry that more robust enforcement of gun laws would end up being the next “war on drugs,” resulting in high rates of incarceration and felony convictions that would disproportionately affect young black men. I think that is the wrong way to think about it. Yes, the population of violent career criminals we would want to target seems to be disproportionately black (African Americans are about 12.5 percent of the population but more than half of those arrested for murder), but it is a tiny, unrepresentative sample of black America. In 2018, there were just under 3,000 black Americans arrested for murder — out of a population of 42 million. That’s 0.007 percent of the black population, while white Americans arrested for murder make up about 0.001 percent of the white population. Surely there is a way to police weapons violations more aggressively without targeting the black community as a whole. We should keep in mind that black men also make up a disproportionate share of the murder victims.

From John Tierney at City Journal, Sorrow and Precaution, Not Hysteria:

Politicians and journalists cannot resist exploiting the deaths of schoolchildren, but the ghoulish wall-to-wall coverage serves no purpose except to terrify adults and kids. Contrary to what you’ve heard from Biden and the media, school massacres like the one in Uvalde are exceptionally rare events. They actually occurred more often in the 1990s than recently—but back then, there wasn’t an army of satellite trucks competing around the clock to chronicle the horror.

“There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking these events for decades and helps keep the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database. “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.”

As Fox notes, the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake. Those are also about the same odds that any American will die in a mass public shooting like the recent one in Buffalo. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving parents and families in Uvalde and Buffalo, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.

We can all agree that even one of these massacres is too many. But wallowing in the gruesome details will not prevent another, and neither will blaming the senseless murders on political enemies. We should be looking for ways to protect children and adults from all the dangers they face—including the recent homicide surge claiming nearly 100 additional lives every week. That carnage continues, and a presidential visit to Texas will do nothing to stop it.



Guns and Shooters

Another tragedy and another proliferation of desperation and outrage.

Unfortunately, desperation and outrage are rarely grounds for effective solutions, and may be as likely be counterproductive.  The Brady Bill of 1993 meant to restrict and delay access only led to record gun sales and showed no significant decline in gun crimes. Even with no new legislation Obama’s flippant comment on a 500% tax on ammo sales led to record sales of ammo in advance of the tax that never came.  Just the fear of a policy of restriction leads to increased gun sales.

We have a gun problem. We also have a mental health problem, and we also have a police problem. This is a terrible mixture. Any policy that addresses only one aspect of this complicated social ill is doomed from the start. In the words of Shimon Peres, “we should not mistake a problem to be solved for a fact to be accepted”.  That does not mean we give up and accept this madness, it means we should analyze the problem carefully and seek effective solutions.

It means we should not waste time on cheap political posturing that solves nothing.  It is no time for virtue signaling; loudly expressing our outrage while making no progress.

We have a lot of guns and a lot of gun owners. Like it or not ownership is a sensitive issue, and the proliferation of arms is not going away. Most gun-owners would readily support policies to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally dangerous.  The NRA is a handy target but they do not engage in a sinister plot to put guns in the hands of irresponsible owners.; most gun-owners are not members.  The Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and the National African American Gun Association indicates the diversity of gun owners.

We also have a mental health problem is that will not be quickly solved.  This may be from family breakdown, social isolation, the decline of mediating institutions, social media, new levels of violence experienced in video games and movies (John Wick) or some toxic mix of these factors.  We may not be any more successful at reducing these factors than we would be reducing the number of guns, but we are still faced with the results.

Lastly, we have a police problem. The poor performance of the cops in Uvalde does not engender trust, and the unwillingness of the police to protect property in the wake of the George Floyd riots only encouraged more first-time gun buyers; many who were women and inner-city minorities.

Given the three legs of this problem I suggest the following:

  1. Enforce the existing regulations against straw buyers.  Unfortunately, these are often mothers, brothers and other family members and are more sympathetic than convenient demons like ‘the gun lobby’ or the NRA.  A 10-year sentence for buying a gun for another user will discourage this common source of guns in the wrong hands.
  2. Increase sentences for gun crimes. I do not like mandatory sentences but if judges will not insist on incarceration, it can be legislated. Be forewarned this burden will fall disproportionately on minorities given the current crime data, but we must decide if we prefer criminal justice over social justice.  It is time to place concern for the victims, which are also disproportionately minorities, over concern for the perpetrators.
  3. Clarify rules and procedures for red flag reporting. Teachers and therapists should be able to report a threat without fear of repercussions. Care must be taken that this is not abused.
  4. Turn social media into an asset.

 From Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal, Red Flag Laws Are As Good as the Data:

Red-flag laws, by acclamation, may be our response to the latest Texas and Buffalo shootings. But red-flag laws are only as good as the evidence that causes somebody, often police, to invoke them. Most are single-data-point laws—somebody complains for some reason. The results are bound to be mediocre, producing false positives and harassment of innocent citizens. But now punch the name into a hypothetical Google Mass Shooter Profiling Tool, scanning the subject’s recent online history, purchases and school, employment, police, medical, and travel records. A subroutine, the Google Social Stability Matrix, examines data related to the subject’s longer-term life pattern. Is he a stable, invested member of the community or adrift and unconnected?

Many data points are better than one, making the red-flag petition less of a shot in the dark and less of a menace to the law-abiding. A subject who rates a 3 might merit a welfare check, one who earns an 8 an immediate lookout-order using networked license-plate readers and face-recognition cameras. But then ask: Why wait for a red-flag petitioner to supply a name? Why not have an algorithm already looking for warning patterns that even a family member, school official or employer might not see?

  1. Research AI technology that can determine one’s state of mind from a facial photograph and deploy to gun dealers.
  2. License gun buyers. You can buy without a license but only with extensive background checks, The license just removes the inconvenience to most responsible gun owners. Perhaps the minimum age for a license other than military or police is 25 and such a license would require a thorough background check.
  3. Lack of enforcement of small crimes leads to more serious crimes. Every shop lifter may not become a school shooter, but one who has committed one offense with a weapon is more prone to commit another if allowed the opportunity.

The hard reality is that these solutions are expensive and compromise rights, but any solution that respects gun rights and  seriously intends to reduce the carnage will require compromise.  We underspend on mental health substantially even if only a small portion are physical threats.  We also underspend on police pay and training.  It is time to re-examine those priorities. These rules can sunset and require reauthorization, as we did with the Patriot Act, putting those on notice who would be tempted to abuse these rights and be overzealous.

We could ban ‘assault rifles’ and close gun show and private sale exemptions but these would have had little effect on mass shootings. If the shooter in Uvalde had a high-capacity pistol and a dozen clips he could have reaped the same results. It also would have been much easier to hide.  Rifles are a very small proportion of gun assaults.  Banning assault weapons panders to virtue signaling, but yields little results. This is also true for clip limits.

If we put these unproductive bans in place, how do we explain the next shooting? It erodes our faith in effective solutions.

Peggy Noonan notes the social change requiring a new perspective in The WSJ, In Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb:

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday that Texas has a long history of letting 18-year-olds have long guns. That is true. He also said cops, after the shooting, told him they’re seeing a crisis in mental health in young people. That’s true too, it’s all around them, all around all of us.

But Mr. Abbott should listen to himself more closely. It is one thing to let an 18-year-old have a rifle to shoot rattlers in 1962. It is another thing to allow an 18-year-old in the middle of a mental-health crisis to buy an AR-15, which is what the sick Uvalde shooter bought on his 18th birthday.

I would only modify her statement that the shooter with his profile should not have been able to buy any gun.

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, While We Panic about Sharks, the Bees Keep Stinging Away:

Kristof writes a great deal about guns, but very little about shooters. He might consult his own newspaper’s reporting, which has found that four out of five of the murders committed in New York City are committed by offenders with prior arrest records. In many cases, these include prior weapons offenses. The same has held true in studies of crime in other high-crime cities. Statistically, the number of homicides that are committed by means of semiautomatic rifles is negligible: All rifles together account for only about 2.5 percent of homicides. But Kristof and others like him would rather focus on the maybe 1 percent of murders that involve culturally resonant “assault style” rifles than the 83 percent that involve prior offenders.

As it turns out, crime is committed by criminals.

Though shark attacks happen, as a practical matter, we don’t have a shark problem — we have a bee problem: ordinary, undramatic social pathologies related to family breakdown, misgovernance, deficient law enforcement, an ineffective criminal-justice system, shockingly dysfunctional schools, etc. But we don’t pick the policies that are likely to prove lasting solutions — we pick the villain who suits us best politically and proceed from there.

 

 

 

 

 

 



Fascist Liberals

What Conservative Women Can Learn About Liberals From the Way They Treat Dana Loesch- by John Hawkins at Townhall:

Liberalism is no longer about winning arguments. It’s about intimidating people into silence. Shutting people up. De-platforming them. Doing whatever it takes to make sure that only the liberal opinion is considered because liberalism can’t win in a fair fight of ideas. So, liberal colleges allow students to storm the stage or riot to shut up conservative speakers. Social media platforms are finding ways to shut up conservatives. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center get paid to falsely brand conservative groups as hate groups. Newspaper and networks other than Fox primarily run squishes and liberals masquerading as people on the Right as their “conservative” voices. Conservatives are treated as pariahs in Hollywood and in schools. Political correctness, cries of “racism” and setting up “safe spaces” are today PRIMARILY about shutting down debates that liberals would rather not have. Along those same lines, going after the children of conservative women, abusing those women and threatening them with rape fits right in with everything else liberals are doing.

HKO

It is a shame we lost the word ‘liberal’ to modern fascists.



The Local Solutions to Parkland

by Henry Oliner

Another shooting and another blame fest. More memes, virtue signaling, intolerance, “please unfriend me if you believe…..”,

Yes, we have too many guns that are too easily available.  Yes, we have a culture of violence that enriches Hollywood and their actors who make fortunes glorifying weapons they want banned.  Yes, we have a weak system to handle dangerous mental health problems. Yes, too many of these faceless shooters have a common profile that includes psychotropic medications to be an irrelevant correlation.

And particularly in the Lakeland tragedy we had inconceivable and unconscionable failures in law enforcement from the FBI down to the cowardly behavior of the armed guards at the scene.

Solving gun violence is more complicated in one sense and easier in another. We are quick to blame the villain that aligns most readily with our political narrative. If you think that the NRA is the problem, then you are only making the solution harder. What about the 90% of the gun owners who are not affiliated with the NRA.   If you think the second amendment is the source of our problem, you may win a few accolades on Facebook and Mother Jones, but you will not be doing much to protect your children.

Comprehensive solutions distinguish terrorism from gang activity, simple assault from faceless mass shooters. But comprehensive solutions take time and a level of unity that does not exist is our hyper partisan world.

In The FBI’s Parkland Fail Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal,  focused the problem on a simple observation:

“Why do these public-agency mistakes continue to happen? The reasons are complex, so an appeal to Occam’s Razor is in order. The simple answer is that the federal government has become too big to succeed. Its vastness ensures mistakes, and its public-safety responsibilities ensure that some of those mistakes will be fatal.”

We have come to expect central solutions to local and even personal problems.  We could discuss the evolution of this from the increasing centralization of our government before and certainly since the Progressive revolution, but that would distract from the topic, even if it is a worthy discussion central to our political arguments.

If we want to secure our children from the mentally deranged, then address it locally. Require your local councilmen and commissioners to beef up school security. Hire the needed security personnel (including plain clothed), install the necessary surveillance equipment, provide the checkpoints and metal detectors. Add it to the budget and raise your taxes. When you own the problem, you can solve it.

Israel stopped the carnage from the Intifada quickly and decisively. You saw armed guards at McDonalds and fancy restaurants.  They still debated the issue of settlements on the West Bank, the Oslo Accords, Palestinian rights, and other causes, but their first task was to stop the carnage.

We may complain about the security procedures at the airports, but we comply, and they have largely succeeded.

Take responsibility rather than seek demons and assign blame.

We can still debate gun regulations, the second amendment, the NRA, help for mental conditions, cultural violence in movies and video games, and failures in law enforcement.

If you want to restrict bump stocks, evil looking weapons, or even high capacity clips, go ahead.  If you want to boycott the NRA be my guest; it is a free country.  But you should expect a counter and do not be surprised if their membership grows as a result. You will find that Second Amendment supporters are not limited to the NRA.

I recommend that you become acquainted with the gun laws that exist and the nature of the weapons you wish to regulate. Ignorance is not excused by passion.  It is ignored by the already converted but subverts your ability to persuade others.  Kevin Williams in Another Misfire at the New York Times charges :

And that’s why the Times remains unembarrassed by routinely displaying on this subject a level of ignorance that would cause its editors to blush in shame if the subject were, say, Shia–Sunni relations or the geography of Togo. This has many unhappy consequences, one of which is that the Times is distorting public discourse about this important subject when it should be enriching it.

This leaves me with two questions.

If those who propose “reasonable gun regulations” succeed in banning bump stocks, closing gun show loop holes, raising the age to buy a gun, requiring a wait list, restricting evil looking weapons, registering all firearm exchanges (private sales), then what will they propose after the next school shooting when these are in effect?  Columbine happened when “assault weapons” were banned under the Brady Bill.

Secondly, if they contend the need to own a firearm is unnecessary because of our advanced law enforcement why do they not hold the law enforcement failures at Parkland more accountable for the tragedy than the NRA?

 

 



The Enemy of Good Government

from Kevin Williamson, It’s Time to Do Nothing about Guns

But our passions can run away with us, especially in politics. Politics is not about policy: Politics is about tribe. Turn on Thom Hartmann’s radio program some time and, if you can stomach two minutes of it, you’ll understand what politics really is for many people: a license to hate. The indulgence of hatred is, for a certain kind of person — not an uncommon type, either — extraordinarily pleasurable, as is the expression of outrage, disgust, and indignation. You probably have seen this, in someone else or in yourself: In the course of detailing some outrage or act of buffoonery, one lists each detail, building up to a crescendo, and then — the smile. A big, wide smile of serene satisfaction announcing that the day’s outrage has been duly and deeply savored.

Passion is what drives us to “do something,” exclamation point implied. It is also what causes us to misunderstand politics as a contest between white hats and black hats: Think of how much of our political discourse is dedicated to explaining the other side as some sort of conspiracy, with the Right talking about “Alinskyites” and “Cloward-Piven,” the Left whispering darkly about the Koch brothers or, this week, NRA money lining the pockets of politicians.

Passion is the enemy of good government — and the enemy of the civil peace, too. Good government is boring government: regular, orderly, predictable. To govern dispassionately requires a measure of mental serenity, which is hard to come by while Americans are still bleeding in Las Vegas. The easiest and surest way to equanimity is to let time pass. And, in the meantime, just do — nothing.

HKO

“We have to do SOMEthing!” are the words uttered to denote an urgency that undermines thoughtful analysis. Good government is boring, not a continuous media spectacle.