I can easily forgive President Barack Obama for not understanding American culture, especially gun culture.

Growing up in the exclusive Menteng district of Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Honolulu, Hawaii to attend a private school, Obama knew nothing of the continental United States until he moved to California as a young adult to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, Obama moved to New York City to attend Columbia. He then moved to Chicago and his first job as a community organizer, before going to Harvard. After Harvard, he returned to Chicago, and lived there until he moved to Washington, DC, as President.

His exposure to firearms has been seeing them in the arms of Indonesian soldiers, on the hips of Hawaiian, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago police officers, and of course, in the crime news of the urban areas in which he has always lived in Asia and in “blue state” metropolises.

Obama views firearms as tools that he can used to enforce the laws that he passes and the executive orders he proclaims. He views them as something useful to provide to allies and drug cartels and foreign terrorists to shape domestic and international politics. He views them as a threat to his one true faith, an all-powerful federal government. And of course, he views them as a vessel for crime and murder among criminals.

Put bluntly, he views firearms as nothing more or less something to be exploited… for good or ill.

The idea of a firearm as a tool ensuring personal liberty is as foreign to him as a life in an Indonesian private school is to patriotic Americans.  The concept of being responsible for your own personal safety, and that of your family, is as alien to him as the concept of personal responsibility itself. Barack Hussein Obama is an American President without an appreciation for the essential nature of firearms as part of the American heritage and the American spirit.

But while we can forgive the President’s shortcomings, we cannot allow him to continue spreading the fiction that the United States has a “gun violence” problem, that the existence of firearms in the United States forces people to become violent.

That is, quiet simply, a lie.

Worse still, this liberal “gun violence” lie is based in the racist belief that people of minority cultures are inherently violent, echoing a disgusting piece called “The Black Dilemma” which seems to have originated on a site called American Renaissance. It should hardly be surprising. Billionaire gun control supporter Michael Bloomberg, who fuels the “gun violence” studies at Harvard, and who is the money behind Mayors Against Illegal  Guns, Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a new anti-gun propaganda site called The Trace, was very blunt in his beliefs that minority males are inherently violent.

Once you listen to audio of his statements, you’ll understand why.

“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [unintelligible]. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” said Bloomberg.

“You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed,” he continued. “First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”

It is quite stunning that the media and activists have not challenged the former Mayor’s comments asserting that young minority males should be disarmed.

The racists at American Renaissance and the racists on the progressive left want to scapegoat firearms because it is politically advantageous, but what they really believe is that minority males are inherently violent.

They use the phrase “gun violence” as a code word and as an excuse for many things.

• When Obama wants to attack the rights of 100 million law-abiding citizens because of the vile actions of someone who is mentally ill or racist or terrorist, he blames “gun violence,” attributing the actions of a single homicidal madman to the tool he used, smearing 1/3 of the nation.
• When anti-liberty Democrats want to create a scapegoat for the unending crime problems in Democrat-controlled cities, they blame “gun violence,” instead of the cycle of poverty and despair that resulted from 50+ years of failure in action that are the results of their social engineering experiments.
• When white, wealthy progressives lament “gun violence,” they do so with the specter of carjackings and home invasions in there minds, fearing that the minority “other” will intrude upon their suburban golf course homes, their penthouse views, and their trendy urban lofts.

The politicians blame “gun violence” as an excuse to attempt to seize more liberty from law-abiding citizens. Progressives use this same “gun violence” argument as code to disguise their deep-seated fear that black people are inherently violent. They feel if they take away the tool that the violence will stop (which shows again how little progressives know about the root causes of violence, but that’s another discussion entirely).

But as we’ve noted previously, firearms are not the problem. “Gun violence” is a myth, an excuse, a multi-purpose strawman.

Nor are minorities a problem. Billionaire totalitarian Michael Bloomberg almost understood the problem, but he seems to view violence as a genetic trait. It’s a bitter irony, considering how many of his own people have been sent to gulags and gas chambers for the same sort of bigotry.

Writing this morning at the Denver Post, Kirk Mitchell and Noelle Phillips almost get it as well.

They lament the “no snitching” culture, the infantile nature of the slights that lead to murders and tit-for-tat retaliation killings, and the police response of disruption tactics to try to temporarily stem the attacks, but they simply refuse to address the problem of a specific minority culture.

We don’t have a “gun violence” problem as liberty-hating opportunistic politicians pretend.

We don’t have a “black male, 15-25” problem, as the wealthy, paranoid, and prejudiced proclaim.

What we have is an amoral, gang-celebrating, “thug life” culture that embraces criminality as not just acceptable behavior, but as a preferred way of life.

If we could magically strip away every firearm from this same violent subculture, they’d simply find other ways to carry out the violence and intimidation tactics that are at the core of this system. Perhaps they’d “only” revert to knives and bats and clubs. Or perhaps they’d advance to bombs and arson, and importing fully-automatic weapons from the same overseas markets that supply the narcotic poison that sustains them, and we’d end up with “little Mexicos” in gang neighborhoods, where even the most heavily armed and armored police units would fear to tread.

Anyone attempting to sell you on “gun violence” is attempting to sell you on a lie. Period.

We have a violent “thug culture” problem, a problem that can be addressed by changing cultural norms and vilifying certain cultural mores, instead of celebrating and perpetuating them. You should question why they are lying to you, and why they refuse to address an addressable problem within a specific subculture that can be changed just as easily as views on smoking or drunk driving.

Subcultures come and go, and destructive subcultures can be marginalized and minimized until they simply cease to have any appeal, and are abandoned.

It would be nice to have a President who still retains so much popularity among certain groups attempt to use that influence to reduce crime.

Unfortunately, he’s clearly more interested in stoking the fears and prejudices of this same thuggish subculture, inspiring hatred, supporting lawlessness, and offering subtle supports for thug-culture based rioting.

Hopefully, the next President won’t be so interested in exploiting those he should instead be helping, to undermine the liberty of all.