When we discuss the politics of the Second Amendment, one of the key statistics driving gun control advocates is the homicide rate. As that goes up, they get louder about how we simply need to do something.
The problem is that gun control isn’t really an answer to homicides in general. Even if it works exactly as advertised – it never does, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that it does – the best it can do is simply shift most of those murders from guns to some other weapon.
However, there’s another point we can’t lose sight of, either. Homicides, you see, aren’t really a national issue. They just kind of look like it.
Democrats desperately trying to spin high crime rates caused by their pro-crime policies began falsely claiming that crime was a Republican problem. The media began running articles with headlines like, “Red States Have Higher Murder Rates” and “Republicans Like to Talk Tough on Crime — But They’re the Ones with a Real Crime Problem”.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who once claimed that the internet would have no more of an impact than the fax machine, argued that high crime was really a Republican problem and decided to prove it by claiming that, “Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s.”
Krugman, who somehow has a Nobel Prize, failed to note that most of the murders were coming out of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt won most of the state while Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties however went to leftist Democrat Joy Hofmeister. The ‘blue’ parts of Oklahoma are also red with blood.
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The 1% of bloody red counties include such Democrat strongholds as Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Dallas, D.C., Miami-Dade, Milwaukee, San Diego, St. Louis, Chicago’s Cook County, L Houston’s Harris County, Detroit’s Wayne County, Memphis’ Shelby County, Pheonix’s Maricopa County, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, and many others.
Biden won Cook County, the bloodiest county in the country, by 66%. He won Los Angeles County, the second bloodiest, by 71%, Harris County by 56%, Philadelphia by 81%, New York City by 76%, Wayne County by 68%, and Shelby County by 64%.
Shelby was not only one of the three counties in Tennessee to vote Democrat, it was also responsible for 311 of the state’s 682 murders. Similarly, Wayne County was responsible for 379 of Michigan’s 693 murders. Houston accounted for 405 of the 537 murders in Harris County and along with Dallas’ 251 murders, Austin’s 47, San Antonio’s 128, Fort Worth’s 99, accounted for around half of murders in Texas. Maricopa County made up 299 of the 423 murders in Arizona.
What you’ll find, if you care to look, is that these counties in question are urban counties in what is generally thought of as rural states.
Guns don’t kill people. Packing too many people per square mile kills people.
The urban-rural divide is real, and part of that is because those in the cities have absolutely no care about the reality of rural voters. In this case, they want everyone else to suffer for their inability to keep homicides in check.
Yet, the fact that these seem to happen in these numbers in very specific locations – namely Democratic-voting cities – suggests that the problem isn’t the availability of firearms; it’s something else entirely.
The easy answer is that Democrats are just soft on crime, and recent history has shown us that to be a pretty accurate assessment, to say the least.
However, even before this current round of nonsense, cities were more violent than elsewhere. These counties didn’t just erupt overnight. They’ve always been the epicenters of their respective states’ homicide problems.
Now, at the risk of having you dear readers break out the torches and pitchforks, I don’t think the problem is Democrats, necessarily.
I think the Democratic voting co-exists with the homicides, but the two are only slimly related. I think the kind of environment that leads to these high homicide rates also leads some to think Democratic policies make sense.
At the end of the day, though, that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that these counties have ridiculously high homicide rates that gun control advocates expect the rest of the nation to sacrifice for. Imagine being told you can’t go to the movies because someone else can’t keep their mouth shut during the film.
That’s where we’re at right now.
Just remember that 1 percent of the counties account for 42 percent of the homicides. If those counties step up their game, homicides are reduced, and no one’s rights are infringed upon. Too bad they won’t do it.
