By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
It has become routine, and one wonders if the perpetrators are conscious of the fact.
First there is a mass shooting, usually committed by a certifiably mentally-ill leftist.
Then after a brief period of the radical Left accusing the Right of being responsible (even to the point of the Biden-Harris regime specifically blaming innocent conservatives for the crimes), the truth comes out and they switch to blaming the weapons used, so they don’t have to admit that a leftist human being planned the crime and pulled the trigger, on purpose, again and again.
We hate “to talk politics” in such instances, or at least, we say we do — because we’re expected to.
But crime IS a political issue. It has always been, and it will always be.
Part of the role of government is to try – to the extent possible, while protecting the liberty of law-abiding citizens – to reduce crime, both to catch the perpetrators, and to remove them from society so they cannot do it again.
So if this is the job of government – and it is – we should stop apologizing for “talking politics” when it happens. This is the time when it’s on everyone’s mind; it’s a perfectly sensible time to discuss it.
Maybe, in fact, it’s the best possible time to discuss it, because we are filled with righteous anger.
In Nashville, three 60-year-olds and three 9-year-olds have been murdered. In cold blood. By a mentally ill woman who thought she could turn into a boy at 28, and who wanted to commit what is known as “suicide by cop:” committing a crime so awful that the police would be certain to shoot her on sight.
But even though there are many of these mass shootings in the news, more than ever before, they are still a drop in the bucket compared to the other murders that occur every day in America’s big cities with astonishing regularity. It’s a rare day indeed when cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles don’t have at least one murder each.
At that rate, it’s no longer news, so there isn’t the outcry. But what’s the difference, really, to society, between six people being murdered together and six people being murdered separately? The issue is crime, and whether government and society (two very different bodies, however intricately intertwined they may be) are doing enough to reduce it.
Or, worse, whether government and society are purposefully doing things to increase it.
The unAmerican Left, both in politics and in the press and pop culture, blame the weapon.
By calling for gun control, they define the argument, and the Right is forced to spend all its time reminding people that triggers don’t pull themselves, and that – every single day in America – good guys with guns stop far more crimes than bad guys commit with them. Crime control must be about the people, not about the weapon.
We are forced to talk about how many murders are committed with knives, blunt instruments, cars and trucks. And with the rise of fentanyl and other drugs, poisoning is climbing higher and higher on the list as well.
But again, even though these are valid points, it’s still a matter of playing defense on the gun control issue, so it’s all a distraction from the real issue of crime.
Why are there so many murders – of any kind? Why are there so many robberies, carjackings, rapes, brawls and beatings?
These should be the focus of the debate, not the individual perpetrators’ weapon of choice.
And only when we turn back to the real problem – crime – can we see the real causes.
The social issues are high on the list, as much as the Left dislikes admitting it. Children raised without a hard-working father in the home – or not raised at all, frankly – are more at risk of turning to crime.
Is government encouraging marriage and employment in the “parent demographic,” or are we discouraging marriage and employment, through destructively-designed welfare programs and a system that financially rewards mothers for staying single?
Is government removing healthy occupations from our youth by banning youth employment through child labor laws and outrageously high minimum wage levels, and by a tax and regulatory climate that drives gainful employment out of their neighborhoods?
Is government rewarding children for being confused or pretending to be? Or worse, is society rewarding teachers, doctors, psychologists and others for encouraging mental illness instead of truly trying to help them, putting children on meds for things they might otherwise grow out of, often making mental illness in fact a self-fulfilling prophesy, inflating the incidence of later drug abuse, suicides, and other crimes of violence, depression and desperation?
But there are also even clearer crime prevention issues that aren’t dependent on the question of how children are raised – simple, clear-cut departures from the norm that have, over the past few decades, caused crime to skyrocket.
Most crime, after all, is caused by recidivists. People don’t rape just one girl in a stairwell, mug just one old lady in an alley, carjack just one SUV, murder just one rival gang leader. Once people cross these lines once, they tend to repeat, again and again, until they’re stopped.
When government catches these criminals, and prosecutes and convicts them, what happens to these now-proven antisocial cretins? Are they locked up for decades, as they once were? No, they are set free, given credit for time served, or given ludicrously short sentences… or even when sentenced decently, they are set free, in mass prison releases because so many governors care more for their states’ criminals than they care for their law-abiding constituents.
And when government has a border to operate, to protect this nation of 300 million from an often-hostile outside world of 7 billion, what does it do? Does it vet every applicant and only allow in the law-abiding, the honorable, the skilled? Or does the government intentionally allow a porous border so that the mafias, terrorists, and drug cartels can flood this country with the worst of the worst, and so that criminals wanted in their home country can start anew in a nation they view as 300 million fresh prey?
And then, when local politicians run for local offices, like mayors and county executives and governors, do they take a firm stand in support of their constituents, pledging support of the nation’s fight against illegal aliens? Or do they proudly declare their cities, their counties, even their states to be “sanctuary” havens, where the drug dealers and territory brokers of MS-13, the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and their ilk are welcomed in, with the promise that local law enforcement will defend their presence from the mean federal DEA and FBI agents pursuing them?
Do our county and state’s attorneys – specifically charged with the duty of removing known criminals from society – actually do their jobs, or are they elected specifically to refuse to prosecute, to actually encourage crime by promising not to arrest robbers who steal “less than $900 worth of merchandise” because they don’t think it’s worth the bother to prosecute them… or perhaps because they think the criminal deserves it more than its rightful owner does?
The Left doesn’t want to admit it, but getting away with small crimes does lead to attempting larger crimes. The shoplifter becomes the smash-and-grabber; the mugger becomes the kidnapper; the drug dealer becomes the murderer, the rapist or child molester becomes the serial killer.
Thus it has always been, but at least we used to have the common sense to try to arrest most of them early in that development, and remove them from the streets to minimize the damage they can do in their careers of crime.
Today, our retail community has to build in ever-higher expectations for store theft, which necessitates raises in prices for their customers.
Our businesses and manufacturers must spend ever more on security guards and systems, or move facilities to ever more expensive areas, to protect their employees from crime… reducing the profits that could otherwise have supported their employees and stockholders.
The residents in our communities must stay at home where it’s safe – relatively – when every potential destination from school to mall, from park to stadium, is now a danger zone. Goodbye, perhaps forever, to the quality of life that Americans were long promised as our birthright.
This is intentional.
This is the result of specific policy choices, primarily by the national and state level Democratic Party: refusing to tighten our borders, refusing to prosecute known criminals, refusing to keep convicted threats off the streets.
On issue after issue, we see that we could in fact reduce crime – considerably – by simply doing what has always been known to work in the past. Catch, prosecute, convict and imprison the criminal element. Remove them from society.
White or black, young or old, male or female, white collar or blue. Prosecute and imprison the cretins.
Justice should be blind, but voters should not be.
It is time to prosecute and imprison criminals again.
Will these corrections necessarily stop every single crime? No. There will always be criminals, so there will always be crime.
But since most crimes are committed by recidivists, a return to rational prosecution and sentencing, and a return to cracking down on illegal immigration, would reduce the amount of crime by a massive amount – seventy, eighty, probably even ninety percent.
You just can’t commit crimes in the neighborhoods if you’re safely locked up in jail.
If the gun control fanatics really cared about reducing violence – gun violence or otherwise – they too would advocate these measures. But they don’t.
And the fact that the gun control advocates are the same ones who decline to prosecute known criminals, who insist on light sentencing and mass prison releases and open borders, is proof that their entire call for gun control is utterly disingenuous at heart, as well.
Copyright 2023 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, and former president of the Ethnic American Council, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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