Gun Violence is Not a Republican Problem, It’s a Democratic Problem

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

January 18, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield

Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.

You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.

He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.

In 2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally buying a gun is all but impossible.

Mayors of Obamerican cities blame guns because it’s easier than blaming people and now the President of Obamerica has turned to the same shameless tactic. The NRA counters that people kill people, but that’s exactly why Obamerican leaders would rather talk about the guns.

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence.

80% of Chicago’s murders are gang-related. But in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois State Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, the future leader of Obamerica voted present. Had he not voted present, it is doubtful that he would have been reelected in an area where gang leaders wield a great deal of influence.

The majority of murders in the cities with the worst homicide rates are gang-related. And while it isn’t always possible to be certain whether a killing was gang-related, the majority of homicide victims in city after city have been found to have criminal records.

In 2010, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States and over 2,000 known gang-related killings, over 90% of which are carried out with firearms. Since 1981, Los Angeles alone has had 16,000 gang related homicides. That’s more than twice the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is what Obamerica looks like. It’s a place where life is cheap and illegal guns are as available as illegal drugs. It’s the war that we aren’t talking about, because it’s easier to talk about the inanimate objects being used to fight that war.

There are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that runs pretty well. And then there’s Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of it is. America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem.

Democratic leaders and machines, combined with social workers and justice crusaders have run Obamerica into the ground. Obamerican cities used to be the homes of industry and progress. Now they’re places where young Black and Hispanic men kill each other in growing numbers.

America does not need gun control. It is a mostly law-abiding place. And gun control cannot help Obamerica. Not when its murder rate is driven by gangs who have no trouble obtaining anything; whether it’s legal in the United States or not.

This country does not need to have a conversation about how many bullets should go in a clip. It does need to have a conversation about how many parents should go in a family. It needs to talk about the ghettos of Obamerica and have a serious conversation about broken families and generational dependency.

Obama has become a role model to millions of people in the black community. If anyone can address these problems, it’s him. But instead of trying to solve the problems of Obamerica, instead of doing something about the high levels of unemployment, the broken families and the glamorization of drug dealing and violent crime, he wimped out and picked a fight with rural America.

AIDS prevention was sabotaged by the claim that the disease was a general problem spreading through the population. It wasn’t. Neither is gun violence.

Adam Lanza is as much of a poster boy for gun violence, as Ryan White was for AIDS. A better poster boy for gun violence might be Jay-Z, who boasts of having been a drug dealer and claims to have shot his brother at the age of 12. The drug dealer to millionaire rapper is the Horatio Alger story of Obamerica. And Jay-Z can be seen partying with Obama.

If Obama really wants to get serious about gun violence, then all he has to do is turn to the man standing next to him. But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

That’s what Obama is doing now. Hiding behind Newtown and adorable little kids is the grim specter of Obamerica’s death toll. It’s buried inside the gruesome figures of how many Americans are shot each year issued as an indictment against the entire country in general and gun owners in particular. But those numbers are not an indictment of America. They are an indictment of Democratic mayors and liberal social policy. They are an indictment of Obama.

We need to set aside the same old tired social justice rhetoric and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago. And we need to do it before it’s too late.

 

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

The "Open Letter" to Obama, from T L Davis, is where I'm at.

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

 

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Open Letter to the President Barack Obama

Mr. President

Today, there are families who question the direction of the nation. There are fathers and mothers trying to figure out how to pay the bills, to put children through college, to just get by everyday when wages have been depressed by overwhelming unemployment. I know it is at 7.8%, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Your economists understand what I am saying.

We are a nation saddled with many bills and deficits that are not realistically ever going to be repaid. For example, the treasury receives around 2.3 trillion dollars in revenue every year, but spends nearly 5 trillion, or 5,000 billion dollars. There are concerns that to continue to operate the federal government, social security, medicare, medicaid, etc., the government is going to have to devalue the dollar. QE 1&2 didn't do it. The Stimulus package went largely to government entities as grants and such. This is not a criticism, but it is a fact. That money did not filter down to small business.

I believe that at some point the government is going to have to crash the dollar to pay off some of the bonds already held in order to borrow more money to pay the bills. This is not radical, I think it is something you already know is necessary. I think you proved that by excercising Quantitative Easing 1& 2. It will be an accounting correction to you and the federal government, but it will destroy the lives of millions of Americans. I will cede that the damage was not done by you alone, far from it, but it will fall to you to make that fateful decision.

Under your predecessor, George W. Bush, at a time of national crisis, we ceded some of our rights to the federal government believing that the only way to keep terrorists from attacking our homeland was to give a little when it came to privacy. But, even though it was Bush who got us into it, you have done nothing to restore liberty now that Al Qaeda, in your words is "on the run." When will these temporary violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments going to be restored and what is your plan to restore them and in what degrees?

It might have gone unnoticed in the pomp and circumstance of inauguration that there is an oath tied to the admitting of one to office. It asks if the office holder is willing to affirm that they will abide by the Constitution, to "protect and defend the Constititution against all enemies foreign and domestic" without coercion or intent to deceive. With everything aside, I mean the fact that so many voted for you; that popularity and media adoration are a given to someone of your background who has attained such high office and the support of African Americans, who are hungry for representation; that Hollywood is in your corner; that labor unions and a lot of people who have not found their place in American society as you have done look to you for inspiration; given all of that, are you willing to swear on your honor that you will protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic without coercion or deception? I ask this, because you have not done so in the first four years of your presidency.

Despite what you have been taught and what the legacies of other administrations have been shown, the Constitution is not a document to be further defined. Even in legal language terms such as "shall not be infringed" and "Congress shall make no law" are pretty definitive, even if they are legalistically worked around. For citizens like me, the words of the Constitution are all they need, they don't need legal scholars to explain "shall not" or "make no law."

Which brings us to the point. I am a Second Amendment advocate, I make no apologies for that, but I am also a First Amendment advocate and down the line. I believe that the Bill of Rights were that, a bill from the government to the people of certain rights, not privileges, not exceptions, not waivers, hard and fast rights, inalienable to us all on birth in the United States of America. So, when I say I am a Second Amendment advocate, I don't hold that right any greater than any other, except to say that it is the last refuge to maintain other rights that may have already been alienated by clever lawyers and Supreme Court Justices.

On this issue let me be blunt: after the many abuses of our rights through the decades, not just your administration, but others even more egregious, we have come to a point where we have had enough. We have let your agents grope our children and grandmothers, steal from our luggage, laugh at our naked images on X-ray machines that deliver who knows how much radiation, all in order to get on an airplane and not disappoint family and friends; not lose business our employers expect; not be late for weddings and funerals; not infuriate others in line at security checkpoints in airports and etc. These practical allowances have not been taken in the spirit which they were meant, i.e. as an accommodation to a nation suddenly under attack by violent and hateful terrorists willing to put our children on the front lines of a deadly and persistent war against the West.

Sandy Hook Elementary was a devastating blow to America; it broke our hearts to think that children would be targeted in such a vile and vicious way. But, instead of handling this incident with the mind of a president eager to quell the fears of a nation, your response was to launch an attack against gun owners of all stripes, from the hunters, to sportsmen to the families forced by economics to live in violent neighborhoods where break-ins, rapes and murders are not as uncommon as they should be, whose only viable defense against the violence is self-defense in the form of a firearm. Yes, some of those threatened have needed five, six, or twenty bullets to defend themselves. There is no certain number that will do the trick, just as there is no certain number of assailants who will enter one's home.

In an attempt to be brief, I will get to the point. Your intent to do as much as you can to disarm the American public is apparent, either as legislation you support or Executive Orders you have signed. Your emotional appeal to the American public via surrounding yourself with children does not ring logical to the American family, because the defense of one's own children is often the sole purpose to own firearms. I can point you to innumerable instances where this has been the case and the total swamps by millions the twenty children you claim to represent with these orders.

Here's the fact of the matter: we have had enough.

We will resist at all costs your efforts, because we know the result. The result is Washington D.C. and its murder rate; Chicago  and its murder rate versus Wyoming and its murder rate and I mean by per capita, not totals.

The bigger point, however, is that without the Second Amendment none of the others can be enforced by the people themselves. Now, I understand that you have armies; you have federal officers. I do not underestimate the power of the federal government, or its agents. I do not mean to call them out, but neither shall we yield to that raw force that you represent with guns and tanks.

We do not believe that you have the law on your side. As is typical, you are likely to attack me on legalities and what the Constitution says or doesn't say as defined by Stare Decisis and such, or what some Supreme Court Justice wrote once in a big book. What I am telling you is that there is a breaking point, a point at which we will go no further and will die to prove it.

I know the response from your spokesperson might be that we are suggesting going to war with the federal government, with law enforcement. That is not the case. In fact, we expect most of them to be on our side when you finally overplay your hand as you have so recently proven you are willing to do. Some people, yourself excluded, care about the oaths they take and the promises they make and I believe there will be a lot of soul-searching in the hearts of those you expect to carry out your orders against their neighbors, relatives and acquaintances.

You are welcome to ask me how many I am willing to kill to retain my rights as soon as you are willing to answer my question: How many are you willing to kill to get them?

Posted by T.L. Davis

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

Our cities have become killing fields.

[Deborah Moore]

Without a doubt.

The children the once Illinois Senator should have had at "our" house, should have been from

Chicago. I wonder how many letters them have received from that area.

I believe Obama should stand in Chicago and try to blame everyone else. Take Christie with

him.