Bob Costas' Casus Belli

M2RB:  The Beatles

Happiness is a warm gun...and a stone-cold dead Prog. /

Stop blaming what Jovan Belcher did on guns.  There are tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners that have never shot anyone.  Furthermore, the cause was not guns or drugs or football or the “manly culture” or whatever other straws the libs wish to grasp.

There is one answer and it is to painful for liberals to face:

“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.”

 – Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation, 1965

Moynihan warned presciently about the disaster of black family breakdown when the black illegitimacy rate stood at what would today be regarded as a paradisal 23%. In response, liberal elites turned Moynihan into a pariah and shut off all discussion of the topic for the next four decades—during which time the national black illegitimacy rate exploded to 72%.   The refusal to address the growing violence and exceedingly obvious problems evident in the African-American family and community -- much of which is traceable to the advent of the Great Society -- has allowed the matter to become a national tragedy, national security issue, and vicious cycle of dependency, violence, envy and defeatism.

Despite a 30% increase in Federal background checks, a 40% year-over-year increase in firearm sales at large retailers, and a skyrocketing jump in the amount of applications for concealed carry permits, gun-related crimes in the United States decreased for the fourth straight year in 2010, according to the FBI's Crime in The United States Statistics.   Since 2006, murders have steadily decreased from 15,087 to 12,996 or 0.00494% and 0.00419% per capita, respectively.  Firearms murders — which made up 67% (8,702) of all murders in the U.S. in 2010 — have followed this trend, decreasing by 14%.  One murder -- whether committed with a gun or arsenic -- is one murder too many, but the idea that Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins would be alive today but for a inanimate object is laughable and hypocritical.  Were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman killed by a gun?  If the gun -- the delivery system -- is to blame, shouldn't the director, producer, writer, and actors of "Batman - The Dark Knight Rises” be in solitary confinement in the Federal detention centre in Los Angeles next to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula a/k/a Sam Bacile, the man behind "The Innocence of Muslims"?

According to FBI data, California had the most gun murders last year —- 1,257, which is 69% of all murders in 2010.  The Golden State has 20% of the nation's population; yet, 33% of all welfare recipients.   It is a laboratory of progressivism.   It was "Ground Zero in the War on Poverty."  California became one of the first states to legalise abortion when Governor Ronald Reagan signed California's Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967.  It, like Illinois, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and other deep blue state contributed more to the gun culture than the National Rifle Association...by a mile.  If "My Progressive Little Ponyland" could ever be achieved on earth, then California, especially, should be a role model and the envy of the world.

As the preeminent African-American, intellectual and economist, Walter Williams has said:

  

"We lived in the Richard Allen housing projects" in Philadelphias. My father deserted us when I was three and my sister was two. But we were the only kids who didn't have a mother and father in the house. These were poor black people and a few whites living in a housing project, and it was unusual not to have a mother and father in the house. Today, in the same projects, it would be rare to have a mother and father in the house....even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren't permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do. And, that is to destroy the black family.'

"Racial discrimination is not the problem of black people that it used to be in his youth.  Today, I doubt you could find any significant problem that blacks face that is caused by racial discrimination. The 70% illegitimacy rate is a devastating problem, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with racism. The fact that in some areas black people are huddled in their homes at night, sometimes serving meals on the floor so they don't get hit by a stray bullet—that's not because the Klan is riding through the neighborhood.   I highlight the moral superiority of individual liberty and free markets,.  I try to write so that economics is understandable to the ordinary person without an economics background.  I think it's important for people to understand the ideas of scarcity and decision-making in everyday life so that they won't be ripped off by politicians.  Politicians exploit economic illiteracy."

There IS an epidemic of gun violence, especially murder, in America, but it isn't one that uniformly affects all socio-racial-economic groups.  According to the Department of Justice, between 1976 and 2005,  52.2% of all murders were committed by African-Americans despite the fact that as a demographic group they only comprise 13% of the entire population and 56.4% of the time their weapon of choice was a gun.  On the other hand, white Americans averaged 80% of the population and were responsible for 45.8% of all murders.  More telling, although white Americans own millions of more guns than do black Americans, white Americans chose to use a gun only 41.9% of the time when they committed murder.

Homicide victimisation rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites in 2005.

 In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites.

Go ahead and call me a "Raaaaaacist!"  Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  The truth is an absolute defence and is not hate speech. 

Facts*:

• Blacks comprise 12.4% of the population and receive 39.8% of all welfare benefits.  

• In 2009, 25.8% of blacks were poor, compared to 9.4% of non-Hispanic whites and 12.5% of Asians.

• Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2009, 29.9% of households headed by single women were poor, while 16.9% of households headed by single men and 5.8% of married-couple households lived in poverty. 
  
  
• Per capita income of African-Americans is less than one-half that of non-Hispanic whites, and non-Hispanic Caucasians have 11 times the asset wealth. 

•  Forty-seven of African-American households use some form of welfare, the second highest rate of any major population group.

• Blacks are 5.0 times more likely to be in prison than whites; they are 8.0 times more likely to be in prison for murder, and 5.0 times more likely to be in prison for felony drug crimes. 

• Young African-Americans are 27 times more likely than young whites (and slightly more likely than young Hispanics) to be in youth gangs.

• Less than a third of blacks lack medical insurance as compared to 77% of non-Hispanic Caucasians, and die from AIDS and tuberculosis at 7.6% times the white rate.

• At 72%, the African-American illegitimacy rate is 3 times the white rate, and Hispanic women have abortions at 3 times the white rate.

• 50% of African Americans and Hispanics read at or below the 5th grade reading level.

•  The African-American drop out rate is 53%.

•  The African-American literacy rate is 38.1%.

More outrageous is the fact that you quoted Jason Whitlock, a sports columnist for Fox Sports.  The size of the racialist chip on Mr Whitlock's shoulder is larger than the entire defencive line of the 1985 Chicago Bears.  The man that you quoted actually said this:

 

"You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture — I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].”

Mr Whitlock is stunning in his ignorance and you, evidently, are content to follow the low-information people amongst us than to do your own research.  In 2008 and 2010, the United States Supreme Court handed down two of the most significant Second Amendment cases in the history of the country.  Neither was pushed by the National Rifle Association.  In fact, the NRA declined to get involved.  What both you and Mr Whitlock should do is look at exactly who were the plaintiffs in both cases.  Liberals claim that they are the heirs of the Enlightenment.  Apparently, however, you need classical liberals to enlighten you.

In District of Columbia v Heller, et al, the plaintiffs were:

1. Ms Shelly Parker,  an African-American woman, who did everything she could to keep her home safe. She owned a dog. She called D.C. police when she suspected illegal activity on her block. She installed a security camera on her front window.  Her crime-fighting efforts made an impression. One night, Parker found her car window smashed and saw rocks scattered around the vehicle. She felt it was retaliation for her vigilance.  "That really disturbed me to my core," recalled Parker, who said she often received verbal taunts while walking her malamute, Barney, near her home on the northeastern edge of Capitol Hill.

She was fearful and exasperated so she asked a police officer for some advice as to what to do.  He told her:  "Get a gun."

Heller v District of Columbia was originally entitled:   Parker vs. the District of Columbia.

2. Tracey Ambeau Hanson, an African-American woman employed by the USDA, who attempted to register her handgun and was denied because - and I kid you not - it was the wrong colour. 

3.  Thomas G Palmer, an openly gay man, who once successfully used a handgun to avoid becoming a gay-bashing statistic before he moved to Washington, DC.

4.  Gillian St. Lawrence, a single, white female, who spent 2 years plowing through DC's bureaucratic red tape in order to register a shotgun for self-defence only to be told that it must be kept in a non-operative condition when in the home. 

5.   George Lyon, a white attorney, who was recruited by Tracey Ambeau Hanson and funded the lawsuit for the rest of the plaintiffs.

6.  Mr Dick Heller, a white, licenced special police officer for the District of Columbia. For his job, Heller carried a gun in federal office buildings, but was not allowed to have one in his home for self-defence even though the city has one of the highest crime rates in the country.

Heller had unsuccessfully sought the NRA’s help with a lawsuit to overturn the gun ban after learning of the plight of fellow D.C. resident Adrian Plesha, who was convicted, sentenced to probation, and ordered to perform 120 hours of community service for shooting and wounding a man who was burglarising his home in 1997.   The burglar ADMITTED his crime. 

In McDonald v. Chicago, 561 US 3025, (2010), the plaintiff was Otis McDonald.  He had been a sharecropper and honourably served his country in the 1960s as a member of the United States Army. He is also an African-American.  

In 2010, Mr McDonald was a 76 year-old retired maintenance engineer living in the same house in the Morgan Park neighbourhood in Chicago that he had purchased in 1971.  Over the decades, he watched his neighbourhood where working-class African-Americans had carved out their little piece of the American Dream deteriorate dramatically.   Instead of neat homes and small businesses, Morgan Park had been taken over by gangs and drug dealers.  Buildings were abandoned.  Homes that had once seen intact black families sitting down to dinner together had become crack houses.  Bullets and needles were more likely to be found on the street than balls and bats.

McDonald's lawn was regularly littered with refuse and his home and garage had been broken into a combined five times.  The most recent robbery was committed by a man that Mr McDonald recognised from the neighbourhood.  An experienced hunter, he legally owned shotguns, but believed them too unwieldy in the event of a robbery.  So, to defend his family and home, he wanted to purchase a handgun, but because of Chicago's ban on handgun registrations after 1982, which required all handguns in the city to be registered, he was prevented from doing so. As a result, in 2008, he joined three other Chicago residents in filing a lawsuit which became McDonald v. Chicago. 

Listen to this American hero.  He could teach you and Mr Whitlock a thing or two:

"Like the millions of law abiding gun owners in America, I am a peace loving person. I own firearms so that I can defend myself and my family, should that need arise. While I sincerely hope that I am never in the position of having to fire a gun in self defense, I rest easier at night knowing that I could stop an armed robber, racist attacker, terrorist, or home invader if the need arose. I also rest easier knowing that my wife could stop a rapist or murderer, rather than becoming a victim. The simple fact is that gun control laws don’t stop criminals from getting guns, and instead only disarm the law abiding citizens, making them easier targets for the criminals. Nor is it justifiable to deprive law abiding citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms for self defense, just because criminals misuse guns, just as criminals misuse other tools...Given those facts, I would encourage my fellow law abiding citizens who do not yet own a gun to do the following: go shooting for the first time, choose the proper gun for self defense, purchase that gun, store the gun in a responsible manner, and become proficient at safely using that gun. Next, join the NRA to protect your right to have a gun for self defense. Doing so may save your life one day, and can also benefit society as a whole."

- Otis McDonald, Patriot

Finally, for Mr Whitlock, especially, I will leave you with some of Justice Clarence Thomas' brilliant concurrence in McDonald v Chicago relative to the factual history of the importance of the Second Amendment in the lives of African-Americans:

“When read against this backdrop, the civil rights legislation adopted by the 39th Congress in 1866 further sup-ports this view. Between passing the Thirteenth Amendment—which outlawed slavery alone—and the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed two significant pieces of legislation. The first was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which provided that “all persons born in the United States” were “citizens of the United States” and that “such citizens, of every race and color, . . . shall have the same right” to, among other things, “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.” Ch. 31, §1, 14 Stat. 27.

Both proponents and opponents of this Act described it as providing the “privileges” of citizenship to freedmen, and defined those privileges to include constitutional rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms. See 39th Cong. Globe 474 (remarks of Sen. Trumbull) (stating that the “the late slaveholding States” had enacted laws “depriving persons of African descent of privileges which are essential to freemen,” including “prohibit[ing] any negro or mulatto from having fire-arms” and stating that “[t]he purpose of the bill under consideration is to destroy all these discriminations”); id., at 1266–1267 (remarks of Rep. Raymond) (opposing the Act, but recognizing that to“[m]ake a colored man a citizen of the United States ”would guarantee to him, inter alia, “a defined status . . . a right to defend himself and his wife and children; a right to bear arms”).

…

Another example of public understanding comes from United States Attorney Daniel Corbin’s statement in an 1871 Ku Klux Klan prosecution. Corbin cited Barron and declared:

“[T]he fourteenth amendment changes all that theory, and lays the same restriction upon the States that be-fore lay upon the Congress of the United States—that, as Congress heretofore could not interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms, now, after the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, the State cannot interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. The right to keep and bear arms is included in the fourteenth amendment, under ‘privileges and immunities.’” Proceedings in the Ku Klux Trials at Columbia, S. C., in the United States Circuit Court, November Term, 1871, p. 147 (1872).

This evidence plainly shows that the ratifying public understood the Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect constitutionally enumerated rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.

…

Chief Justice Henry Lumpkin’s decision for the Georgia Supreme Court in Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243 (1846), illustrates this view. In assessing state power to regulate firearm possession, Lumpkin wrote that he was “aware that it has been decided, that [the Second Amendment], like other amendments adopted at the same time, is a restriction upon the government of the United States, and does not extend to the individual States.” Id., at 250. But he still considered the right to keep and bear arms as “an unalienable right, which lies at the bottom of every free government,” and thus found the States bound to honor it. Ibid. Other state courts adopted similar positions with respect to the right to keep and bear arms and other enumerated rights.  Some courts even suggested that the protections in the Bill of Rights were legally enforceable against the States, Barron notwithstanding.   A prominent treatise of the era took the same position. W. Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America 124–125 (2d ed. 1829) (reprint 2009) (arguing that certain of the first eight Amendments “appl[y] to the state legislatures” because those Amendments “form parts of the declared rights of the people, of which neither the state powers nor those of the Union can ever deprive them”); id., at 125−126 (describing the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms” as “a restraint on both” Congress and the States); see also Heller, 554 U. S., at __ (slip op., at 34) (describing Rawle’s treatise as “influential”). Certain abolitionist leaders adhered to this view as well. Lysander Spooner championed the popular abolitionist argument that slavery was inconsistent with constitutional principles, citing as evidence the fact that it deprived black Americans of the “natural right of all men ‘to keep and bear arms’ for their personal defence,” which he believed the Constitution “prohibit[ed] both Congress and the State governments from infringing.” L. Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery 98 (1860).

Please read the entirety of Justice Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald v Chicago.  It is his finest hour.

*   SOURCES: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009, Report P60, :   Population Division, US Census Bureau, “Table 3: Annual Estimates of the Population by Sex, Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2005” (NC-EST2005-03), (Washington, DC: USCB, 2006), Carolyn Lochhead, “Give and Take Across the Border,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2006, Robert Suro, “Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy” (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2005), and US Census Bureau, Population Division, Current Population Survey, March 2005 [Computer file], (Washington, DC: USCB, 2005).