| Author |
Message |
    
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 201
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 12:55 pm: | 
|
Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attempted to file an injunctive class-action suit "to force [gun manufacturers] to distribute their product responsibly," the NAACP president, noted that gun violence takes a disproportionately high toll among young black males.
Am I alone in seeing this as an absurd act of political desperation by the civil rights establishment? What's next? Will Irish-Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company? That last analogy only works, of course, for those who think the Holocaust was a self-inflicted wound. In fact, black leaders have already accused white and Korean liquor vendors of "invading" black communities and intoxicating their inhabitants. Boycotts have followed these charges, and anti-white, anti-Korean race riots as well.
But who forces alcohol down reluctant throats? And who makes guns shoot in ways that victimize blacks more than whites?
Why did the NAACP even attempt to make the comparison between gun deaths of blacks and whites, if not as a racist insinuation that whites are somehow the cause of those "disproportionate" violent deaths, just as whites are the implied cause of nearly every other social pathology that afflicts the African-American community?
In the sociology of the left, including the NAACP, there cannot be a wound the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the responsibility of malicious whites. To think otherwise would be to "blame the victim." Only mean-spirited conservatives (like me) would even think of doing that. The fact is that while blacks make up only 12 percent of the population, they account for 46 percent of total violent crime and 90 percent of the murders of other blacks. It is they, not whites or gun manufacturers, who are responsible for the disproportionate gun deaths of young black males.
Firearms don't kill people. Sociopaths do. It takes a human brain to pull the trigger. If young black males abuse firearms in an irresponsible and criminal fashion, why should the firearm industry be held accountable? Why not their parents? Why not themselves?
Unfortunately, as a nation we have become so trapped in the melodrama of black victimization and white oppression that we are in danger of losing all sense of proportion. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus? Why do all those black Haitians want to come here? To be oppressed?
In the grips of a politically inspired group psychosis, we find it natural to collude with demagogic race hustlers in support of a fantasy in which African-Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves.
If blacks constitute just under half the prison population, for example, that cannot be allowed to suggest that the black community might have a problem when it comes to raising its children as law-abiding members of society. Oh no. Such a statistic can only be explained by the racism of a criminal justice system that is incarcerating too many blacks.
Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the civil rights leadership from racist bloviator Al Sharpton to race baiter Louis Farrakhan. Against the intimidating atmosphere this consensus creates, to suggest the obvious -- that too many blacks are in prison because blacks commit too many crimes -- is to be identified as an apologist for racism, and perhaps even a closet racist oneself.
The NAACP's anti-gun lawsuit came on the heels of the crusade to defend crack dealers because 90 percent of them are African-American and their sentences are considered "too harsh." This insipid campaign was launched by Jesse Jackson at the Washington rally of race-hater Louis Farrakhan.
That 90 percent of crack cocaine dealers are black cannot be seen, of course, as a moral stain on those crack dealers or as a massive social problem for the community that produces them. It can only be the result of a white legal system that stigmatizes crack as a more dangerous and more culpable drug than the powder cocaine it uses itself.
Forget that the heavier penalties were originally demanded by black leaders who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black community and the white criminal justice system did not care enough about its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh.
That was then, this is now. And now, lessening the sentences that were previously raised has become a crusade for "social justice" that overshadows the need to combat the crime wave itself. Because racial oppression is the main enemy, the villainy of the crack trade is transformed into yet another symbol of white unfairness.
It is true that the number of blacks executed in Texas (and nationwide) is greater than their proportion in the population. But it is also true that the proportion of black murderers far exceeds the proportion of blacks in the population at large. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit 54 percent of the homicides in America even though they constitute only 12 percent of the population.
An individual black male is eight times more likely to commit murder than an individual white male. Thus, in the most equitable system imaginable, a black male would be eight times more likely than a white male to be executed for murder.
In fact, however, convicted white murderers are more likely to be executed for their crimes than convicted black murderers. Whites accounted for 62 percent of the convicted murderers executed in Texas. According to statistics provided by the Justice Department, the proportion of whites presently on death row compared to the total white population is almost four times that of the comparable proportion of blacks on death row in terms of the total black population.
Whatever these statistics prove, it is not that justice in America is systemically biased against blacks. But the desperation to prove white turpitude is so great that instead of celebrating this as a triumph of civil rights reform in the law, the race baiters merely shift their focus to the victims of capital crimes.
Thus the statistic with which Amnesty opens its case is this: "Of the 500 prisoners executed between 1977 and 1998," according to Amnesty, "81.8 [percent] were convicted of murdering a white person, even though blacks and whites are the victims of homicide in almost equal numbers nationwide."
No attempt is made of course to explain how the criminal justice system might systematically discriminate in favor of white victims but not against black defendants (except by this indirect method). What the report's raw statistic fails to take into account is that the death penalty is only imposed in aggravated circumstances, which can include the violence of the crime, whether it is committed in the course of another crime or whether the perpetrator has a prior criminal record of violent crimes.
All these factors are ignored in the Amnesty report. It so happens that black felons commit 43 percent of aggravated assaults, 66 percent of armed robberies, 27 percent of rapes and 85 percent of interracial crimes of violence, mainly against whites.
Since juries generally don't demand the death penalty for crimes of passion, where the victim is known to the killer, and since blacks are far more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than are whites against blacks, the disparity that offends Amnesty may not imply a racial bias on the part of prosecutors and juries at all. The report does not even acknowledge this as a problem.
Poor black academic performance cannot be seen as a failure of black families to educate their children, or of the black community to support educational values, which are often referred to derisively as "thinking white." Black failure can only be the result of some lingering residue of the white perfidy involved in slavery and segregation. Call it "institutional racism."
Of course, those who invoke the phantom of "institutional racism" are too sophisticated to claim that there are actual racists lodged in our liberal education establishment who refuse to admit black children to legally integrated schools or refuse to teach them when they get there.
Instead, the concept of "institutional racism" is made to encompass an entire system of oppression that invisibly conspires to keep black children down. It may do so through culturally rigged tests; or through the failure to provide black role models in positions of authority; or by providing only underfunded schools to black neighborhoods; or as a result of the pervasive negative pressure exerted by an environment of poverty that cannot be countered with a mere six hours of school.
In reality, the failure of African-American children to make the educational grade cannot be explained by any of the above factors. Statistics analyzed by the New York Times (July 4, 1999) dispel the poverty argument by establishing that impoverished white children whose parents earn less than $10,000 a year score higher on standardized SAT tests than black children whose parents earn more than $70,000.Why is that? Obviously the impoverished white children are not privy to a better education.
While the oppression theme dominates public discourse, no attention is paid to the real problems that hold African-American children back. There is a symbiosis, in fact, between the political mumbo jumbo of the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons (abetted mightily by patronizing white liberals) and the seemingly intractable social problems of the black community.
Nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. A child raised in a single-parent, female-headed household is six times more likely to be poor than a child of any color born into a two-parent household. Seventy percent of youth violence is committed by males from female-headed households, regardless of race.
If the NAACP and other black leaders want to end the terrible scourge of gun violence committed by young inner-city thuggish blacks, they should launch a campaign to promote marriage and family formation in the African-American community; they should issue a moral plea to the community to stigmatize fathers who abandon their children and parents who have more children than they can afford.
Instead of waging war against law enforcement agencies and supporting destructive racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, they should campaign for a tripling of police forces in inner-city areas to protect the vast majority of inhabitants who are law-abiding and who are the true victims of the predators among them.
But to take these remedial steps would require rejecting the bogus charge of white oppression. It would mean abandoning the ludicrous claim that white America and firearms manufacturers are the cause of the problems afflicting African-Americans. It would mean taking responsibility for their own communities instead.
|
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 3794
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 06:58 pm: |
|
So how about we ask white folks to quit selling bullets? |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 282
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 01:28 am: |
|
Bullets and Butter, the staples of life. |
|
Email This Page