Do Democrats Really Oppose Gun Violence?

From the Wall Street Journal:

That didn’t take long. Right after Orlando, President Obama promised he would “spare no effort to determine what—if any—inspiration or association” had sent Omar Mateen on his murderous spree.

Now, just one week later, his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, tried to have the Islamist “inspirations” and “associations” Mateen invoked scrubbed from the transcripts of the 911 calls released to the public—before being forced to back down on Monday. No one should be surprised. The impulse to edit out anything that confirms acts of terror are acts of war is fully consistent with standard operating procedure these past eight years.

And if Hillary Clinton is elected in November, it will be the same for the next four.

Like the president, Mrs. Clinton has used Orlando to relaunch the liberal offensive on the “gun lobby.” She promises “to do everything” to take “weapons of war off our streets.” She further calls for an “intelligence surge.”

Tough stuff, right? Unfortunately, the moment any of these efforts run up against political correctness, they will almost certainly collapse under liberal pressure. How do we know? There is no better example than the post-9/11 experience of New York under Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Mr. Kelly began his second stint as New York’s top cop on Jan. 1, 2002, when the city was still clearing debris from the Twin Towers. His charge looked impossible: Prevent another terror attack, and maintain the progress against gun violence begun under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Over the next 12 years the finest police force in America did just that. In so doing, Mr. Kelly pulled off what President Obama and Hillary Clinton now claim are their post-Orlando priorities—a full-fledged assault on gun violence, and “smarter” policies to identify terrorists before they strike.

Here’s the rub. The secret to New York’s success wasn’t just Mr. Kelly. It was also Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Bloomberg was a liberal rarity, a pol who would not throw his cops under the bus when successful policies produced politically inconvenient results.

Start with guns. Under Mr. Kelly, police expanded a tactic known as stop-and-frisk. Here’s a better way to think about it: gun control for bad guys.

Cops would be proactive. When they spotted someone behaving suspiciously, he would be stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked. Often police found an illegal weapon.

The gun control was not limited to the thousands of guns taken off the streets this way. Because the bad guys knew they might be frisked, they started leaving their guns at home. New York became America’s safest big city.

How was this success greeted? The cops found themselves denounced as racists, because the stops of black men were disproportionate to their percentage of the general population (but not disproportionate to suspect descriptions). The activists sued; an anti-cop federal judge egged them on; and Bill de Blasio made “racial profiling” by police a key campaign point in his successful run for mayor in 2013.

Never mind that as a result of the NYPD’s approach, thousands of young black and Hispanic lives were saved.

Alas, it’s the same sad story for the cause of better intelligence. Under Mr. Kelly, police set up a demographics unit. The Associated Press would win a Pulitzer for a sensationalist series of stories falsely implying it was about blanket spying on Muslims. In fact, the unit was about getting smart—learning where, for example, terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers might look for shelter had they made it to New York (as they’d planned) after bombing the Boston marathon.

Or what about the 2007 NYPD report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat”? Here’s a sentence from the first paragraph of the executive summary: “Rather than being directed from al-Qaeda abroad, these plots have been conceptualized and planned by ‘unremarkable’ local residents/citizens who sought to attack their country of residence, utilizing al-Qaeda as their inspiration and ideological reference point.”

Substitute “ISIS” for “al-Qaeda” and these words today look prophetic.

So how did the liberal world react to this effort to smarten up? In January, the de Blasio administration agreed to pull the report from the NYPD website as part of a settlement with Muslim groups who had sued. Two years earlier the NYPD had disbanded the demographics unit, also after much litigation and pressure.

Bottom line: when stopping violence collides with political correctness, Democrats will opt for political correctness.

Indeed, the entire liberal push for gun control is the result of cultural bias. Liberals stereotype “gun nuts” as middle aged white males, living in rural areas, listening to country music, driving pickup trucks and voting Republican. Those are the gun owners least likely to actually shoot a person, but they are “the other” in the minds of the secular urban liberal elites.

On issues like this, liberals will sacrifice the welfare of ordinary black people to pursue an ideological agenda. They don’t like prisons, but their campaign against “mass incarceration” is a campaign to put on the street criminals who will mostly victimize black people. Likewise, their campaign against discipline in the nation’s schools inflicts little harm on kids in affluent suburbs.

This is the sort of thing that happens when the cultural biases of a group, and not sober policy analysis, drives their politics.

George Zimmerman: Another Political Prosecution?

A column by Alan Dershowitz in the New York Daily News:

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional.

She was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. The New York Times has reported that the police had “a full face picture” of Zimmerman, before paramedics treated him, that showed “a bloodied nose.” The prosecutor also had photographic evidence of bruises to the back of his head.

But none of this was included in any affidavit.

Now there is much more extensive medical evidence that would tend to support Zimmerman’s version of events. This version, if true, would establish self-defense even if Zimmerman had improperly followed, harassed and provoked Martin.

A defendant, under Florida law, loses his “stand your ground” defense if he provoked the encounter — but he retains traditional self-defense if he reasonably believed his life was in danger and his only recourse was to employ deadly force.

Thus, if Zimmerman verbally provoked Martin, but Martin then got on top of Zimmerman and banged his head into the ground, broke his nose, bloodied his eyes and persisted in attacking Zimmerman — and if Zimmerman couldn’t protect himself from further attack except by shooting Martin — he would have the right to do that. (The prosecution has already admitted that it has no evidence that Zimmerman started the actual fight.)

This is a fact-specific case, in which much turns on what the jury believes beyond a reasonable doubt. It must resolve all such doubts in favor of the defendant, because our system of justice insists that it is better for 10 guilty defendants to go free than for even one innocent to be wrongfully convicted.

You wouldn’t know that from listening to Corey, who announced that her jobs was “to do justice for Trayvon Martin” — not for George Zimmerman.

As many see it, her additional job is to prevent riots of the sort that followed the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King.

Indeed, Mansfield Frazier, a columnist for the Daily Beast, has suggested that it is the responsibility of the legal system to “avert a large scale racial calamity.” He has urged Zimmerman’s defense lawyer to become a “savior” by brokering a deal to plead his client guilty to a crime that “has him back on the streets within this decade.”

But it is not the role of a defense lawyer to save the world or the country. His job — his only job — is to get the best result for his client, by all legal and ethical means.

So the argument is that Zimmerman needs to go to jail to keep black people from rioting. Or maybe to keep black gangs from beating up whites in retaliation.

This thus begins to look a bit like the Duke rape case, where an elected prosecutor, needing the votes of the local black community, brought charges against white Lacrosse players. The entire case collapsed.

The argument, of course, is demeaning to the majority of black people who — while understandably sensitive about racial injustice — don’t embrace a lynch mob mentality, and will accept the verdict of a fair legal process.

As for the minority of blacks who don’t think this way: they are what cops and riot police (and concealed carry) are for.

Racial Sleaze in Dallas

We don’t frequently read Dallas publications, but we happened across one just today, and it contained an article about greedy black politicians playing the race card, all the while trying to line their pockets.

It was really a racial protection racket.

And the Dallas Morning News went along with it, siding with the race hustlers.

Does any of this sound familiar to Milwaukeeans?

Eric Holder: Race Hustling

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Attorney General Eric Holder may get the dialogue on race that he called for Wednesday in a speech marking African American History Month. But the terms he offered are likely to promote division more than unity.

Holder’s speech demonstrated the contradictions that doom these dialogues before they start. The most quoted - and dumbest - line from his speech is, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

If Americans don’t talk enough about race, it’s because they’ve learned from long experience that such efforts are often futile. If no action is ever enough, how could words help? At the end of almost any dialogue, Americans know the refrain will remain: We still have a long way to go.

The implication is that we still have widespread, deep-seated racial hatred in this country. Not so. Actually, our remaining differences on race have little to do with legal barriers to equality or opportunity. The debate today is about the means of achieving racial parity, not the end itself.

Holder addressed one of those means, affirmative action, in his speech. He said there can be “very legitimate debate” on the issue - “nuanced, principled, and spirited.” But too often, he said, the conversation is “simplistic and left to those on the extremes.”

I’m guessing that the “extremes” include people who oppose race-based policies such as affirmative action. That was the view of the Clinton administration, which made much of its national dialogue on race, but whose distinguished commission included no one who had fundamental disagreements with the use of racial preferences.

In other words, let’s have an “honest and open” dialogue on race, but don’t bring up certain views, or you will be labeled an extremist - i.e., racist. This is about the convener’s photo-op, not your concerns.

Holder takes this model further. Now, if you fail to join the chat under the stated preconditions, you’re a coward, too.

The simple fact is that an “honest and open” discussion of race is something that liberals don’t want.

Such an honest and open discussion would raise issues they don’t want discussed. It might involve discussing the decline of family structure in the black community. It might involve discussing high levels of crime committed by blacks.

Liberals will do their best to silence discussion of these issues, as some Marquette students have learned when they tried to raise such issues in classes.

Simple fact: an open and honest discussion would put liberals on the defensive. That’s why it’s the last thing in the world they want.

“I Escaped the Plantation”