The Enablers of Serious Crime – Republicans?

 

As Americans blame Joe Biden for not managing inflation, even as the vast majority of Americans voice strong support for Ukraine and utter disdain for Putin’s Russia (the true cause of higher prices), we are on the brink of a possible shift of both houses of Congress to Republican control. Voters continue to miss the obvious. What never ceases to amaze me is the obvious imprint of right-wing policies that have encouraged everything from political lawlessness to long sentences in prisons that have become advanced schools of crime within gang-controlled institutions (generating anger that grows with incarceration in dangerous and often-dilapidated prisons) and generating policies expanding the spread of guns (from assault weapons and guns with large magazines to “open carry” and increasingly lax concealed weapons rules) adding encouragement for the use private guns to kill more people… clearly evidenced in statutes like the “stand your ground laws.” See my March 20th Stand Your Ground… and Kill! blog for specifics.

Ah, but if you are rich enough and politically connected, there’s a different legal system for you. Drug cartel kingpins and mega-dealers face prospect of decades in prison. But if you are even bigger purveyor/pusher of severely addicting narcotics, using fraudulent claims to get consumers to use your product, you get fines and exoneration in bankruptcy… but none of your owners/senior managers who made those decisions gets prison time. With phalanxes of lawyers, it often comes down to money, no jail, for the mega-rich, able to play and delay the “system” entirely. Even if tens of thousands of people die from overdoses from your addictive product. Often even if you defraud banks, evade taxes or bilk millions from innocent consumers. For everyone else, the criminal justice system has an explosive capacity to put people behind bars. The party of money and wealth designed the system that way.

We only have 4% of the world’s population, so why do we have 25% of the incarcerated criminals? Why has gun ownership skyrocketed? Virtually as many guns as there are people in the United States. Why has such a large proportion new guns sales been for military grade weapons? Why have Mexican cartels been and continue to be supplied by assault weapons purchased in the United States at gun shows and other “easy access” vendors, and smuggled across the border? So many guns. Why? Technology? Or lax American control of guns, marketing efforts paid handsomely by gunmakers, resulting in a red state proclivity to make gun ownership vastly easier? Accelerated by laws justifying the lethal use of weapons in situations where once, the proper response used to be leaving the scene to avoid unnecessary conflict? Where individuals, carrying assault weapons into clearly dangerous venues and events, engage in provocation, and are exonerated under such laws even after they kill? Where serial killings are now routine, often taking place on school and college campuses, at levels this nation has never seen before.

We know that, in what I will call the “COVID-years,” gun homicides have escalated. Why? David Leonhardt writing for the March 23rd New York Times addresses the causation: “There is no fully satisfying answer, but experts point to several plausible partial explanations. They include: Social isolation and frustration caused by the pandemic. A sense of lawlessness stemming from police violence (like the murder of George Floyd). Police officers’ timidity in response to recent criticism of them. And a rise in gun sales during the pandemic…”

“Many crime experts define a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people are shot. Last weekend [March 18-2], there were a shocking number of them — at least nine — across the U.S… In Norfolk, Va., an argument outside a pizzeria led to a shooting that killed two people, including a 25-year-old newspaper reporter who was a bystander. In the farming community of Dumas, Ark., a gunfight broke out at an annual car show, killing one person and injuring 27. In downtown Austin, Texas, four people suffered gunshot wounds during the final weekend of the SXSW festival.

“The burst of weekend violence continues a trend that began almost two years ago, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, and shows no signs of easing, as my colleagues Tim Arango and Troy Closson report. Murders have risen more than 30 percent since 2019, recent data suggests. They are still far below the levels of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s but have reached the highest point in more than two decades.” By any metric you choose to apply, to the continuing dismay of the rest of the world, we are a gun-crazy nation with accessible guns at a level that isn’t remotely mirrored in any other nation not involved in an actual war.

According to a May 2020 report from the Violence Policy Center, and based on the “Number of reported justifiable homicides and homicides taken from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) as tabulated by the Violence Policy Center… In 2017, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 35 criminal homicides.” That ratio has only gotten worse over the years, as guns have proliferated as noted above. That statistic makes a mockery of that NRA self-defense aphorism, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Define “good guy” and “bad guy” and when one transitions into the other type. 

In the 1970s, when gunmakers realized that without the Vietnam War to generate military gun orders, given the hard-metal endurance of private guns, they were facing economic disaster as gun sales lagged. What to do. They turned to an organization, once predicated on increasing gun safety, to take on a new role to market gun ownership. Handsome pay was on the table. So, the National Rifle Association added a companion for-profit entity to market guns. Their well-funded core philosophy was to convince the public (and the legal system) that the Second Amendment, passed in an era of flintlocks and muskets, was all about ubiquitous American ownership of a vast array of new guns… including high-speed, big magazine, assault weapons. Think NRA executive Wayne LaPierre’s home (above) reflects the original mission of the NRA? New York’s investigation and resulting charges forced the NRA to file bankruptcy due to such excesses, but the damage was already done.

The NRA lobbying/marketing effort was wildly successful, embraced by right-wing America. Until 2008, there had never been a Supreme Court ruling that favored the NRA’s broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. But in 2008, in Heller vs. District of Columbia, Justice Antonin Scalia essentially endorsed the NRA position. Since Heller, serial killings, murders and all other forms of gun crimes have exploded. To understand that transition, just watch the original and remake of Westside Story (photos above), where the presence of a single gun among gangs used to knives, chains and pipes as their weapons of choice in the 1950s, was a shocking development. Today, drug dealers, gang members and various levels of hoodlums consider guns as basic tools of their trade. For those unable to buy the required guns in their big Blue city, a short drive to a nearby red state provides the necessary source of their desired weapons. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and that “law and order” mantle worn by Republicans has produced precisely the opposite result.