As Murder Rates Fall, Crime Fear and Gun Sales Rise?

As Murder Rates Fall, Crime Fear and Gun Sales Rise?

The New MAGA Official Emotion: Hate and Acting on It

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” 

Trump 2015 campaign speech

The politics of blame, labeling, categorizing and stereotyping, legitimizing the use of demeaning or vitriolic labels and using words that are construed to support bigotry and bias are everywhere. While these realities have been with us for a very long time, generally, they have either been uttered among small groups or simply suppressed. Local pejorative slang containing ethnic or racial slurs had been decidedly kept in the shadows.

And then it all changed. In his campaign for the presidency in 2015/6, Donald Trump created demeaning nicknames for his opponents or for groups that opposed his political stance. Effectively, Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency created the MAGA movement, and as his speech quoted above illustrates, negative generalizations became commonplace and legitimized by the man holding the highest office in the land. The use of such negative epithets became common expression in social media… and in rightwing campaign platforms. When COVID exploded, Trump’s “Kung-Fu Flu” created a surge in physical violence against Asians.

People who looked different were targeted. Sikhs, representing a Hindu sect, were mistaken as “Muslims” attacked as if they were enemy. Mosques were desecrated. Minorities were attacked, even killed in their places of worship. And the use of new epithets, like Ron DeSantis’ radical use of the word “woke,” became ambiguous dog whistles for White supremacy with more neutral explanations. The problem was hardly relegated to red states, as racism, sexism and ethnic hatred plague even the bluest of the blue states:

“Hate crimes soared in California in 2022, with year-over-year rises recorded in crimes targeting virtually every demographic group, according to a report released [June 27th]… All told, there were 2,120 reported hate crimes, a 20.2% jump from the year prior, figures from the California Department of Justice show… Overall, the number of such events has risen 145.7% since 2013. California’s all-time high in reported hate crimes was 2,261 in 2001.

“State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta attributed the rising numbers to what he characterized as an encirclement of hate… ‘Hate-filled rhetoric fills our social media feeds and dominates the news cycles,’ he said during a news conference in front of the Los Angeles Central Library on Tuesday. ‘It infiltrates our schools and our community gatherings. It seems to be at so many places; it’s so pervasive.’

“A major departure from the top-line trend was the number of anti-Asian hate crimes — which have soared in recent years, partly due to racially motivated attacks related to the COVID-19 pandemic, but declined sharply from 2021 to 2022… But that was one of only a few silver linings presented by Bonta, who implored those interpreting the statistics to ‘remember the contrast since 2020’ in anti-Asian hate crimes … Nearly 1,300 crimes reported in 2022 were suspected to be motivated by bias against someone’s race, ethnicity or national origin. Roughly half of those, 652, were directed at Black residents — a 27.1% increase from the year before.

“‘The statistics on the numbers for African Americans really set me back,’ said Robert Sausedo, president and chief executive of the Leimert Park-based Community Build Inc., which offers education, training and employment placement assistance… Hate crimes targeting members of the Black community have increased rapidly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 243 anti-Black hate crimes in 2019.” Andrew J. Campa writing for the June 29th LA Times.

This roiling use of pejorative rhetoric, where defined minorities are/were labeled as dangerous criminals, created a new elevated level of fear, which in turn increase demand for increasingly sophisticated guns combined with a red state legislative trend that loosened gun restrictions and sent almost 30 million AR-styled semiautomatic rifles into gun stores in all red states and a few blue ones. Open and concealed carry, stand your ground laws, escalated. Fear was good marketing… for gunmakers and rightwing politicians. Murder rates, from individual to serial killings everywhere, although red states had proportionately higher per capita gun homicides.

While gun violence has seriously escalated in recent years, there is a ray of hope as murder rates subside. “When murder rates spiked three years ago, experts worried that the U.S. was slipping into a violent era that recalled the period between the 1970s and ’90s. But the data this year offers hope that the increase was temporary… This year, murders have fallen more than 12 percent in major cities (where recent data is most reliable), after also having fallen slightly last year. The murder rate is still about 10 percent higher than it was in 2019, but at least the trend is going in the right direction… The declines are a sign that at least two of the issues that likely contributed to the murder spike — Covid and the fallout from George Floyd’s murder — are receding. As much of life has returned to normal after a highly unusual 2020, the crime trends have started to shift back, too.” German Lopez writing for the June 26th NY Times.

But, for example, the number of racially tinged blue-on-black assaults and excess violence is anything but gone, notwithstanding the horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police and the resulting conviction of the perpetrating officers. The plague continues as this incident, reported by the BBC on June 29th suggests: “Five Mississippi deputy sheriffs alleged to have been involved in the assault of two men have been fired or have resigned, officials have said…Michael Corey Jenkins, 32, and Eddie Terrell Parker, 35, say Rankin County Sheriff Department officers entered a home without a warrant in January [allegedly turning off their body cameras] … They allege they then tased them, assaulted them and shot one of them in the mouth… Deputies claim that on 24 January, they carried out a raid in response to a report of drug activity at the home in Braxton, Mississippi… [The victims say] that during a 90-minute encounter, the deputies brutally abused them, used stun guns on them, hurled racist slurs, and waterboarded them.” The Department of Justice is investigating.

In the end, many believe that our polarization is getting worse, that bigotry is finding its way into enabling statutes, and that mythology and conspiracy theory are used to justify these horribles. While most of these wrongs are the product of individual choices, that there is effective and commonplace support from elected leaders, legislatures and those campaigning for elected office suggests that these bigoted practices are nowhere near containment.

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps the biggest mythology on the horizon is the continued repetition of America as “the home of the brave and the land of the free” with so many Americans pressing for the opposite.