Aug 6, 2013 | Politics, Sci-Tech
From Richmond Times-Dispatch: Central Virginia:
Gun-related violent crime in Virginia has dropped steadily over the past six years as the sale of firearms has soared to a new record, according to an analysis of state crime data with state records of gun sales. The total number of firearms purchased in Virginia increased 73 percent from 2006 to 2011. When state population increases are factored in, gun purchases per 100,000 Virginians rose 63 percent. But the total number of gun-related violent crimes fell 24 percent over that period, and when adjusted for population, gun-related offenses dropped more than 27 percent, from 79 crimes per 100,000 in 2006 to 57 crimes in 2011.The numbers appear to contradict a long-running popular narrative that more guns cause more violent crime, said Virginia Commonwealth University professor Thomas R. Baker, who compared Virginia crime data for those years with gun-dealer sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
[...] "My opponents are constantly saying, 'If you got more guns on the street, there's going to be more crime.' It all depends on who has the handgun," Van Cleave said. "As long as it's going into the hands of people like you or me, there's not going to be a problem. Criminals are going to continue to get their guns no matter what."[...]"From my personal point of view, I would say the data is pretty overwhelming," said Baker, who is new to VCU and studied under Florida State University professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, whose nationally recognized research on guns and homicides in the District of Columbia was cited in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 that overturned the district's handgun ban. "But we're pretty cautious in the social sciences in talking about causality. We only talk in probabilities."The multiple years of data for gun purchases and gun-related crime help strengthen the premise that more gun sales are not leading to an increase in crime. Using what Baker calls the "lag model," the data show that an increase in gun purchases for one year usually is followed by a decrease in crime the next year.
[...] Gun-control lobbyist Goddard, whose son was wounded during the Virginia Tech massacre five years ago, doesn't dispute the numbers but questioned their significance."It's quite possible that you can sell a whole lot more guns and crime is still going down," Goddard said. "But is the crime going down because more people are buying guns, or is the crime going down because the crime is going down?" [Gun-related violent crimes drop as sales soar in Va. -]
So is he saying that guns don't cause crime, but criminals do?
Aug 5, 2013 | Culture
Writes Glenn Garvin at MiamiHerald.comThere is no war on black men, at least not by white men. Last year, the Scripps-Howard News Service studied half a million homicide reports and found that killings of black victims by white attackers have actually dropped over the past 30 years, from 4,745 during the 1980s to 4,380 during the first decade of the 2000s. There were nearly twice as many white victims killed by black assailants: 8,503 in the 1980s, and 8,530 in the 2000s. [Zimmerman Trial: Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till]
According to findings from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), Supplementary Homicide Reports:Blacks were victims of an estimated 805,000 nonfatalviolent crimes and of about 8,000 homicides in 2005. While blacks accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2005, they were victims in 15% of all nonfatal violent crimes and nearly half of all homicides. [...]
In 2005 nearly half of all homicide victims were black Blacks accounted for 49% of all homicide victims in 2005, according to the FBI's UCR.Black males accounted for about 52% (or 6,800) of the nearly 13,000 male homicide victims in 2005. Black females made up 35% (or 1,200) of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims.[...] In 2005 most homicides involving one victim and one offender were intraracial. About 93% of black homicide victims and 85% of white victims in single victim and single offender homicides were murdered by someone of their race. [Black Victims of Violent Crime]
You got that? In the United States, 93% of the black people who were murdered in 2005 were murdered by other people in their beloved "Black community."Perhaps this is what prompted Jesse Jackson to say:
"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating." [Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in "Crime: New Frontier - Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue" by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original).]
So much for "racial profiling." From an editorial in the
Baltimore Sun:
Jesse Jackson has been taking an unusual amount of heat from his fellow African-Americans recently because he has identified black-on-black crime as a major problem in poor communities. The reaction reminds us of the incredulity that greeted the little boy's observations concerning the emperor's new clothes. Isn't it obvious that blacks are the primary victims of crime in poor neighborhoods, and that the brunt of the suffering inflicted by black criminals is borne by other blacks?In a society with a less troubled racial history than ours, these would be self-evident statements. Because criminality has so often been used in the past to paint all blacks in a negative light, however, frank discussion of the problem has always been an extremely touchy subject. Mr. Jackson has been accused of fueling racist stereotypes.
Yet one of Mr. Jackson's roles is that of iconoclast. And [Jackson] has performed valuable service by jettisoning the taboo against black leaders talking about black-on-black crime. He knows that the "root causes" of much crime are to be found in poverty, broken families, hopelessness. And his audiences, who are overwhelmingly black, know he is not talking about them when he speaks of the "bad black brothers" who deal drugs, rob and kill. They just want help getting criminals off their streets.Critics have lambasted Mr. Jackson's claim that black-on-black violence is the nation's "number one civil rights problem." They point out that black criminals don't target their victims because of their color but because they are vulnerable and close at hand. So how can such crimes possibly be considered a "civil rights" matter? Yet when services -- including police protection -- in poor black neighborhoods are stretched to the breaking point, when good schools, businesses and jobs are virtually non-existent, when all the elements that make a community viable are lacking, surely that is a human rights issue.
Apparently it is OK to rob, rape and murder someone -- just so long as you don't do it because of their skin color? This is context-dropping "compartmentalization" on steroids. This the result of so-called "civil rights" advocates who deny individual rights.Ironically, many of Mr. Jackson's detractors are the same people who subscribe to various theories of a massive white conspiracy to keep blacks down. Perhaps they fear his ideas may deprive them of a convenient scapegoat. Mr. Jackson, however, speaks to the concerns of all decent people, black and white, when he suggests the same moral force that sustained the civil rights movement of the 1960s must now be applied to task of ridding poor communities of lawlessness and terror. If that seems like a revolutionary message in the 1990s, it is only because it has the ring of truth. [Jesse Jackson On Black Crime | Jesse Jackson on crime - Baltimore Sun]
The above was written in 1993. My how have things changed today under the Presidential "leadership" of the great divider.Aug 2, 2013 | Culture
From Zimmerman Trial: Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till - Glenn Garvin - MiamiHerald.com
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/29/3530067/zimmerman-trial-trayvon-martin.html#storylink=cpy
[...] The most nauseatingly overheated rhetoric has been the comparisons of Martin to Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old black kid from Chicago who, in the summer of 1955, went to visit relatives in a tiny Mississippi Delta town called Money. He either whistled at or flirted with (accounts vary) a white woman at the counter of a grocery store.A few nights later, her husband and brother-in-law (and perhaps some of their neighbors, though that’s uncertain) dragged Till from his home, beat him to an unholy pulp, shot him in the head, tied a 70-pount weight to him with barbed wire and dumped him in a river.When his body was fished out of the water three days later, the photos — published in Ebony magazine — made America vomit. Well, that part of America outside Money, Mississippi, where the men who killed Till were acquitted by jurors who deliberated just over an hour and confessed it wouldn’t have taken that long if they hadn’t paused to have a soda.The murderers, once they were safely protected by the constitutional sanction against double jeopardy, boasted of their own guilt. And several jurors admitted they voted for acquittal because they didn’t believe killing black people was a jailable offense.In what conceivable way does that story resemble the Trayvon Martin case? Zimmerman didn’t know Martin, has no history of racism and, when he called police to report what he thought was a suspicious character in his neighborhood, wasn’t even sure the person was black. Martin wasn’t dragged from his home by a mob but was killed during an altercation in which Zimmerman says he feared for his life and there was little evidence to contradict him.And in post-verdict interviews, the Zimmerman jurors have come across not as flippant racists but thoughtful citizens who were agonized by their decision but did their best to enforce the law as they understood it. You may think they got it wrong. But that doesn’t mean they were a lynch mob, or that 2013 America is 1955 Mississippi.
Jul 30, 2013 | Politics
Commenting on the George Zimmerman trial, America's first half-black President, Obama stated:On the other hand, if we're sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there's a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we'd like to see?And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?
Obama also stated:I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African-American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it – and that context is being denied.And that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Or it might not have.Meet Christopher Cervini killed by two gun shots.
Meet Roderick Scott the man who killed him:
YNN Rochester reports on the verdict:Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April. [
Jury Finds Roderick Scott Not Guilty:]
Mr. Obama's speech-writer clearly has not been doing his homework.
"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out."I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner."The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.
Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott."How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."
Comments T.Kevin Whiteman at
Liberty Unyielding:
[...] It was verified during Scott’s murder trial that he called 911 before the bloody confrontation took place. It was also determined that he opened fire with his legally owned firearm only as a last resort when he reasonably believed his life was in danger.Still another similarity between the two cases was Scott’s testimony that there had been a rash of break-ins in the area. Scott testified that on the morning of the fatal encounter he observed Cervini and two other youths breaking into a neighbor’s vehicle. Scott says he ordered the suspects to freeze and wait for the arrival of the police.He insists that he opened fire on Cervini only when the teen “charged” him and was screaming that he was going to get Scott.After Scott was acquitted, family members of the deceased child claimed that justice had not been served by the verdict. They shared their belief that their son’s killer had taken it upon himself to act as judge, jury, and executioner.But this is where the similarities between the two cases end. There were no marches, no vigils, no mobs crying “No justice, no peace.” There were no riots or revenge beatings of lone black men by gangs of white teens. There was also no statement by the president — whose named coincidentally was Barack Obama — or other efforts to inject his personal biases into the outcome of the trial. ["Obama’s double standard on race challenged by the 2009 shooting death of a white teen by a black adult"]
For the record the Scott decision, like the Zimmerman decision, was the correct one.However, like Dana Loesch, we are wondering: where is the outrage from the "progressive" racial bigotry machine?Outrage peddlers are silent because this story doesn’t fit the narrative of racial strife. Al Sharpton can’t Tweet about his photo ops with Jay Z and Beyonce over instances of justice like this.So do Sharpton, NAACP, Piers Morgan, Stevie Wonder, etc, etc, all believe that Roderick Scott is a murderer? That he should have been denied his ability to defend himself? Are they really wanting to reintroduce Reconstruction-era suppression on the ability and right to self defense? [The Double Standard On The Zimmerman-Martin Case | RedState]
Perhaps this is because the Zimmerman case, unlike the Roderick case, distracts attention from the nihilist in chief's attacks on the American Republic, capitalism, and freedom.
