Continuing a Tradition

The news this morning brought back an old character to the national stage: the unserious Obama. Just a few days ago, we heard that president Obama was now going to do something about gun crime. Now today, we hear that Obama has named Joe Biden as his "point man" on the issue. Biden? Really? Was Pee Wee Herman busy?

It really is time for a serious look at gun violence. I mean a serious look, not a crazed left-wing dream look. Here are a few facts worth noting:

1) During the administration of mayor David Dinkins, New York City had 2,245 murders per year. The vast majority of these murders were gun crimes. After Dinkins, New York elected mayor Rudy Giuliani whose police force adopted all sorts of new programs to combat crime. The most innovative of these was to track crime statistics and to reassign police to neighborhoods that showed rising crime. Another was to show zero tolerance for small crimes like jumping the turnstiles in the subway. Crime fell dramatically. Under mayor Bloomberg, the Giuliani policies were continued. Murder in the city fell to 471 killed, a drop of 80% over the twenty year period. It was police work and better strategies that stopped the murders, not gun control. (For comparison, consider that so far this year the number of murders in Chicago has already passed the 471 figure, and Chicago has less than one-third the number of people that New York has.)

2) In 1966, a 25 year old man shot and killed his family and then went to the University of Texas and began randomly killing people from a perch on the bell tower on campus. Thirteen people were killed and 32 wounded. The students were older, but is sound fairly similar to what happened in Connecticut. The Texas shooter used a hunting rifle and a batch of pistols. Like Connecticut, none of the weapons would have been classed as an "assault weapon".

The problem that we as a society have to face is not gun control. There are something like a quarter of a billion guns in the USA. They are way beyond "controlling", particularly since the second amendment guarantees the right to have arms. The problem is identifying people who might be shooters. Prior to the shooting at the University of Texas all those years ago, no one suspected that a murderous rampage was about to occur. As far as we know now, no one in Connecticut suspected that the shooter was about to snap. Indeed, in all of the mass violence incidents over the years, it seems that only the one in Aurora, Colorado came after a mental health professional noted the disturbing tendencies and potentially violent nature of the shooter. Even in Aurora, nothing was done with the knowledge. In our society, you cannot lock up a person because he is mentally ill with possible violent tendencies. We do not have enough jails to house all of those people.

It is not the case that we should give up dealing with this problem. What we need to do, however, is to come up with new solutions like the New York City government under Giuliani did. Fighting again about gun control when we know that it will have no real effect is just a waste of time. It is unserious. It is a way to claim to have done something without actually accomplishing anything at all.

By the way, I just heard that Biden has already decided on a slogan for his anti-gun efforts. Here it is: "Guns don't kill people, knives do." Hey, it makes no sense, but we are speaking about Joe Biden. What did you expect?