May 17, 2023

About 20 years ago, I read a piece about the North Miami police department eliminating the swimming requirement for the police. With a working knowledge of geography and having visited Miami many times, I thought this was a bit odd and kind of a bad idea. After all, North Miami has hundreds of miles of canals, lakes, and beaches. Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was that “blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups…” In other words, the change was because not enough blacks were qualified to become police.

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That was long before the cancer of wokeness had taken hold of much of America. I was dumbfounded. Nobody with a functioning brain would have looked at that situation and said we must eliminate a key element of the job requirements to let more members of “X group” join. But that’s what the people in charge decided. If someone with a functioning brain were actually in charge, he would have said something like, “If our goal is to have a more diverse workforce…” (a questionable assertion in the first place) “and not enough otherwise qualified black candidates can pass the swim test, maybe we should simply take those candidates who meet the other requirements and teach them how to swim.”

But that’s not what they did. And that is just another demonstration that Democrats aren’t actually serious people seeking to help the communities they represent. No, their goal was to cater to the “equity” crowd, even before it had a name. And they have continued to do so for the last two decades.

Image: Drowning by Blake Cheek (cropped). Unsplash license.

Take gun control. Democrats have been gun-grabbing for decades. They use every mass shooting as a lever to try and wrest guns out of American hands and eviscerate the Second Amendment. While it is certainly the case that gun violence is a problem in America, the reality is, it’s not the guns, it’s the criminals and the Democrats who pamper them.

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There are 350 million people in the United States. Of those, there are 280 million adults, 90 million of whom say they own at least one of America’s 400 million guns, with an average of almost 5 guns each. And how frequently do those 90 million gun owners commit crimes with those guns? Not very often.

It’s estimated that more than 80% of gun crimes are committed by people who came into possession of their weapons illegally, which means that, conservatively, legal gun owners perpetrated only 20% of gun crimes. There are almost 100,000 shootings in the United States annually (not counting suicides). If we assume that 20% of those shootings were by legal gun owners, that would be 20,000 shootings. To put that in perspective, that would mean that .0002% of legal gun owners commit crimes with their weapons, or conversely, 99.9998% of legal gun owners never use their guns in crimes….

As a matter of fact, despite what the Democrat media tell you, “Good guys with guns” help stop between one-third and one-half of all active shooter incidents nationwide. But Democrats work continuously to take guns away from all of those apparently “violence eschewing” citizens while at the same time seeking to free actual violent criminals from jail or prison or not send them there in the first place—even as those they free are the ones who actually commit most of the crimes and the worst crimes, and it’s not even close.

Making matters worse, Democrats rarely seek to focus on the strong correlation between anti-depressants and violence, particularly with young people. They would rather preen in front of cameras and accuse Republicans of having blood on their hands than focus on the real issues that spill so much blood.

And there is indeed much blood on Democrats’ hands. In what must seem counterintuitive to them, more gun control results in more mass shooting deaths. California is a perfect example. As it’s become more difficult for law-abiding Californians to legally obtain guns over the decades, to the point where it’s actually almost impossible to exercise the right, the rate at which the state exceeds the rest of the country has skyrocketed:

From 2010 on, California’s per capita rate of mass public shootings was 43% higher than the rate in Texas and 29% higher than in the rest of the United States. Since 2020, the rate in California is 276% higher than in Texas and 100% higher than in the rest of the U.S.