Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Japan is also assiduously policed. Wm. Bratton and Rudolph Giuliani showed what you can accomplish with that in New York City, engineering an 82% reduction in the homicide rate over a period of 20 years. Enforcing the law is emotionally unacceptable to leftoids. The gun control narrative is also a fairly obvious effort to stick the blame for slum crime with small town and rural gun hobbyists.
I wonder why Tannehill thought to include:
“*Only 1.5% of the population being Christian”
as significant?
I wonder how many fatherless families Japan has.
“2 people killed by guns last year.” she did not mention how many people were killed by knives.
The large majority of “gun deaths” in this country are suicides. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, but they rarely use guns to do it. As Mary suggests, their weapon of choice is usually a blade of some kind. Or they jump on subway tracks in front of oncoming trains. One of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels featured a “suicide park” in an area of fumaroles and geysers. I always wondered if any such place actually existed. Brief online research indicates probably not, although there are a number of “popular” locations noted in various accounts.
The Japanese suicide rate has been declining for decades, and it’s now below the US rate (at least for pre-covid years). Their most popular method is hanging. As far as I know, their rate is still absurdly high among older men.
Art:
And we both know that dealing with the problem a la Giuliani confirms conservative and not liberal hypotheses on crime: that violent crime is overwhelmingly a problem of fatherless young men of one particular race in blue cities.
And we both know that dealing with the problem a la Giuliani confirms conservative and not liberal hypotheses on crime: that violent crime is overwhelmingly a problem of fatherless young men of one particular race in blue cities.
Just looking at crime data and demographic data for different precincts of a metropolis will do that. Giuliani and Bratton proceeded under the understanding that (1) disorder breeds disorder in a feedback loop and the loop can be reversed, (2) the quantum of misbehavior in a society is sensitive to the degree to which you deter, punish, and incapacitate (in policing, emphasis on the former); and (3) your police force will be more proactive and thus effective if you don’t throw officers under the bus when mishaps occur. Some students of society (Mark Kleiman) drew insights from New York’s experience; some (Michael Massing) manufactured rationalizations, contending that everything which happened in New York was just serendipity; and most just ignored it. You can see from the events of the last several years that street-level Democrats (among them the sort of twit who lands on blue state municipal councils) are not astute about these matters.
Keep in mind that an aversion to street crime is a common, abiding, and vernacular sentiment. The self-understanding of liberals is that they are better people as manifest in their resistance to common, abiding, and vernacular sentiments. The dimbulb who used to run the alternative newspaper in my home town wrote editorials every other week about how conservatives are ‘simplistic’ (while being largely innocent of nuanced thoughts). Note also that a concern with public order invests value in the sort of people who are attracted to police work as a trade (cannot have that) and acknowledges personal agency and moral choice. Liberals have spent decades attempting to promote the prestige of social workers, mental health tradesmen, school teachers &c. and promote the notion that the only way you improve social relations is to listen obsequiously to designated client groups (not those other people with their common, abiding, and vernacular sentiments) and give them things. The only people it’s proper to punish are people like the J6 defendants with their common-and-garden jobs and their white skin and their common, abiding and vernacular sentiments.