Sense on Cents

Ed, I’m glad you put “off the streets” in quotes. I owned an AR-15. I did not consider it “on the street.” That’s a very loaded term.

Your ideas are far from novel.

FredB,
I’ll bet that’s exactly what Adam Laza mother thought

Ed

The average person with just a modicum of practice can drop a magazine and swap to a new one and start firing again in 2 seconds on average. With regular practice they can accomplish it in just one second and a few who could be considered world class could do it in about 0.7 seconds as I have read recently.

But, doesn’t all of this pretty much totally ignore the fact the criminals won’t obey the new gun laws no matter what they are? If that is so, and I believe that has been proven many times, then new gun laws are only restricting law abiding citizens at home and making it more difficult for them to feel safe in their own homes.

Obama is not interested in having a Czar like Bratton. Bratton might actually dare to suggest that the real need is for us to eliminate psychiatrists’ability to give out psychotropic drugs almost like they were candy to anyone they consider depressed or troubled. Proven side effects of these types of drugs are both suicidal and homicidal tendencies.

Additionally, if the idea is to stop or materially reduce mass shootings.. please note that roughly 90% or more of the shooters are either on or recently getting off psycho-tropic drugs. Additionally, making the sentence of mass shooters more strict? Is that a serious recommendation? The great majority of them kill themselves at the end of their killing spree already.

There is also something important for all people who might have to defend themselves at home to remember.. when bare SECONDS count, the police are only MINUTES away!.. Police seldom save anyone from being attacked and killed in the spur of the moment once someone has broken into their home, no matter how fast the call goes out to them. The police nearly always arrive just in time to tag the bodies, gather the evidence and start an investigation to find the attacker that got away. The same timing holds true for mass shootings as well, although most shooters, as noted above, tend to off themselves and save the State the effort of finding and prosecuting them.

You know, I am now in my early 60′s and fortunately my memory is still pretty good and although we have had lots and lots of guns in the possession of the general public for a many, many decades, I honestly do not remember lots of mass shootings taking place before these highly dangerous prescription drugs were available for emotional disturbances and depression.

Such highly dangerous drugs should be restricted for use only on patients who are in a secure Institutional setting where they do not have access to the general public. Psychiatrists should not be free to dispense them freely to patients who are still freely walking our streets. Ahh but then that issue won’t even be given serious consideration.. not with the huge amount of money that the pharmaceutical industry funnels through their lobbyists to our government officials. How silly of me.

Gun Violence is Not a Republican Problem, It’s a Democratic Problem

Posted By Daniel Greenfield at Daily Mailer

January 18, 2013

Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.

You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.

He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.

In 2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally buying a gun is all but impossible.

Mayors of Obamerican cities blame guns because it’s easier than blaming people and now the President of Obamerica has turned to the same shameless tactic. The NRA counters that people kill people, but that’s exactly why Obamerican leaders would rather talk about the guns.

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence.

80% of Chicago’s murders are gang-related. But in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois State Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, the future leader of Obamerica voted present. Had he not voted present, it is doubtful that he would have been reelected in an area where gang leaders wield a great deal of influence.

The majority of murders in the cities with the worst homicide rates are gang-related. And while it isn’t always possible to be certain whether a killing was gang-related, the majority of homicide victims in city after city have been found to have criminal records.

In 2010, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States and over 2,000 known gang-related killings, over 90% of which are carried out with firearms. Since 1981, Los Angeles alone has had 16,000 gang related homicides. That’s more than twice the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is what Obamerica looks like. It’s a place where life is cheap and illegal guns are as available as illegal drugs. It’s the war that we aren’t talking about, because it’s easier to talk about the inanimate objects being used to fight that war.

There are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that runs pretty well. And then there’s Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of it is. America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem.

Democratic leaders and machines, combined with social workers and justice crusaders have run Obamerica into the ground. Obamerican cities used to be the homes of industry and progress. Now they’re places where young Black and Hispanic men kill each other in growing numbers.

America does not need gun control. It is a mostly law-abiding place. And gun control cannot help Obamerica. Not when its murder rate is driven by gangs who have no trouble obtaining anything; whether it’s legal in the United States or not.

This country does not need to have a conversation about how many bullets should go in a clip. It does need to have a conversation about how many parents should go in a family. It needs to talk about the ghettos of Obamerica and have a serious conversation about broken families and generational dependency.

Obama has become a role model to millions of people in the black community. If anyone can address these problems, it’s him. But instead of trying to solve the problems of Obamerica, instead of doing something about the high levels of unemployment, the broken families and the glamorization of drug dealing and violent crime, he wimped out and picked a fight with rural America.

AIDS prevention was sabotaged by the claim that the disease was a general problem spreading through the population. It wasn’t. Neither is gun violence.

Adam Lanza is as much of a poster boy for gun violence, as Ryan White was for AIDS. A better poster boy for gun violence might be Jay-Z, who boasts of having been a drug dealer and claims to have shot his brother at the age of 12. The drug dealer to millionaire rapper is the Horatio Alger story of Obamerica. And Jay-Z can be seen partying with Obama.

If Obama really wants to get serious about gun violence, then all he has to do is turn to the man standing next to him. But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

That’s what Obama is doing now. Hiding behind Newtown and adorable little kids is the grim specter of Obamerica’s death toll. It’s buried inside the gruesome figures of how many Americans are shot each year issued as an indictment against the entire country in general and gun owners in particular. But those numbers are not an indictment of America. They are an indictment of Democratic mayors and liberal social policy. They are an indictment of Obama.

We need to set aside the same old tired social justice rhetoric and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago. And we need to do it before it’s too late.

America’s Exodus from Marriage
By Peter Wehner
Commentary magazine
01.17.2013
In 2000, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his 40-year political career. Moynihan, a man of unusual sagacity, experience, and perspective, responded this way: “The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world.” This change has occurred in “an historical instant,” Moynihan said. “Something that was not imaginable 40 years ago has happened.”

I thought about Senator Moynihan’s observation after reading “The President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,” which is the centerpiece of the latest State of Our Unions report. This study focused on the nearly 60 percent of Americans who have completed high school but do not have a four-year college degree.

What we’re seeing is a rapid hollowing out of marriage in Middle America–with 44 percent of the children of moderately-educated mothers born outside of marriage. “We’re at a tipping point with Middle America,” W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading scholar on marriage, told National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, “insofar as Middle Americans are on the verge of losing their connection to marriage.”

We are “witnessing a striking exodus from marriage,” according to the study.

More than 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock, while more than half of births (53 percent) among all women under 30 now occur outside of marriage. Between 1970 and 2012, the annual number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried adults decreased by more than 50 percent. The divorce rate today is about twice that of 1960, though it’s declined since hitting its highest point in our history in the early 1980s. For the average couple marrying for the first time in recent years, the lifetime probability of divorce or separation now falls between 40 and 50 percent. Today more than a quarter of all children live in single-parent families, compared to only 9 percent in 1960. And the number of unmarried couples has increased seventeen-fold in the last 50 years.

All of this has profoundly negative implications–for the emotional and mental well-being of children; for America’s social fabric and “civil society”; for social mobility and the gap in income inequality; and for dependency on government and costs to the state (family breakdown costs the taxpayers billions every year). The collapse of marriage in America, then, has enormous human and social ramifications. And whatever one thinks about same-sex marriage, this collapse has occurred long before any state approved marriage between gays.

The report offers a range of recommendations to reverse this trend, including eliminating marriage penalties and disincentives for the poor and for unwed mothers, tripling the child tax credit, providing marriage education and evaluating marriage programs, engaging Hollywood to help shape positive attitudes toward marriage and parenting, launching social media campaigns, and presidential leadership on this issue.

These recommendations may be fruitful, and the scholars who authored the marriage agenda have an admirable unwillingness to accept the collapse of marriage and the American family as irreversible. We are not, after all, by-standers in what is unfolding. We are the central actors.

Still, we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the difficulty of the challenge we face. “The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent and seems unique,” the distinguished historian Lawrence Stone said a few years ago. “At no time in history, with the possible exception of Imperial Rome, has the institution of marriage been more problematic than it is today.”

This is a deeply worrisome turn of events. And unless we find a way to repair the damage and the institution–unless we reshape our public and private attitudes toward marriage, family and children; toward commitment, self-giving, and love itself–there will be much human wreckage.

Vice President Biden was curt, avoiding confrontation when he sat down with the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates. He looked across the table in his ornate conference room and asked the NRA official if his group could back a ban on assault weapons.

“No,” was James J. Baker’s reply.

There was little discussion, no real debate over whether a 1990s ban had worked. The two men simply moved on. Biden, leading a task force to study gun violence, was certain of the course of action President Obama would end up taking…

Biden’s Gun Task Force Met With All Sides, but Kept Its Eye on The Target

What is the REAL problem in America?

Gun Culture’ — What About the ‘Fatherless Culture’?
By Larry Elder – January 17, 2013. Real Clear Politics

The face of gun violence is not Sandy Hook. It is Chicago.

In 2012, President Barack Obama’s adopted hometown had 506 murders, including more than 60 children. Philadelphia, a city that local television newscasters frequently call ‘Killadelphia,” saw 331 killed last year. In Detroit, 386 people were murdered.

Since 1966, there have been 90 school shootings in the U.S., with 231 fatalities. Yes, Sandy Hook shocked us. But the odds of a child being killed at a school shooting are longer than the odds of being struck by lightning.

Of the 11,000 to 12,000 gun murders each year, more than half involve both black killers and black victims, mostly in urban areas and mostly gang-related. The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young black men is not auto accidents or accidental drowning, but homicide.

Rapper/actor Ice T (“Cop Killer”) and I attended the same high school. In the 1991 John Singleton film “Boyz n the Hood,” the teenagers attend that school, and car-cruise the South Central Los Angeles boulevard after which the school is named.

Crenshaw High opened in 1968. By the time Ice-T left, less than a decade later, Crenshaw had become, in the rapper’s words, “a Crip school” — meaning one controlled by that street gang. Because of the school’s reputation for violence, Time Magazine called it “Fort Crenshaw.” A powerhouse in basketball and football, the school lost its accreditation 2005, before getting it back in 2006 on a short-term basis.

In 1970, I was part of the second graduating class in the new school’s history. Some kids, who started with me in the 10th grade, did not finish. But it was the exception rather than the rule. By 2012, only 51 percent of Crenshaw’s students graduated.

What happened?

Dads disappeared. Or, more precisely, to use Bill Cosby’s term, the number of “unwed fathers” exploded.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.” At the time, 25 percent of blacks children were born out of wedlock, a number Moynihan called alarming. Fast forward to the present, 72 percent of black children are now born out of wedlock. In fact, 36 percent of white children are born out of wedlock. Of Hispanic children, 53 percent are born outside of marriage.

In “Boyz n the Hood,” Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., has an active father in his life. Doughboy, played by Ice Cube, was raised without a father. His mother resents him because she dislikes his father. On the other hand, Gooding’s hardworking, responsible father, played by Laurence Fishburne, stays on his son. He warns him against hanging out with the wrong people and that becoming a street criminal was a trap. He lectures his son that “any fool with a (penis) can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children.”

Studies show that children of divorced parents can have outcomes as positive as those coming from intact homes, provided the father remains financially supportive and active in his children’s lives.

But what happens without dads in the ‘hood?

In 1979, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that fatherless kids were twice as likely to drop out of school and that girls who grew up without dads were 2.5 times more likely to become pregnant teenagers.

Rutgers University sociology professor David Popenoe published “Life Without Father” in 1996, where he describes the “massive erosion” of fathers in America. Popenoe concluded that boys raised without fathers were more likely to have problems with drugs, alcohol, behavior and social interactions. Several studies during the ’90s found that disruption in family structures was a predictor of children’s gang involvement.

Many on the left dismiss the importance of fathers as “right-wing,” blame-the-victim propaganda. Well, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, in the posthumously released documentary “Resurrection,” said: “I know for a fact that had I had a father, I’d have some discipline. I’d have more confidence.” He admits that he starting hanging out with gangs because he wanted to belong to a family structure, and it offered structure, support and protection — the kind of thing we once expected home and family to provide.

The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don’t have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child. Preparing for the future requires dedication. It requires deferring gratification, precisely the kind of “discipline” that Tupac admitted he lacked because he grew up without a father.

Doing what you want to do is easy. Doing what you have to do is hard. Dads, by getting up and going to work each day, send a powerful message every day to their children: Hard work wins. There are no short cuts. The outcome is unknowable. But the effort is entirely within your control.