Sultan Knish
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
numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.
Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most
restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the
places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and
immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world
bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places
that have 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 try anyone carrying out a firearm
attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have affected
gang members who often bring weapons to school, 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 and it's more than the number of Americans who
died in the Mexican-American War.
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 a series of war
zones whose problem is not the supply of guns, but their own social
dysfunction. 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.
Reformers in the twenties blamed the plight of the slums on the
availability of liquor. They rammed through Prohibition for the entire
country to fix the cities. The liquor went on flowing and the slums went
on being slums. Gun control has been just as successful in healing the
slums as whiskey control was. And like the dry reformers, gun control
advocates insist on trying to apply their solution on a national level,
when the problem is not nationwide.
There are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that
runs pretty well on its own. Gun sales in America do not lead to bursts
of homicide. If the power goes out for an hour, there is no epidemic of
looting. The new year isn't rung in at the morgue. Social dysfunction
exists but it never affects the majority or even a sizable minority of
the population.
And then there's Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of
it is. Obamerica has a big gap between the rich and the poor. Its
middle class is always on the run. Its upper class retreats to
fortresses. Its lower class is broken and constantly growing as its
political machines feed off human misery and exploit social dysfunction
to gain votes.
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. These social ills cannot be
solved by banning something. The War on Guns is not going to fix the
inner city just as the War on Drugs didn't. Rigid law enforcement can
keep the numbers down, but does not deal with the causes of the
violence.
Obamerica is a bad place. It has great restaurants and night clubs. It
has a lot of noise and a lot of light. The next big thing in music will
probably come out of there. It's where your kids probably dream of
moving to when they're teenagers. But for all that it's fundamentally
broken.
Democratic leaders and machines, combined with liberal 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.
In America, guns are used for target practice and for hunting, and on
rare occasions for self-defense, but in Obamerica guns have only one
purpose, as so many liberals have pointed out, like so many of the young
men who walk the streets of Obamerica, they exist only to kill. The
guns get blamed and the killers rotate through the revolving doors of an
overburdened justice system. And then the politicians who sit around
the table with gang leaders announce that they have a new initiative to
get guns off the streets.
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.
What can help is talking about Obamerica. 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. Despite the
occasional exception created by high profile suburban shooting sprees,
this is not an American problem. It’s an Obamerican problem.
Adam Lanza is as much of a plausible 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, the political king of Obamerica touching base with its
cultural king.
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 Obamerica. They are an indictment of
Obama.
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. It needs to have a conversation about funneling
new immigrants from broken parts of the world into areas already
suffering from high levels of unemployment and street violence.
Most of all this country needs to have a conversation about the
direction it's headed in. We need to set aside the same old tired social
justice rhetoric that has done nothing except train .001 percent of the
young men and women of Obamerica to be community organizers and race
card wielders and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with
New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago.
Obama has become a role model to millions of people in the Black
community. You can see posters and photos of him in every barbershop. 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
the rural Americans that he derided as gun-clingers.
In the same hollow tradition of macho posturing common among the men
responsible for much of the violence in Obamerica, he chose to show his
power in a fight for dominance with a perceived rival, rather than give
back to his community. Rather than looking to the hearts and minds of
his followers, he went after the guns of those he sees as his enemies.
That is what distinguishes a thug from a leader. Leaders uplift their
people. Thugs use them up as cannon fodder in their own private power
struggles.
The legacy of Martin Luther King reminds us that a leader speaks
difficult truths even to his own people. There are such leaders in the
Black community today. Obama is not one of them.
The guns of America, by and large, are not a threat to the innocent. The
guns of Obamerica are. And the conversation that we need to have is
about what can be done, not about the guns of Obamerica, but about its
hearts and minds.
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