Crime and Punishment – Page 10 – Maverick Philosopher

Feel-Good Liberalism, High Capacity Magazines and High Capacity Soft Drink Containers

If you need further proof that leftism is emotion-driven, consider the latest Obamination, the call for a ban on high capacity magazines, an abomination which the fascist-in-chief may try to ram though under Executive Order. I take it that these are magazines the capacity of which is in excess of seven rounds.

(By the way, you liberals, and especially you liberal journalists, need to learn the correct terminology: 'magazine' not 'clip.' 'Round' not 'bullet.' The bullet is the projectile. To confuse the bullet with the round is to commit a pars pro toto fallacy.)

When I ranted about this over lunch with Mike V. on Saturday, he made an interesting comparison. I had made the point that it is very easy to change out a depleted mag. A skilled shooter can do it in a second or two. Suppose I have a semi-auto pistol with a loaded seven-round mag. I have two more loaded mags of the same capacity in my right pocket and two more in my left. Within a minute or two I can get off 5 X 7 = 35 shots. (My firepower increases if I have a second or third semi-auto on my person.) Plenty of time to commit mayhem in what liberal boneheads have made a 'gun-free zone.' (The sign ought to read: Gun-Free Zone Except for Criminals.)

Mike brought up Gotham's benighted mayor, Mr Bloomberg, and his call for the banning of 32 oz sodas. Mike said, "You just order two 16 oz. drinks."

Exactly. Get the comparison? Banning high capacity magazines is as foolish a feel-good proposal as banning 'high capacity' soft drink containers.

Why is the high capacity mag ban foolish? Because it does nothing to solve the problem. But it is worse than foolish since it is one more violation of the liberties of law-abiding citizens, one more step on the road to full-tilt statism.

It is also foolish because it promotes a black market for the items banned and tends to undermine respect for law and for the rule of law.

Laws ought ought be (i) few in number, (ii) reasonable in content, (ii) intelligible to the average citizen, (iv) enforceable, and (v) enforced. When dumbass libruls pass stupid feel-good laws because they feel that they just have to do something, the result is an erosion of respect for law and an increase in readership of Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience.

And another thing. Passing laws is easy and beloved by the feel-gooders on both sides of the aisle. Enforcement is much more difficult and here liberals whether Dems or Repubs demonstrate that it is feeling alone that drives them. Enforce existing laws and attach severe penalties to their breaking. Why hasn't the Islamist murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, been executed?

Newtown and the Bipartisan Police State

This article, by Anthony Gregory, is well worth reading although it gets off to a somewhat rocky start:

I think the most conspicuous problem is the glorification not of guns or fictional violence, but of actual violence. America is a militarized society, seat of the world’s empire. The U.S. government is always at war with a handful of countries.

First of all, we need to distinguish between the glorification of fictional violence and the fictional glorification of violence. What contemporary film makers glorify is violence, actual violence of the most brutal and sadistic sort, not fictional violence. A movie such as Hostel II (cannibal scene) that depicts a man being eaten alive by a man is not depicting a fictional representation of a man being eaten alive, but a man being eaten alive. Of course, a violent and sadistic movie is fiction, but if it is good fiction, it draws the reader in and involves him in the action, degrading, desensitizing, and dehumanizing him. That people find this evil stuff entertaining shows how how morally corrupt they have become. This is the ultimate circenses for the depraved masses. (See Alypius and the Gladiators) [Correction 16 January: Not the ultimate circenses, for that would be the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome or something similar. We haven't slipped that far, not yet.]

I say this because it is important not to downplay the role played by too many film makers and other cultural polluters in contributing to a culture or unculture in which sensitive, highly alienated kids like Adam Lanza, who are products of broken homes, and brought up without moral guidance in politicaslly correct schools in which our Judeo-Christian heritage has been expunged, can be pushed over the edge.

That being said, Gregory makes some very important points, despite his being a bit too libertarian for my conservative taste. Excerpts (emphasis added):

At least as alarming as the finger pointing have been the particular solutions most commentators have immediately gravitated toward. Progressives immediately began accusing conservatives of cutting mental health funding, and conservatives immediately fired back that civil libertarians have eroded the capacity of government to involuntarily commit those suspected of mental illness. This is, I think, perhaps the most disturbing reaction in the long run. Great strides have been made in the last half century to roll back the totalitarianism of mandatory psychiatric commitment. For much of modern history, hundreds of thousands were denied basic human rights due to their unusual behavior, most of it peaceful in itself. Lobotomies and sterilization were common, as were locking people into hellish psychiatric gulags where they were repeatedly medicated against their will, stripped of any sanity they previously had. The most heroic libertarian in recent years may have been the recently departed Thomas Szasz, who stood against mainstream psychiatry’s unholy alliance with the state, correctly pointing out that the system of mandatory treatment was as evil and authoritarian as anything we might find in the prison system or welfare state.

[. . .]

Meanwhile, statists on both the left and right called for the national security state to put armed guards in every school in America. More militarized policing is not the answer. Barbara Boxer, California’s hyper-statist Democrat, called for National Guard troops in the schools. Yet the spokesman of the NRA, instead of doing what it could to diffuse the hysteria and defend the right to bear arms, added his voice to this completely terrible idea, demanding utopian solutions and scapegoating when he should have been a voice of reason. The main difference between his proposal and Boxer’s would be the uniforms worn by the armed guards.

I agree. Turning schools into armed camps is an awful idea, though not as stupid as making them 'gun-free' zones.

Government armed guards will not necessarily make the schools safer, though. Central planning doesn’t work. The Fort Hood shooter managed to kill twelve people in 2009, despite the military base epitomizing the very pinnacle of government security. And now we see President Obama toying with the exact proposal aggressively pushed by the NRA—more surveillance and police, funded by the federal government, to turn America’s schools into Orwellian nightmares.

Although both conservatives and progressives have responded to this tragedy in generally bad ways, and there seems to be wide agreement on a host of downright terrifying police state proposals, I don’t want to imply that both sides have been equally bad. As awful as the law-and-order conservatives have been, the progressives have been far worse, agreeing with most of the bad conservative proposals but then adding their own pet issue to the agenda: disarming the general population.

The right to bear arms is a human rights issue, a property rights issue, a personal safety issue. The way that one mass murderer has been turned into a poster boy for the agenda of depriving millions of Americans of the right to own weapons that virtually none of them will ever use to commit a crime is disgusting, and seems to be rooted in some sort of cultural bigotry. Nothing else would easily explain the invincible resistance to logical arguments such as: rifles are rarely used in crimes, gun control empowers the police state over the weak, and such laws simply do not work against criminals, full stop. Rifles are easier to manufacture than methamphetamine, and we know how well the drug war has stopped its proliferation, and 3D printing will soon make it impossible to stop people from getting the weapons they want.

I will be doing some more writing about gun rights in the next few weeks, as it appears that not for the first time in my life, I was totally wrong about something. I had suspected that the left had given up on this issue, more or less, and Obama—whose first term was overall half-decent on gun rights—would not want to touch it. We shall see what happens, but it appears that the progressives have been lying in wait for an excuse to disarm Americans and have happily jumped on the chance.

Many left-liberals will claim they don’t want to ban all guns, and I think most are honest when they say so. Polls indicate that 75% or so of Americans oppose a handgun ban. Maybe there has been some genuine improvement on this issue, although I do have my doubts about the honesty of those who claim they would stop at rifles and high capacity mags, which are implicated in a handful of crimes compared to the thousands killed by people using handguns.

In any event, the core mentality of the gun controllers is as dangerous as ever. In response to a horrific mass murder of around 30 people, they are calling for liberties to be sacrificed in the name of security, apparently impervious to the logical problems with their proposals. When terrorists murdered a hundred times as many people in September 2001, many of these same progressives sensibly pointed out that those who would sacrifice liberty for security will wind up with neither, a line from Franklin. Yet the same logic should apply here. If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it’s that you cannot have total security, certainly with the state in charge of everyone’s safety. Nineteen men with boxcutters murdered 3,000 people. In a world with cars, gasoline, fertilizer, gunpowder, and steel, it is simply impossible to eliminate every threat, rifles being one of the smallest ones out there. Since 9/11 we have lost so many freedoms, have seen our police forces turn into nationalized standing armies with tanks and battle rifles, have undergone mass molestation and irradiation at our airports, have seen the national character twisted to officially sanction torture, indefinite detention, and aggressive wars. What will we see happen in the name of stopping troubled young people from engaging in smaller acts of mass murder? Much the way that conservatives led the charge toward fascism after 9/11, with liberals protesting a little at first only to seemingly accept the bulk of the surveillance state and anti-terror national security apparatus, I fear that today’s progressives are leading the stampede toward an even more totalitarian future, with the conservatives playing defense but caving, first on militarized schools, then on mental health despotism, then on victim disarmament.

Perhaps if after 9/11 the conservatives had focused on allowing airlines to manage their own security, even permitting passengers with guns on planes, instead of doubling the intrusiveness of the police state, we’d be in better shape today. But now the progressives are running the show, the SWAT teams have become more ruthless, the domestic drones have been unleashed, the wars abroad have escalated, and the same federal institutions whose gun control measures left American civilians dead at Ruby Ridge and Waco can expect new targets throughout the land. The bipartisan police state commences, now that the left has gotten its own 9/11.

If Everyone Goes Straight to Heaven . . .

. . . then heaven is a joke, and so is this life, and there is no ultimate justice, hence no God.

Mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. has died in prison. Good riddance. I read the book by his son, Frank Jr. and came away impressed by him for courageously 'ratting out' his father: family loyalty is a value, but there are higher loyalties.

Unfortunately:

Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Sun-Times on Wednesday that that violent history made his father's death especially emotional.

"I believe he was taken on Christmas Day for a reason," he said. "I hope he made peace. I hope he's up above looking down on us. … He's not suffering anymore. The people on the street aren't suffering anymore."

With all due respect to Frank Jr., this is just morally obtuse. For it implies that how we live here below makes no difference to the ultimate outcome. It makes no difference whether one lives the life of a brutal murderer or the life of an Edith Stein or a Simone Weil. But then there is no justice, and this life is even more absurd than it would be were there no God or afterlife at all. The reality of the moral point of view cannot have the divine underpinning it needs unless God is the guarantor of justice. The following exchange between Drury and Wittgenstein is apropos:

DRURY: I had been reading Origen before. Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things. That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory. This was a conception that appealed to me — but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN: Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

What I like about Wittgenstein is that he was one serious man.

When Guns are Used to Thwart Crimes . . .

. . . it is rarely news, and it is never big news, unless the liberal media can put a 'vigilante' spin on it. Remember Bernie Goetz. the NYC subway gunman? As I reported about a year ago:

Bernard Goetz, mild-mannered electronics nerd, looked like an easy mark, a slap job. And so he got slapped around, thrown through plate glass windows, mugged and harrassed. He just wanted to be left alone to tinker in his basement. One day he decided not to take it any more and acquired a .38 'equalizer.' And so the black punks who demanded money of him on the New York subway in December of 1984 paid a high price for their thuggishness to the delight of conservatives and the consternation of liberals. To the former he became a folk hero, to the latter a 'racist.' It was a huge story back then. One of the miscreants, James Ramseur, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose.

Ramseur was freed from prison last year after serving 25 years for a rape, according to NBC NewYork.com. He was one of four black teens shot by Goetz on a train on Dec. 22, 1984, in a shooting that earned Goetz the nickname of "subway vigilante" by city newspapers.

Meanwhile Goetz, 64, flourishes and runs a store called "Vigilante Electronics." A
heart-warming story on this, the eve of Christmas Eve.

Now let us assume that you desire a balanced understanding of the gun issue. It seems to me that you would have to take into consideration the many cases in which guns are used to save lives, protect property and livelihoods, thwart rapes and muggings and massacres, etc. If you care to gain this balanced understanding, if, in other words, you are not a liberal, you can start here, and then go here, in both cases following out the hyperlinks.

The New Jim Crow Again

Daniel M. writes:

Coincidentally, I'm currently a TA for a class in which significant portions of this book have been assigned (a philosophy of law class, focusing on legal punishment). Alexander's main focus in the book is not incarceration (and related phenomena) in general, but the War on Drugs in particular. An important part of her case for the racially discriminatory nature of "mass incarceration" (a phrase by which she means (a) the entire system of state-control over offenders, whether prison, parole, probation, etc., as well as (b) the post-punishment effects on offenders such as barriers to voting, employment, public housing) in the U.S. is the claim that black Americans are no more likely to use/deal illegal drugs than are white Americans, and yet law enforcement have disproportionally targeted black Americans. She thinks that this discrimination largely results from the great procedural discretion which law enforcement have in prosecuting this War (both at the level of police forces and individual officers in deciding where/whom to search, and at the level of prosecutors in deciding what kind of sentences to seek). This discretion, along with the need to be proactive in order to bust people for drug offenses, creates the opportunity for racial biases, whether conscious or unconscious, to shape how the War is prosecuted.

When I read the bit you did, my first thought was that it was ridiculous to compare Cotton's political "disenfranchisement" to his KKK-killed great-grandfather's political disenfranchisement. I still think that about this case (homicide/robbery…), but I did become more sympathetic to the idea that there were interesting connections between Jim Crow and "mass incarceration." The main difference is that the "New Jim Crow" is officially "colorblind," not a result of overt racism (at least by and large). The official aim is to maintain "law and order," not to sweep black Americans into the state's control. The alleged parallel is that you have a class of people largely characterized along racial lines who are shut out of mainstream society in various ways (voting, public housing,employment). The new reason, having a felony on your record, is very different – and, one might think, much more justified than the old reasons. But I was struck by (a) the claim that black Americans are not more likely to be guilty of drug crimes and yet are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement for them, and (b.) the severity of punitive measures attached to drug offences (including the felony label for many such offences, with all the ensuing ramifications).

Thank you for that, Dan. A few brief remarks:

1. Are black Americans no more likely to use/deal illegal drugs than are white Americans? I rather doubt that. We know that blacks commit proportionately more crimes than whites in general, so one would expect that to be true for drug dealing in particular. This is of course an empirical question, but it is exceedingly difficult to get to the truth of the matter because of the 'hot button' nature of the question and because fields such as sociology and criminology are heavily infected with ideology. For example, how many conservative sociologists are there in universities as compared to leftists? A very small number. What does that say about universities and about sociology? Given the leftist bias of most sociologists, it is reasonable to be skeptical about anything they claim is a result of 'research.'

2. Leftists conflate the world with the world as they wish it to be. And they wish to believe that we are all equal. And so they cannot accept the notion that blacks have a greater natural propensity to commit crimes than whites. This leads them to think that blacks are disproportionately 'targeted' and 'labeled' felons. The truth, I suspect, is that blacks commit more crimes proportionately, which is why their rates of incarceration are proportionately higher.

3. This is consistent with a frank admission that there is plenty of injustice in the criminal justice system. There are corrupt judges, vicious cops, and ambitious prosecutors willing to sacrifice human lives to their careers. Needless to say, I am against all that.

4. Why would anyone want to single out blacks for especially harsh treatment? This is a question that needs answering, and 'racism' is no answer to it. That word is well-nigh meaningless: it is is used by leftists as an all-purpose semantic bludgeon to beat down conservatives. It means anything leftists want it to mean. What is racism? If I argue against ObamaCare, leftists call me a racist. But ObamaCare is a policy, and policies, last time I checked, have no race. So for leftists 'racism' and cognates mean everything and nothing. Do people dislike blacks because of their skin color? Perhaps a few do. But dislike of blacks is not for most people based on skin color but on black behavior. This brings us back to the empirical question whether blacks as a group behave worse than whites as a group. If they do, then this would explain why they are incarcerated in greater numbers.

5. Should felons have the right to vote? First of all, how many criminals want to vote? The typical criminal is someone whose only concern is himself and the immediate gratification of his basest desires. Such people have contempt for civil society. They are not interested in participating in it. For them it's a joke. These are not people who think about the common good. If you mentioned civic duties to them they would laugh their heads off.

So we need to ask: who is it that wants felons to vote? Not felons for the most part. But leftists! Leftists want felons to vote to expand their base. Leftists have a an exceedingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. They are by nature lenient and forgiving. So if criminals are allowed to vote, they will of course vote for leftists, in the USA, for the Democrats.

That is why leftists want to extend the franchise to felons.

Whether or not they want to vote, should criminals have the right to vote? Of course not. Criminals can't even order their own lives, why should have a say in how society is ordered? Furthermore, removal of the right to vote is part of the punishment that they deserve for raping and drunk driving and drug dealing and murdering and for being the generally worthless individuals that they are.

6. Finally, I am open to the idea that drug laws need to be carefully examined. I am opposed to draconian 'zero tolerance' laws that make a felon of some harmless hippy who grows marijuana for his own use. But if he drives while stoned, or sells the stuff to school kids, then I want the law to come down on his shggy head like a ton of bricks.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rodney King and Henry Hill

Tonight I permit myself a bit of Schadenfreude (or is it righteous satisfaction?) at the passing of the 'motorist' Rodney King and the 'businessman' Henry Hill. Calling King a 'motorist' as so many knee-jerk liberal journalists did from 1991 on is like calling the mafioso Hill a 'business man.' In 'honor' of these two sorry specimens of (in)humanity, I propose the following for your listening pleasure.

Rodney 'Can We All Just Get Along?' King

Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law and the Law Won

Andrew Sisters, Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Roger Miller, Dang Me

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln

Roger Miller, King of the Road

Jackie DeShannon, What the World Needs Now

Henry Hill

Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. What a great song! Unfortunately Cooke did not take his own advice, and died young in consequence.

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

Byrds, Life in Prison

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (Piano Exit)

“I Have Nothing to Hide”

This is an entry from the old blog, first posted 28 December 2005. It makes an important point worth repeating.

…………..

In an age of terrorism, enhanced security measures are reasonable (See Liberty and Security) But in response to increased government surveillance and the civil-libertarian objections thereto, far too many people are repeating the stock phrase, "I have nothing to hide."

What they mean is that, since they are innocent of any crime, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and so there cannot be any reasonable objection to removing standard protections. But these people are making a false assumption. They are assuming that the agents of the state will always behave properly, an assumption that is spectacularly false.

Most of the state's agents will behave properly most of the time, but there are plenty of rogue agents who will abuse their authority for all sorts of reasons. The O'Reilly Factor has been following a case in which an elderly black gentleman sauntering down a street in New Orlean's French Quarter was set upon by cops who proceeded to use his head as a punching bag. The video clip showed the poor guy's head bouncing off a brick wall from the blows. It looked as if the thuggish cops had found an opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being under cover of law, and were taking it. And that is just one minor incident.

We conservatives are law-and-order types. One of the reasons we loathe contemporary liberals is because of their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. But our support for law and order is tempered by a healthy skepticism about the state and its agents. This is one of the reasons why we advocate limited government and Second Amendment rights.

As conservatives know, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have no illusions about human nature such as are cherished by liberals in their Rousseauean innocence. Give a man a badge and a gun and the power will go to his head. And mutatis mutandis for anyone with any kind of authority over anyone. This is the main reason why checks on government power are essential.

The trick is to avoid the absurdities of the ACLU-extremists while also avoiding the extremism of the "I have nothing to hide" types who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of secure pottage.

Companion post: Cops: A Necessary Evil

Liberals and Leniency

One of dozens of reasons not to be a liberal is that liberals have a casual toward crime. The best writer on this topic that I know of is Theodore Dalrymple. His latest is Leniency and Its Costs. Get thee hence!

I feel sorry about the decline of the mother country, but I'm glad that the consequences of liberalism are playing out there more quickly and dramatically than here, so that we Americans may learn something before it is too late. Excerpt:

What, you might ask, was such a man doing at liberty? Well, most importantly, he was providing a living for the lawyers who defended him when he was caught: he was what one might call a criminal Keynesian. And he was providing ammunition for penological liberals who argue that prison doesn’t work. After all, he had been to prison and still he set fire to the furniture store, endangering the lives of so many people! On this argument, of course, he shouldn’t be sent to prison even now, for it will not “cure” him of his “disease,” and he will learn nothing from it. Among the penological liberals, alas, are to be counted more than one chief justice and our current minister of justice (an Orwellian term unknown to British government until that of Prime Minister Blair): the consistently careerist Kenneth Clarke, who values his reputation with the Guardian, our principal liberal newspaper, more than he does the lives and property of the people of Croydon.

A Pithy Summary of the Trayvon Martin Case

Here:

The liberal narrative about the [Trayvon Martin] case is now destroyed; it had nothing to do with finding out the truth, whether a trigger-happy vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, or a desperate neighborhood watchman saved his head from being pounded to smithereens by pulling out a gun and shooting his assailant, or something in between. The narrative instead was solely concerned with taking a tragic shooting case and turning it into more fuel for a fossilized civil rights industry (since the case broke, dozens of violent crime cases of blacks against whites and Asians are splashed over the news, enraging readers and escaping liberal commentary). All we know now is that the “narrative”—a preteen shot “like a dog” while eating candy by a white “assassin” who uttered racial epithets and was never even touched by the victim, only to be let go by a wink-and-nod police force—is false.

I think it will be very hard to get a second-degree murder conviction, given the absence of racial malice on the tape (the narrative’s “coons” and NBC’s version of Zimmerman on his own volunteering “he’s black” are now inoperative), eyewitness accounts of the fray, and the clear injuries to Zimmerman. Instead, the authorities will hope that by inflating the indictment, by airing the facts, and by making Zimmerman testify, tensions will ease–and so when he is acquitted or a judge throws out the case, or a lesser count is pressed, riots will fizzle.

[. . .]

Perhaps before the second-degree-murder charge is thrown out, the prosecution can so entangle Zimmerman in testimony that they can recharge him with perjury or conspiracy and then plea bargain him down to a year or two. The case is now not concerned with justice, but with politics, defusing threats of violence, and salvaging the careers of so many who so foolishly rushed to judgment.

“Tookie” Williams Executed

From the Powerblogs archive. Originally posted 13 December 2005.

As you all know by now, Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed at San Quentin, California at 12:35 AM PT. I take no pleasure in this man's or any man's death; but I do take satisfaction from justice's being served. I simply do not understand how anyone who is not morally obtuse can fail to see that justice demands capital punishment in cases like this.

Not only did this fellow brutally murder four people, three of them members of a Chinese family, "Buddha-heads" in the miscreant's lingo, but he also helped found the Crips gang. So he is indirectly and partially responsible for hundreds and perhaps thousands of other crimes including rapes, carjackings, murders, you name it. Not only that, he failed to show any remorse, failed to take responsibility for his deeds, and played the predator right to the end, attempting to stare down the press there to witness his last moments.

But no fact and no argument I or anyone adduces will make any impression on liberal gush-heads like Bill Press, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and their ilk. Bill Press the other day opined that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual." To say something so stupid, and so typical of a liberal, is to empty that phrase of all meaning. Williams died by lethal injection, painlessly. He wasn't broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered — or cut in half by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun, which is how he murdered one of his victims.

So there is cause to celebrate: not the death of a man, nor the awesome power of the state, but that justice was done and the Left was handed a stinging rebuke.

In Defense of Profiling

Even Jesse Jackson does it! This following is excerpted from the NYT piece, The Color of Suspicion (emphasis added)

Why a Cop Profiles

This is what a cop might tell you in a moment of reckless candor: in crime fighting, race matters. When asked, most cops will declare themselves color blind. But watch them on the job for several months, and get them talking about the way policing is really done, and the truth will emerge, the truth being that cops, white and black, profile. Here's why, they say. African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of the types of crimes that draw the attention of the police. Blacks make up 12 percent of the population, but accounted for 58 percent of all carjackers between 1992 and 1996. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.) Victim surveys — and most victims of black criminals are black — indicate that blacks commit almost 50 percent of all robberies. Blacks and Hispanics are widely believed to be the blue-collar backbone of the country's heroin- and cocaine-distribution networks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 make up 1.1 percent of the country's population, yet commit more than 28 percent of its homicides. Reason, not racism, cops say, directs their attention.

Cops, white and black, know one other thing: they're not the only ones who profile. Civilians profile all the time — when they buy a house, or pick a school district, or walk down the street. Even civil rights leaders profile. ''There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life,'' Jesse Jackson said several years ago, ''than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.'' Jackson now says his quotation was ''taken out of context.'' The context, he said, is that violence is the inevitable byproduct of poor education and health care. But no amount of ''context'' matters when you fear that you are about to be mugged.

At a closed-door summit in Washington between police chiefs and black community leaders recently, the black chief of police of Charleston, S.C., Reuben Greenberg, argued that the problem facing black America is not racial profiling, but precisely the sort of black-on-black crime Jackson was talking about. ''I told them that the greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality,'' he recalled. ''Fifty percent of homicide victims are African-Americans. I asked what this meant about the value of life in this community.''

The police chief in Los Angeles, Bernard Parks, who is black, argues that racial profiling is rooted in statistical reality, not racism. ''It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,'' Parks told me. ''It's the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.''

Chief Parks defends vigorously the idea that police can legitimately factor in race when building a profile of a criminal suspect.

''We have an issue of violent crime against jewelry salespeople,'' Parks says. ''The predominant suspects are Colombians. We don't find Mexican-Americans, or blacks or other immigrants. It's a collection of several hundred Colombians who commit this crime. If you see six in a car in front of the Jewelry Mart, and they're waiting and watching people with briefcases, should we play the percentages and follow them? It's common sense.''

The Trayvon Martin Case and the Growing Racial Divide

Utterly outstanding analysis by Victor Davis Hanson. I have but one quibble. Hanson writes,

Millions of so-called whites are now adults who grew up in the age of affirmative action, and have no memory of systemic discrimination. To the degree some avoid certain schools, neighborhoods, or environments, they do so only on the basis of statistics, not profiling, that suggest a higher incidence of inner-city violence and crime.

My quibble concerns Hanson's use of 'profiling.' He is suggesting a distinction between avoidant behavior based on statistics and such behavior based on profiling. But there is no difference. To profile is to predict the likelihood of a person's behavior based on statistical information. A fiftyish Mormon matron from Salt Lake City does not fit the terrorist profile, but a twenty-something Egyptian Muslim from Cairo does. To screen the two equally at an airport is therefore unreasonable, and to take a more careful look at the Egyptian is entirely reasonable.

Who fits the heart attack profile? Is it the obese and sedentary fiftyish smoker who has bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning, or the nonsmoking, vegetarian, twenty-something marathoner? The former, obviously. Of course, it doesn't follow that the marathoner will not have a heart attack in the near future or that the fat man will. It is a question of likelihood. Similarly with the Mormon matron. She may have a bomb secreted in her 1950's skirt, but I wouldn't bet on it. If the Muslim is stripped-searched this is not because of some irrational hatred of Muslims but because of the FACT that twenty-something Muslim males are more likely to be terrorists than fiftyish Mormon matrons.

What I am objecting to is the use of 'profiling' to refer to blind, unreasonable, hateful characterizing on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. All decent people are opposed to the latter. But that is not what profiling is. Profiling is neither blind, nor unreasonable, nor hateful.

What Mr. Hanson is doing is acquiescing in the liberal misuse of 'profiling.' It is not a pejorative term. Liberals want to make it a pejorative term, but we must resist them.

Language matters.

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” Law Irrelevant to Trayvon Martin Case

This is one of the points made by Mona Charen in her excellent column, If Obama Had a Son:

We are now engaged in another fruitless shouting match about whether young black men are being hunted on the streets of America and whether "stand your ground" laws are dangerous. But as the estimable Ann Coulter has pointed out, Florida's "stand your ground" law was irrelevant to the Martin case. Whichever version of events that night you believe: A) that Zimmerman followed and shot Martin in cold blood; or B) that Zimmerman shot Martin in the midst of a fight; the law, which does not require a person who fears for his life to retreat before using deadly force, is not implicated.

Here is what the laws says:

It establishes that law-abiding residents and visitors may legally presume the threat of bodily harm or death from anyone who breaks into a residence or occupied vehicle and may use defensive force, including deadly force, against the intruder.

In any other place where a person “has a right to be,” that person has “no duty to retreat” if attacked and may “meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

In either case, a person using any force permitted by the law is immune from criminal prosecution or civil action and cannot be arrested unless a law enforcement agency determines there is probable cause that the force used was unlawful.

If a civil action is brought and the court finds the defendant to be immune based on the parameters of the law, the defendant will be awarded all costs of defense.

On scenario (A), the law does not apply because Zimmerman on that scenario is not defending himself. On scenario (B), the law does not apply because Zimmerman is not able to retreat. (Charen does not make this clear, but this was basically Coulter's point.) If someone is on top of you pounding you then you don't have the option to either retreat or not retreat.

But of course much depends on what exactly happened. In any case, the law is eminently reasonable whether or not it applies to the Trayvon Martin case.

And note the law is not a gun law despite what lying liberals will tell you. You can stand your ground with your fists, a baseball bat, a knife, a can of Easy-Off oven cleaner . . . .

Why Do Progressives Love Criminals?

A symposium with Theodore Dalrymple et al. Excerpt:

Dalrymple: That leftists regard the criminal justice system as criminal and therefore regard criminals as “primitive rebels” against an unjust system is, I suppose, right, though few of them would openly admit it. They tend to see the proper function of the criminal justice system as being the promotion of what they call social justice, by which they mean equality – and not equality under the law, but equality of outcome between identifiable groups. (Equity and equality they almost always assume to be the same.) And they think that if there were justice, equality would result, naturally and inevitably; there is no equality, therefore there is no justice. I think you can read for quite a long time before you find an unequivocal statement that there could be no greater injustice than equality of outcome.

Their approach to the criminal justice system is not that its faults should be corrected, and individual instances of injustice righted (there does seem much to criticize); but rather that the whole of society must be transformed into something completely different from what it is now.

'Social justice' is one of those obfuscatory pieces of leftist jargon which ought never to be used by conservatives. It sounds good, doesn't it? But as Dalrymple points out what it means is equality of outcome, equality of result. It has nothing to do with justice in any legitimate sense of the term. In fact, the implementation of 'social justice,' i.e., equality of outcome, requires massive injustice in the form of affirmative action, wealth redistribution, race-norming, and the like.

Would You Want Your Murderer Executed?

Excerpt:

Americans should be able to declare what they want the state to do on their behalf if they are murdered. Those who wish the state to keep their murderer alive for all of his natural years should wear, let us say, a green bracelet and/or place a green dot on their driver's license or license plate. And those who want their convicted murderer put to death can wear a red bracelet and/or have a red dot on their license.