“America doesn’t have a crime problem,” wrote commentator Daniel Greenfield recently; “it has a Democrat problem.”
At issue is a finding that a mere one percent of United States counties — Democratic areas — account for a whopping 42 percent of our murders.
So it’s no wonder people issue quips such as (from under a Tuesday article of mine), “Just taking guns away from Democrats would reduce shootings by 90%.” If only such gun control actually worked.
But all this illustrates a truth: America really is a very safe country — except for small pockets of violence. While there are demographic reasons for this, too (more on that later), the Democrat link warrants elaboration. As Greenfield wrote at FrontPageMag.com:
Democrats desperately trying to spin high crime rates caused by their pro-crime policies began falsely claiming that crime was a Republican problem.
…New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who once claimed that the internet would have no more of an impact than the fax machine, argued that high crime was really a Republican problem and decided to prove it by claiming that, “Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s.”
Krugman, who somehow has a Nobel Prize, failed to note that most of the murders were coming out of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt won most of the state while Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties however went to leftist Democrat Joy Hofmeister. The ‘blue’ parts of Oklahoma are also red with blood.
“The fact is the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma under your watch,” Hoffmeister [sic] had claimed in a viral gubernatorial debate attack. Oklahoma had 287 murders in 2020: 166 came out of Oklahoma County and Tulsa County, the two counties that supported Hoffmeister [sic].
Greenfield draws statistics from a “groundbreaking study” published in January by John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. In it, the researcher presented good news along with the bad.
“When it comes to murder, there are three types of counties in the United States,” Lott wrote. “Most counties experience no murders, a smaller set where there are a few murders, and then a tiny set of counties where murders are very common. In 2020, 52% of counties (with 10% of the population) had no murders. 68% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 18% of the population. These counties account for only 2.6% of all murders in the country.”
So while America is often portrayed as a Wild West where guns and life are cheap, the truth is more nuanced. Consider: Britain is often used as a paradigm, with its relatively low murder rate attributed by many to its strict gun control. Yet New Hampshire, for example, has far less gun control and a higher firearm-ownership rate, but also a lower intentional homicide rate than the U.K. does.
But then there’s the bad news. “The worst 1% of [American] counties (the worst 31 counties) have 21% of the population and 42% of the murders,” Lott also explains. “The worst 2% of counties (62 counties) contain 31% of the population and 56% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 73% of murders.”
Providing yet more perspective, Lott points out that “even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas.”
In fairness, some of the safe areas — such as the town I reside in (I seek to escape) — are Democratic themselves. So what’s the difference?
The people are, explained Professor Thomas Sowell in 2012.
“When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas,” he wrote in one of many examples. “The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks.”
It’s not politically correct to say (hence, few say it), but demographics is one of the best crime-rate predictors. In NYC, for instance, approximately 96 percent of all crime and 98 percent of gun-related crime are committed by blacks and Hispanics, even though the two groups together constitute just over 52 percent of the population. This said, it nonetheless is true that a demographic largely responsible for crime is a political one: Democrats.
As Greenfield points out, Democrats “cater” to criminals and “after jettisoning the white working class and the small business middle class became the party of criminals.”
“From police defunding to the Black Lives Matter riots to mass jailbreaks and the legalization of drugs and shoplifting in major cities, they [Democrats] embraced pro-crime policies that unleashed a massive crime wave,” Greenfield also writes. “And now they pretend not to know what’s causing the crime.”
“There’s no mystery here,” he continues. “Crime is caused by repeat offenders. In the 90s we began locking them up and then about 5 years ago, we began letting them go at the federal and state level.”
Remember, too, that left-wing Democratic policies have exacerbated the black family’s dissolution (result: black illegitimacy is now 73 percent), have undermined America’s morality via the sexual devolutionary agenda and other corruptive phenomena, and have even claimed that virtue byproducts such as punctuality and industriousness are “white norms” that blacks needn’t embrace.
The bottom line: Whatever your race, people promoting the bad over the good and telling you good is bad, probably aren’t your friends.
