“GOP extremism is marring the soul of the American people,” wrote Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts in a Wednesday tweet. Clark, Congress’ Democratic whip, was announcing that she’d visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School earlier this year and had just shared “thoughts” at Newsweek about how nothing has changed since the 2018 Parkland massacre: There’s still death and destruction, is the idea — because of Republicans’ Second Amendment advocacy.
Clark’s article is a case study in style over substance, propaganda over prudence, rhetoric over reality, as she dramatically tells of seeing “unfinished writing assignments and the lesson plans scrawled on white boards” in Parkland and of a child drawing “their last breath.” Unfortunately for her, however, while a “whip” is a party’s enforcer, she can’t whip the Truth into complying with a lie.
Now, it’s interesting that Clark should bring up Parkland, because it has a backstory. Oh, like all backstories, it was in the background even in 2018. It tells a telling tale, though. More on that momentarily.
There’s an irony here. Not far from Clark’s 5th Congressional District in Massachusetts is the city of Brockton, where officials have just requested that the state’s National Guard be sent in to restore order at their high school.
You read that right. They don’t want more security officers or even police. Rather, Democratic Brockton in Democratic Massachusetts near Democratic Boston wants the National Guard.
By the way, reporting on the story, Boston.com didn’t mention guns as the problem, but that there’s a teacher shortage, no doubt due to “fighting and drug use in the hallways, and verbal abuse of staff,” as the site puts it.
Given this, and that crime is predominantly a problem of Democratic jurisdictions (with strict gun-control laws), it might be wise for Clark to focus on flawed Democratic policies. Instead, she complains that even six years after Parkland, we have “[n]o assault weapons ban. No universal background checks. No federal red flag law. No crackdown on high-capacity magazines. Not even safe storage requirements.” So just a quick primer:
- “Assault weapon” is a propaganda term for semi-automatic rifles that usually have less stopping power than many hunting rifles.
- Background checks are standard, and when they don’t occur (20 percent of the time) it’s often due to federal government incompetence.
- Red flag laws can be abused and applied to good people along with the bad.
- There’s no evidence that magazine size limits or “safe storage requirements” would reduce murder and crime rates.
Almost as if to refute her own assertions, Clark later mentions the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade. This act was committed by two young thugs using handguns (not rifles), almost assuredly acquired illegally. The crime was also the result of an argument, which is what motivates most shootings in Democratic Kansas City, a jurisdiction with the U.S.’s sixth-highest murder rate.
Clark proceeds to portray all of America as mirroring crime-ridden Democratic districts, writing that we “live in a purgatory of terror and grief” as “the threat of sudden gunfire hangs over every moment.” Really?
No, not really.
In reality, a 2017 study (based on 2014 data) found that 68 percent of our murders occur in just small parts of five percent of our counties. Moreover, 54 percent of counties had zero homicides. You’re more likely to die in an accident or of heart disease or stroke than of gunfire — which isn’t even among the top 10 leading causes of mortality.
But what of kids? Clark says that “guns are the single deadliest killer of American children.”
Not true.
The two leading causes of death for actual children, ages 1-14, are motor vehicle crashes and drowning, according to the CDC. Clark’s statistic is perhaps only valid if included in the “child” category are people up to 19 years old (so violent gang-bangers are lumped in).
Sadly, this category also includes Parkland’s high-school victims. But then there’s what Clark likely wouldn’t want us to know — that backstory.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was committed by (child?) 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, about whom RealClearInvestigations wrote in 2018:
Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient.
Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RCI. “He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement.”
Not surprisingly, there was a racial/ethnic component to this. I warned in 2010 already that the Obama administration was coercing schools into punishing students based on racial quota. It was unfair, the idea went, that black and Hispanic kids were suspended/expelled more than whites were (mostly unmentioned was that Asian-descent kids were punished less than whites were, and girls less than boys). This wokeness-turned blind eye to minority crime helped ensure that Cruz would be let off — until he went off.
It doesn’t matter how many laws — on guns or anything else — you enact if the criminally inclined are given an affirmative-action based dispensation. So if Katherine Clark really cares about protecting people, she ought to take her whip to the Democratic practice of playing racial games with Americans’ lives.
