Pro-choice quote (from 2005): “You could abort every black baby in this country…”

I’ll make one more attempt to inject some sanity into your diatribe.

Forget abortion. Take that out of the equation. Let’s assume that there were some number of murders or other capital offenses committed YESTERDAY in our major cities. Those crimes were committed by a set number of people. Let’s just use the number 100 since it’s a nice, round number.

We’re going to make a major assumption here - we’re going to assume that the police could round up all 100 of those criminals TODAY. Now we have 100 murderers in police custody. Again, assuming that all of those murderers confessed, and the wheels of justice moved at light speed, all 100 murderers are executed before midnight tonight.

The question is - is it likely that the murder rate in those major cities would be higher or lower TOMORROW than it was YESTERDAY?

Please, don’t answer with something about how the God of the universe would just find other people to commit the murders that those people would have committed. That’s a false choice, because it assumes that God is in control of the murders, but not the apprehension and execution of the murderers.

Another question, again, taking abortion completely out of the equation:

I hope you’ll agree that it’s a FACT that the homicide rate among black males aged 10-24 is significantly higher than that of any other ethnic group. In fact, they commit 51.5 murders per 100,000 people, while whites commit 2.9, Hispanics 13.5, American Indians/Alaska Natives 17.6, and Asians 2.8.

Just for the sake of argument, and I’m not advocating this, but suppose that someone rounded up all the black males aged 10-24 and incarcerated them today. Would the murder rate TOMORROW be higher than it was yesterday?

Just an update: I should have endeavored to find this transcript from the September 30, 2005 Hannity & Colmes show sooner. Bennett does make it aboslutely clear that he was satirizing the Freakonomics argument, and I do find it quite satisfactory.

Thanks for bearing with me. I am sorry if I gave the appearance of being intransigent.

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