Posted on 04/02/2013 10:20:40 PM PDT by neverdem
Okay, The Washington Post is liberal. We all know its overall perspective. But is it too much to ask the Posts editors to be thinking liberals? An op-ed in the Post on March 29 titled White men have much to discuss about mass shootings by Charlotte and Harriet Childress attempted to inject race into the debate on how to stop mass murderers by blaming white men and boys. The op-ed is so factually inaccurate the Post should give itself four Pinocchios for running it.
The Post introduces Charlotte and Harriet Childress as researchers and consultants on social and political issues, but it should have been clear to the Posts editors these twin sisters from Oregon didnt do any research on this political issue.
Charlotte and Harriet write: Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent yearsnot just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbinehave been committed by white men and boys.
The thing is there have been mass shootings (when two or more people were shot) committed by non-white Americans. Here are a few from 2012: Jeong Soo Paek, a Korean American, killed four people at a health spa in Norcross, Georgia; Travis Lamonte Steed, a black man, started a gun fight in a night club in Jackson, Tenn., that resulted in one death and 16 injuries; Su Nam Ko, a Korean American, killed seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, Calif.; Otis Phillips, a black man, was reportedly involved in a shooting that left two dead at a soccer tournament in Wilmington, Delaware; Radcliffe Frankin Haughton, a black man, killed three at a spa in Brookfield, Wisconsin; Jacob Tyler Roberts, an Hispanic man, killed two people at a mall near Portland, Oregon.
Also, while Adam Lanza, the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary, and some other notable mass killers were white, other famous mass murderers have been Asian, black or Latino. Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was a Korean American. John Allen Muhammad, aka the D.C. sniper, was black.
This poor attempt by Charlotte and Harriet Childress to make the debate on how to stop mass murderers into a racial issue impugning white men should have been easily dismissed by the editors at The Washington Post. Could it be that they were blinded by their ideology?
Whatever the reason, this dishonest op-ed does bring up an important topic many in the liberal media have been carefully avoiding. The Childress sisters write that when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room. Now, though treating white males in America as a homogenous class is so silly its hard to take seriously, this ideological twisting of the facts does point a finger back at the real elephant in the room: inner-city violenceoften between minoritiesoccurring in areas that have the most stringent Second Amendment restrictions in the U.S.
Consider that in 2012 a total of 532 people were murdered in the city of Chicago, according to statistics compiled by the website Crime in Chicago (log on here for their names and stories: ). Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has said 500 people were killed in 2012, but whatever the precise number of fatalities, this needs to be honestly discussed for the best solutions to be found.
One thing the Post should be addressing is that in 2012, while Chicago earned the gruesome distinction of being the murder capital of the U.S., the Windy City also rated dead last in federal prosecutions of gun crimes.
David Burnham, co-director of Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data-gathering and research organization run by Syracuse University, says they found that on a per-capita basis Chicago ranks dead last for prosecuting gun crimes. Burnham says that according to case-by-case U.S. Justice Department information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by TRAC, there were 52 prosecutions in Illinois North (Chicago) in 2012, or 5.52 per million in population. By this measure, compared with the 90 federal judicial districts in the U.S., the prosecution rate in Chicago was the lowest.
So the city with the highest murder rate also has the lowest federal prosecution rate for gun crimes yet the mainstream media thinks this isnt a story? Could the medias avoidance of these facts have something to do with how they view race? According to the City of Chicago, though blacks make up 33 percent of the citys population about 80 percent of the people murdered in 2012 were black. Many explain these numbers away by saying the killings are mostly related to gang violence. Regardless, how can they explain away the lack of federal prosecutorial zeal for crimes related to guns? Could it be that theyre afraid that such a discussion would inevitably show that the lefts anti-gun-rights ideology doesnt work in practice?
The TRAC study also determined that the number of federal weapons prosecutions nationally has fallen nearly every year in the U.S. from a high of 11,015 in 2004 to 7,774 in 2012. In fact, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), in 2010 of the 6 million Americans who attempted to buy a gun about 76,000 were denied. Of those, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) referred 4,732 cases for prosecution. Of these, 44 people were prosecuted and 13 were punished.
Given all this, shouldnt The Washington Post, and other media outlets, be investigating? If theyre going to make room for Charlotte and Harriet Childress to make unsubstantiated claims about white men and guns, couldnt they send a reporter to find out why federal prosecutors dont seem to be trying very hard to put away the bad guys with guns?
Near the end of their op-ed the Childress sisters write: If life were equitable, white male gun-rights advocates would face some serious questions to assess their degree of credibility and objectivity. They then rely on their false premise to ask: What facets of white male culture create so many mass shootings?
The thing is rural areas in the U.S.areas that often have higher legal gun-ownership rates than urban areasalso have some of the lowest murder rates in the U.S. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, determined that from 1993-1998: Urban males experienced violent victimizations at rates 64% higher than the average combined suburban and rural male rate. But the media isnt all that interested in acknowledging or looking into this, as it what they might report could conflict with their politics.
Many readers gave The Washington Post a drubbing in the comments section on this op-ed. One reader summed up the Childress sisters op-ed this way: I am a liberal, but these two are perfect examples of off-the-deep-end yahoos who give serious liberals a bad name. By running this poorly fact-checked op-ed, The Washington Post is also giving itself a bad name.
Frank Miniter is the author of The Ultimate Mans Survival Guide.
Here in Maryland we’ll be right behind Connecticut. I’ll stand my ground and won’t follow any of the new laws I expect will be passed by the end of the week.
I’ll buy guns & ammo through friends scattered around the country in gun friendly states and in 4.5 years if America last that long, I’ll be moving to one of those states.
Under what circumstances would an administration stop prosecuting federal gun crimes? You'd think it would be a slam-dunk. You illegally applied for a gun, we have it documented, you're going to jail and we're going to advertise that fact to the general public.
Two things come out of the above stats (2010, the other numbers don't match up for some reason):
1. Nearly 94% of denials aren't worth prosecution, therefore some other non-prosecutable factor caused the denial.
Conclusion: background checks are a waste of time.
2. A little over 6% of the rejections are prosecutable according to BATFE officers, but not according to the prosecutors at the DOJ.
Conclusion: background checks are a waste of time.
3. Of the six million background checks .08% were referred for prosecution, of which .00073% were determined prosecutable, and the result is .00022% of background checks resulted in punishing "illegal" purchase attempts. Keep in mind just how miniscule each of those numbers is. None of them even approach 1% and the biggest is measured in thousandths of a percent.
Conclusion: background checks are a waste of time.
Can someone get this information into the hands of our good guys? We don't need background checks at all.
We go to southern NH every couple of months...a daytrip of sorts....only an hour and 15 mins from my house for tax free wine & booze, cigs, fireworks, hardware store stuff and now ammo.
Anyone registering their clips in CT is crazy.
You have to have one or two incidents, in the double digits, by white guys, to show concern about in the Media.
There is NO room there for THIS...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3003351/posts
In your pickup and with your Bible on the seat nexst to you!
A BLACK guy named Banks was responsible for a mass killing(13) with an AR in the Wilkes Barre, PA in September 1982. Was declared too stupid for electrocution even though he was given the death penalty.
Hmmmmm, the Post seems to have forgotten who is committing all the inner city murders in this country. It sure ain’t the KKK hitting the inner cities for a little weekend entertainment!
All this identity group bull$h!t has got to stop. Enough. The left has created artificial groups and placed people in them just because of the shade of their skin.
Then they chose certain groups and gave them special privileges, and gave other groups a never-ending burden of guilt.
Enough.
Actually, most mass shootings are gang-related. You just don’t hear about them because whites don’t a) do them and b) aren’t usually the victims.
If a Blood shoots up a nightclub full of Crips, it ain’t news.
The reason that guns are so hated by the left is that they allow oppressed peoples, it used to be blacks in the south, to defend themselves from their oppressors.
Today, the left uses government and minority thugs to oppress their most hated group. And “white men” just happen to be the perfect cipher for “Christians”.
We are being set up as the next Armenian Jewish Kulaks.
Could it be all the mass shooters were being raised by mothers and came from single parent homes?
They are doing this because they lost the debate on guns.
They got nothing.
They don’t need to win the debate, just make Congress think they have.
The REASON mattereth not; as long as they can DIVIDE and Conquer.
AR-15 will be beside me, loaded and ready.
The Ft Hood shooting was by a white man?
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