Shootings are up 20 percent this year. Bratton is blaming marijuana. I doubt it. But maybe. I’m certainly willing to consider the idea. Most liberals, I find, never ever consider the idea that their advocacy might have unintended consequences, like more young black men getting murdered. That said, Bratton pointed to drug dealers getting killed.…
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This is interesting, albeit about South Africa. But the basic idea is this: Walls are actually making things worse. “No one can see what is happening in your home so no one can help,” she told the [South African] Daily News. They keep people from being each other’s natural lookout. And they are an even…
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Lindsey Blansett killed her 10-year-old son by stabbing him and bashing him a rock so he could “go to heaven” rather than face a life full of “suffering and pains.” I haven’t heard anybody blame Jesus Christ for this woman’s actions. But I’d bet she was driven by her own mistaken perception of Christian ideology.…
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This is a no-brainer to many, but a lot of people — usually those who don’t like police — still deny or diminish it: cops matter. And national trends are the result not some crime-related miasma but of the collective work in individual cities and neighborhoods. Camden, NJ, is worth paying attention to. I haven’t…
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With regards to the killing of Jersey City Police Officer Melvin Santiago, Fox News TV reporter Sean Bergin no longer has a job after editorializing on-air: It’s important to shine a light on this racist mentality that has so contaminated policing and America’s inner-cities. … The underlying cause for all of this, of course, is…
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I finished reading Gun Guys, and it’s very good. Here’s Dan Baum talking about his book on the BBC. And here he a more in-depth interview with Dan Baum on KMO’s C-Realm Podcast (which just happens to have been recorded in my basement). [Update: and here is Baum in the New York Times.] Baum makes…
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Can we please stop using being teased and bullied, no matter how bad, as an excuse to kill yourself or others? I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link between the criminalization of bullying, a culture (on the left andthe right) that embraces victimhood (not to mention guns), and mass shootings. If you are…
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The solution to all crime? Philadelphia Mayor Nutter hits the nail on the head: “The first way to stop this kind of stuff is for young people to home, where they’re supposed to be home, and for adults not to act like idiots and asshole out in the streets of our city.” Kind of like…
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If the state can censor sexfrom the eyes of children, why can it not censer violence? Isn’t sex better than violence? It certainly is more fun. I guess I’ll have to read the Supreme Court’s decision… And consider this: perhaps the more violent video games of the past few decades have actually contributed to the…
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James Q. Wilson writes some good stuff on crime in the Wall Street Journal. But this worries me: Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not…
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