Root Causes

by William B. Blair
[email protected]

Special to TLE

           With the subject of "evil assault weapons" once again surfacing in the media, with the President claiming that no citizen has the right to purchase such weapons because they serve "no sporting purpose," I must remind everyone that the 2nd Amendment is not about duck hunting. It's about the ultimate self-defense of the individual from tyrannical government. A number of our founding fathers and authors of the Constitution stated this through personnel correspondence and in other printed media. There is no need to debate in a vacuum the intended meaning of this Amendment. Its authors have already interpreted it for us.
           In any case, the root of the crime problem in this country has little to do with guns of any kind, as our government would want us to believe. The crime problem in this country has everything to do with huge, incredibly expensive government programs that have failed miserably and dangerously. See if you can determine the ultimate effect on our nation when the results of a failed government program are combined with results of a failed government policy in the following tale.
           Once upon a time, a government established a program called "welfare" that encouraged out-of-wedlock births among young girls since benefits from this program could be received only if the resulting child was fatherless. Our main character, a teenage girl, is from an nth-generation welfare family. There is no work or achievement ethic instilled in her by her single parent, her mother, nor are good grades in school demanded of her. She goes to a government daycare prison called a "public school" where others like her disrupt the classes taught by disillusioned teachers who may have been, at one time long ago, idealistic enough to believe that they could actually "make a difference" against these long odds.
           With no real education, she can realistically choose from only two career paths. She can get a miserable, minimum wage job at a fast food joint or she can have a child out of wedlock, get on welfare (like mom) and receive: food stamps, free food for her baby under another government program, free medical care for her and her baby, massively subsidized housing, massively subsidized day care, etc. In 9 U.S. states, when all of the tax-free benefits under welfare are taken into account, welfare pays more than the average first-year, after-tax salary for a teacher. In 29 states it pays more than the average starting salary for a secretary. In 47 states welfare pays more than a janitor earns. In the 6 most generous states, benefits exceed the entry-level salary for a computer programmer. Minimum wage? Work? Are you crazy?
           Years go by and her male baby grows to adolescence. He is surrounded by many others of his age who are also products of this failed government program. He has no father. He needs male bonding, protection, and the feeling that he is important to someone, anyone. He joins a gang.
           The gang finds that it's easy to acquire huge sums of money selling illegal drugs and difficult to accumulate even meager amounts through honest, hard work. Why pay attention in school? That's difficult and boring and graduation, if it comes, is years away. Drugs are far more profitable and the rewards of dealing them are received immediately.
           Outside the ghetto, out in "middle America," the same people who have failed to research the root causes of our nation's problems (problems like gun-related violence) have demanded that their government fight Prohibition Part II (a.k.a. "The War on Drugs"). Multi-billion dollar federal and state government agencies with vested interests in Prohibition Part II are more than willing to comply with and even encourage this way of thinking. The average American voter doesn't seem to remember any history beyond last night's football score. He doesn't remember the catastrophic Prohibition Part I which resulted in: gang warfare, drive-by shootings with 1920s era "assault weapons," bombings, robberies, extortion, murder, widespread corruption of politicians and policemen, and the placing of many billions of 1997 equivalent dollars into the hands of criminal elements, causing the rapid growth of crime from small, localized problems into a massive, national one under the control of organized crime.
           Sound familiar? Today, modern gangs conduct drug turf wars and carry out drive-by shootings with guns, the extremely high cost of drugs results in robberies (sometimes involving guns) to support expensive drug habits/addictions, the extreme profit margins make it well worth the risk to sell drugs to your children no matter what the penalty for doing so, policemen and politicians are corrupted with drug money or killed because of it, and your constitutional rights under your Bill of Rights are violated by court decisions made in the interest of fighting a totally hopeless Prohibition Part II.
           How many liquor store owners shoot up their competition these days? How many liquor store owners risk their legal businesses to recruit booze "pushers" in your local grade school? How many alcoholics break into your home to steal something when they can easily support their habit with the income earned from the most menial of jobs or even through begging? How many politicians or policemen are corrupted by or killed over "booze money?"
           A federal prison is a place guarded by armed personnel using spotlights, cameras, police K-9s, guard towers, and high double fences festooned with razor wire. A federal prison is, also, a place where drugs are trivially easy to obtain. If one extrapolates this to our nations' War on Drugs, it means that we could convert this entire nation into a high security prison, far beyond a total police state... and we'd still have drugs. Prohibition Part II is failing as miserably as Part I while having an equally catastrophic effect on this nation's crime rate. We need to explore other solutions to this problem.
           Back to our story. The boy becomes an adult. His continued drug sales or use result in his eventual imprisonment. Mandatory minimum sentences set by government for drug-related offenses put him away for a longer time for a non-violent, consensual crime than someone imprisoned for a violent, gun-related crime. Since 1989, more people have been incarcerated for drug offenses than for all violent crimes combined, and drug offenders account for 60 percent of the federal prison population. With the prison overcrowding resulting from this mass incarceration, we now have to parole violent offenders from prisons to make room for the non-violent. We allow violent criminals to plea-bargain so we can make room in our courts and prisons for non-violent drug offenders. We then wonder why we have so much violence in our streets? It's because of guns, right? Wrong!
           FAILED GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS & POLICIES = CRIME.
           Your government tells you: GUNS = CRIME. What a convenient scapegoat ... and you continue to believe it.

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TREASON, TREASON, TREASON!

"I sympathize with the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt. He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in a fight for freedom. ... It is easier to take a critical view of this policy a half century removed than to understand fully what went on in Roosevelt's mind in the year prior to Pearl Harbor."
-- Robert Stinnett, in his book Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, in which he asserts that the monster Roosevelt II deliberately precipitated America's entry into World War II over the brutally blasted or horribly drowned bodies of thousands of American servicemen. Stinnett, in spite of his research and conclusions, still finds that being a sheeple is preferable to thinking ill of the feral conspiracy.

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