Thread by @JewhadiTM

Why Soft-on-Crime Democrats Are Tough on ‘Gun Violence’

By embracing the magical thinking behind gun control, the Democrats remind us they would rather punish society and label law-abiding citizens wrongdoers than confront the criminal class. bit.ly/2LB2oMA

To point out the obvious⁠—that murder is bad whether committed with a gun or not, whether the killer is white or black, and whether it happens to a lot of people at once or one at a time⁠—is to be shouted down as a “racist” and a “fascist.”

The rhetoric of gun control to combat “gun violence” obscures the moral dimension of these crimes by focusing on the tool and averting attention from who is committing crimes and how often. These are not the actions of the average gun owners that Democrats are intent on punishing

Gun control lets the Left indulge in its fantasy that evil white men are the real source of crime without confronting the facts about disproportionate minority offending.

Resistance to confiscation efforts will reinforce any such narrative by igniting completely avoidable violence along the lines of Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Democrats never imagine doing this kind of confiscation effort in the ghetto, where genuinely dangerous “felon in possession” cases are ignored today in Chicago and went down under Obama, lest we indulge in “mass incarceration.”

The criminal law is ultimately about making judgments. At its heart, criminal punishment affirms civilization and its right to use force in the face of its enemies.

But the Left and its endemic moral relativism makes today’s Democratic Party incapable of recognizing that we have a civilization and that it has enemies.

Thus, the Democrats cannot admit that the supposed evil of mass incarceration has reduced the much greater evil of criminal victimization of innocents.

Unlike gun control aimed at amorphous and faceless “gun violence,” real toughness on crime requires one to affirm that crime is wrong, that criminals are to blame, and that criminals should be punished.

By embracing the magical thinking behind gun control, the Democrats remind us that they would rather punish society and label its law-abiding members wrongdoers than confront the criminal class who, not coincidentally, tend to be among their supporters.

While gun control seemingly contradicts Dems’ softness on crime, it is in fact an expression of the same relativism that cannot make judgments, defines society as an evil to be overcome, and is paralyzed when a member of a preferred victim group turns out to be a perpetrator.