Reminder that the DNA of America

I admire your willingness to have a rational exchange with Darren on the incarceration issue you raised. Both of you have debated without mudslinging which I respect. I lean conservative but I am concerned about American crime and incarceration trends. However, I take issue with your last line suggesting black people are hated in the U.S. This is hyperbole and rebutted by any number of actual facts. One example is the exploding number of black immigrants now living in the U.S. The number reached 4.6 million just before the pandemic which is an increase from about 800,000 in 1980. And the trends show these are not illiterate poor people. Nearly one third of black immigrants to the U.S. in the last three years of sampling were college educated. The stats show increasing numbers of intelligent, world-savvy black people clamoring to get into America who simply would not relocate their entire lives to a place of prejudice and hatred against their race.

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I am going to have to split this into several parts, for length. It has to be this long for me to present my argument and supporting evidence adequately.

I definitely think guns are a major part of the problem. I've heard of so many Americans being jailed for shooting others, because in many of those situations, the killer has felt angry, threatened or just plain harmed and they've all had access to lethal weapons, which means that instead of just calming down and thinking of the situation, they've reacted at the moment of most anger with a gun and ended a life, and most of the time, theirs as well.

No, guns are not the problem. I grew up around them. We had several in my house. My grandparents, aunt & uncles, neighbors – as a kid, I literally didn’t know anyone whose home didn’t have at least one firearm in it. And you know what? Nobody ever shot anyone. I’ve been a cop for the last 22 years. I’ve worked in a building full of armed men and women, and we’ve had all the usual workplace squabbles, arguments, even the rare red-faced shouting match. But there was a remarkable shortage of dead bodies.

This is because sane, well-adjusted people don’t, in fact, lose control and shoot someone every time they get angry. The evidence is not just anecdotal. All but 9 US states are so-called “shall-issue” states for concealed weapons permits. That means if you meet a very small set of criteria, no bureaucrat can turn you down for a permit because he doesn’t think you need one. In every such state, every year, a tiny number of permits get revoked for cause – I think the average is about 0.0002%.

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It's not the availability of guns. There are as many guns as people in the US, and the gun-related crime is nearly all clustered in the inner-city crime-zones like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc. It’s almost all drug and gang related, and it’s almost all done with illegally obtained weapons. If you factor all those crime-ridden urban centers out, the US gun crime rate compares very, very favorably with the rest of the developed world.

Now we have had shootings in my city such as you describe. There were two recent ones I can mention. One was a road-rage incident. One driver, because the other had flipped him off, actually made a U-turn, to pull up beside the other driver and empty a handgun into his car. In another, a group of three males was parked in front of someone’s yard, just hanging out around their car. They were dropping litter on the homeowner’s lawn. When he went out to tell them to stop, one of the three shot him dead.

BTW, both suspects were gang members, and both murders were committed with stolen guns. This is not a gun problem, this is a feral teenager problem. There is a whole generation of young males in the poorer communities who, as I said, grew up in homes without fathers, started running with gangs as kids, and as a result have no respect for authority, property, life or anything really. Make them angry, even slightly, and they become homicidally violent. Slights you or I or anyone else would ignore, and which would be completely forgotten a few days later, they will try to kill you for.

Gun control won’t fix this.

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Drug use is another thing: By all means, prosecute and jail the pushers, but is it true that drug users and addicts are jailed as well? Why? What purpose does it serve? Keep them off the streets?

Heavy drug use is criminalized because if you don’t criminalize and punish it, it becomes a worse problem. Cities have tried it the other way. San Francisco, Portland, etc. They’ve stopped prosecuting most drug crimes. They’ve even tried handing out free needles, so that at least the addicts won’t pick up and spread diseases.

Have you seen the state of these cities lately? Especially San Francisco. It is no coincidence that these are the cities with homeless encampments spreading like cancer, and public streets littered with used needles and even human feces. I understand the impulse behind the policies these cities have adopted: they want to ameliorate the suffering of the people on the lowest rung of society. Problem is that these policies essentially provide tacit societal approval of behavior that is both self-destructive and anti-social. Nobody likes to see people suffer, but bad behavior and bad decisions have consequences. When you try to remove the consequences, people have no incentive to stop the bad behavior, and so they don’t. Worse, these cities have seen addicts and homeless from other cities migrate to them, because it’s easier to be a homeless addict in these cities, so their problem becomes still worse.

It’s hard on some individuals, but it’s better for society to make people live with the consequences of bad life choices. Compassionate people want to "take the sting" out of drug use, among other things, but it's precisely the sting that motivates people to change their behavior for the better.

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What about the lack of mental illness institutions, and using jails for mentally ill people instead. They're not criminals for the most part, and they're suffering enough without being treated like scum as well!

Now on this I agree with you. But again, part of the problem at the root of it was an excess of compassion. We used to have asylums, and some of them were genuinely awful. Think “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The system needed reforming. But what grew up was a patient’s rights movement, mostly in California at first, but spread nationwide. The idea was to close these awful asylums and treat all but the worst patients on an outpatient basis. When Reagan signed the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, closing most of the asylums, there was supposed to be federal funding for the outpatient treatment centers, and increased social services to handle the case load. There were two problems. One is the folly of expecting people with only a tenuous grip on rationality to rationally and voluntarily follow a course of medication and treatment. The second was that Congress never allocated those funds, and the centers and new social workers never materialized. It was and is a disgrace.

Again, as I cop, I deal with the mental patients who have to be involuntarily committed, and sometimes you can spend a whole shift trying to find an available bed in a facility. On some occasions, we’ve had to drive the patients two or more hours away to reach the closest ones. The reasons so many mental patients end up in jails (L.A. County’s jail, and the Cook County jail in Chicago are effectively the nation’s largest “mental hospitals”) because unlike medical facilities, jails can’t turn a dangerous prisoner away. So they end up being the only option left when all other attempts to locate a bed have failed.

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