Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
The harder Obama pushes his unconstitutional gun control measures, the harder Americans push back.
Each proposal hardens the consensus in favor of the Bill of Rights and against his latest gimmick. His Town Hall was buried in the ratings by viewer apathy. Those who tuned in had to watch as he was unable to answer which mass shootings his proposals would have actually prevented.
And now the State of the Union looks to be more of the same.
But there are actually great common sense solutions for stopping gun violence. Unfortunately instead of embracing these proposals, Obama is fighting them and making the problem of gun violence worse.
1. Fight Crime
Gun violence isn’t some isolated phenomenon caused by guns. It’s just crime.
Most gun violence is gang and drug related. To stop gun violence you have to stop gangs and drug dealers. No amount of cracking down on ordinary citizens is going to stop organized crime from getting its hands on guns. Instead you have to fight organized crime directly.
But while Obama considers the civil rights of legal gun owners to be expendable, he has made leniency toward drug dealers a priority, even personally intervening to free violent armed drug dealers and launching investigations into the police treatment of drug dealers like Freddie Gray.
The Ferguson Effect has limited the ability of police to stop gun violence before it happens which is turning over entire neighborhoods to violent gangs.
It is structurally impossible to be soft on crime but tough on guns, and yet that’s exactly what Obama is proposing. He wants to free drug dealers and then blame their murders on insufficient gun control.
It’s not gun control that is the issue, but criminal control.
If Obama really wants to stop gun violence, then he has to stop helping criminals and start fighting them instead.
2. Limit Immigration
Gun control advocates like to claim that we’re a gun ban away from being Japan, but Japan is a stable society with an older population and minimal immigration.
While immigration is overall a good thing, it’s also socially destabilizing.
To reduce gun violence, we need to reduce the social instability produced by immigration. This includes Islamic terrorism, as in San Bernardino, unemployment in inner cities caused by cheap foreign labor which feeds recruits to gangs, not to mention actual overseas gangs like MS13 migrating to America.
We can best do this with a selective immigration policy which cuts immigration from countries with terror and gang problems. At the same time we have to evaluate the impact of immigration on our inner cities to protect a pathway to employment for inner city youth.
Finally we must aggressively deport immigrant drug dealers and gang members. Any illegal alien convicted of a weapons or drug offense must be immediately removed from this country.
There are no excuses for allowing sanctuary city crimes like the murder of Kate Steinle to take place.
When no more sanctuary cities are allowed to harbor illegal alien crime, then we can begin making a real impact on gun violence.
But instead of adopting these common sense measures to stop gun violence, Obama has defended sanctuary cities that lock in gun violence, provided amnesty to illegal alien gang members and aggressively pushed for more immigration from the most dangerous parts of the world.
His open border policies only encourage the spread of gun violence by gangs and terrorists.
3. Stop Turning Shooters Into Stars
If you can name three mass shooters, that’s three too many. The manifestos and diaries of some recent mass shooters showed that they drew inspiration from the media coverage of each other’s accomplishments. Take away the publicity and you take away much of the motive.
Studies have shown that copycat attacks are a very real phenomenon. This is especially true of teenagers. Media organizations knew this which is why they did not report on teenage suicides. But the ethical firewall came down with Columbine when ratings and political agendas took over.
Many in the media know that giving publicity to the latest killer will inspire the next one, but they view the next set of murder victims as collateral damage in their public safety crusade for gun control laws. And so they enable mass killings for gun control, destroying the American village in order to save it.
Killing Americans for gun control is not the answer. This irresponsible behavior by Obama’s media allies has to stop.
4. End the War on Veterans and the Middle Class
The solution to the high rates of firearm suicides among veterans and middle class whites doesn’t lie in depriving them of their civil rights.
Instead Obama must end his war against veterans and the middle class.
This administration has tried to smear returning veterans as the real terror threat, it has left them to die at the VA while cutting their medical benefits, and now it’s coming after their civil rights. It has tried to squeeze the middle class out of existence both economically and politically. The aging middle class white male has been shouldered with most of the burdens and the blame for the disasters of the Obama era.
Beleaguered groups routinely show higher levels of suicide rates. If Obama really wants to reduce self-harm gun violence rates among members of these groups then he must end his discriminatory campaign against them.
5. Repair the Inner City
Gun violence is not an American crisis, but a crisis of cities controlled by Democratic machine politics. Obama came out of that same machine in Chicago and his former chief of staff has overseen a murder spree in that very same city.
Along with the general measures on this list, the Democratic Party must reform its own cities.
The rotten structure of deals which tethers students to failed schools run by public sector unions, that allows regulators to squeeze out jobs and makes running a business dependent on political protectionism, that turns over municipal government to activist special interests whose real agenda is to maximize misery and that makes social mobility outside the bureaucracy impossible must end.
The broken education and employment infrastructure of major cities is a direct gateway to crime. Widespread political corruption destroys the credibility of authority figures. The collapse of the family turned criminals into models of masculinity. The Democratic Party must clean its own house.
Black lives matter should mean that the lives of black children at risk of being hit in an exchange of gunfire between drug dealers should matter. It should mean that the lives of black teens being pressured into joining gangs should matter. Instead Obama and the Democratic Party use it to mean that the lives of drug dealers, gang members and criminals matter more than their lives do.
And that is the real reason why gun violence is such a crisis.
Until Obama actually utilizes these common sense reforms, any proposals that he offers to fight gun violence will be insincere and unconstitutional gimmicks that don’t address the root causes of the crisis.
He needs to decide whether he cares more about open borders, Muslim refugees, freeing crack dealers and cracking down on cops or stopping gun violence.
If Obama really wants to fight the crisis of gun violence, then he can start by fighting the crisis of gang members and drug dealers on the streets of his city and so many of the cities that voted for him.
If he wants to fight gun violence, let him look south toward the border which criminals cross unopposed.
If he wants to fight gun violence, let him stand up for its victims, not its perpetrators. Let him use the weight of the law that he has put at the service of drug dealers to instead aid its victims.
Fighting the Bill of Rights will not stop gun violence. Fighting crime will. Waging a war on Americans will not make America safer. Freeing crack dealers while attacking the Bill of Rights certainly won’t do it.
Obama needs to choose between supporting criminals and fighting gun violence. He cannot do both.
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