Crush Crime, and Watch ‘Woke’ Power Collapse

Here we are again with the self-congratulatory Left slaving away to get rid of guns, and with far too few conservatives bestirring themselves to get rid of murderers.

In a perfect world, gun violence would not exist. In our fallen, tragic world, gun violence will continue so long as either guns or violence exist. Since no one (outside of Hollywood and the “happy hoodlums” it celebrates) actually likes gun violence, the question arises: What to do about it?

Liberals such as Joe Biden choose to focus on the guns. They say they are out to stop “gun violence,” but it’s the guns that have their attention. Regarding violence in general, liberals are too often indifferent, ambivalent, or just plain wrong-headed for their ideas to be of any use. At their worst, liberals have actively encouraged violence so long as it serves their ends or victimizes people they despise.

Conservatives’ Dereliction of Duty

I would like to say that we conservatives, for our part, choose to focus on the violence. Unfortunately, far too many of us have had our minds elsewhere. While never as perverse as the Left has been in rationalizing crime and coddling criminals, we too have been of little use to crime’s victims. We have not discharged our duty to suppress criminal violence with all the means at our command.

This dereliction, and the political price we have paid for it, have been the theme of most of what I’ve written, at American Greatness and elsewhere, for a great many years. In this piece from 2008, for example, I argued the case like so:

I believe a really hard campaign against crime, if carried through to victory, would destroy liberalism’s power for a generation or more. Specifically, actual enforcement of the death penalty, to the point that thousands instead of dozens of killers are put to death for their crimes, has the potential to break apart the entire culture of gangsterism, cowing not only murderers but also the robbers and rapists who rely on the threat of murder—and thus making today’s crime rates a thing of memory. And in the peace that followed, people would never forget nor forgive liberalism for the fact that the mayhem they’d suffered for decades had been indulged, shepherded and enabled by liberal dogmas.

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