THE DAILY BLADE: Liberals Are Accessories To Crimes Against Women
Commenting about the recent shooting at a fitness center near Pittsburgh in which three women were killed and nine others wounded by a gunman who then killed himself, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes:
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter. [Emphasis, The Stiletto.]
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women - not so much of an uproar. …
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment. …
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
Herbert is right about one thing: Men are much likelier to commit violent crimes – as well as gun homicides – than women. According to statistics from the Department of Justice, between 1976-2005 (the most recent data available), 91.3 percent of gun homicides were committed by men v. 8.7 percent committed by women. And The Sentencing Project’s report “No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America’’ - which slices and dices demographic data about the 140,000 inmates serving life imprisonment in the U.S. for murder, sexual assault and other violent or depraved crimes - finds that 97 percent are men, even though men make up 49 percent of the population.
Unfortunately - and predictably - Herbert does not connect the dots to arrive at one obvious solution to “the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day”: Putting teeth into an order of protection by accompanying it with a concealed carry permit - and requiring a woman who fears that a stalker or domestic partner will try to hurt or kill her or her family to purchase a gun (or borrow one from a local police department until the protection order expires) and to complete a gun safety course. (While violent crime against women would drop precipitously if most women but not most men were permitted by federal or state statute to carry concealed weapons, the Supreme Court would likely strike down such a law as an equal protection violation.)
But Herbert, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and other liberals just can’t seem to wrap their minds around arming women – even as an experiment in limited circumstances, such as domestic violence, to study whether lives could be saved. In fact, Bloomberg ensured that women in his city and hundreds of others will continue to be murdered and raped by armed attackers when he led a group of 450 mayors in a successful fight to defeat the Thune amendment (second item) that would have allowed gun owners with the proper permits to carry concealed weapons across most state lines.
Bloomberg has bankrolled Mayors Against Illegal Guns - who are ostensibly against illegal guns, but spend the majority of their time preventing law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights – for the last two years with $2.9 million of his $16 billion personal fortune. After he called the Thune amendment “Another obstacle in the way of sanity,” the SD Repub senator’s spokesperson, Kyle Downey, countered: “The fact that a guy who rides the New York subways with armed guards can tell the rest of America that they cannot defend themselves is absurd.”
If liberals really want to ensure that sadistic criminals or enraged domestic partners can no longer target defenseless women and children, they would seek psychiatric counseling en masse to get over their irrational fear and loathing of firearms – and they certainly wouldn’t transmit the cognitive defect to their progeny generation after generation.
Liberals need to get their heads on straight about the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, because lives are being tragically lost on a daily basis - and they are complicit. As the old saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are minutes away.” But don’t expect Bloomberg to foot the bill to help fellow libs overcome their hysterical phobia of guns. When it comes to using firearms for self defense, he’s the biggest head case of them all.
Editorial Note: Post corrected to reference a more relevant Fourteenth Amendment clause.
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