{"id":20247,"date":"2015-09-07T08:03:39","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T06:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=20247"},"modified":"2015-09-07T08:04:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T06:04:12","slug":"ilana-mercer-gun-violence-no-goon-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=20247","title":{"rendered":"Ilana Mercer: ‘Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a short while, the thing called \u201cgun violence\u201d was uppermost in the minds of the blabbering class. Two lovely young people, Alison Parker (news reporter) and Adam Ward (photojournalist), of Roanoke, Virginia, were gunned-down on live TV, is a scene reminiscent of the film \u201c15 Minutes,\u201d<\/a> in which an anchor\u2019s drive for ratings and a murderer\u2019s quest for his 15 Minutes of Fame result in \u2026 gun, fist, and other gratuitous, on-air violence.<\/p>\n

A week on, CNN\u2019s Poppy Harlow was using the language of George Orwell’s Oceania<\/a> to describe the entity, \u201cgun violence,\u201d that \u201ctook\u201d the life of poor Deputy Darren Goforth, of Harris County, TX. Shortly thereafter, the same inchoate culprit claimed Lt. Joe Gliniewicz of Fox Lake, Illinois.<\/p>\n

Ambush assaults on police are, indubitably, up. And so is Orwellian newsspeak.<\/p>\n

In Roanoke and Harris County, black men were implicated in directing the guns at Parker, Ward and Goforth. The killers acted on a tip from their mentors in media. That\u2019s right: Do not be so hard on the \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d movement. The movement is in its infancy. Most people are unfamiliar with it. \u201cBlack Lives Matter,\u201d moreover, is not nearly as innervating and enervating as the meme disseminated, year-in and year-out, by media, academia, by the pedagogy and the politicians; over the airwaves, on the teli, in classrooms, in the halls of power; in textbooks, film, music and in every other cultural outlet and product.<\/p>\n

For decades has this \u201cRacial-Industrial Complex\u201d<\/a> been schooling Americans in the fiction of systemic black oppression by white America. The threshold for oppression is remarkably low. To be white is to oppress The Other; to be black is to be oppressed.<\/p>\n

Concomitantly, there has been an epidemic of citizen fatalities at the hands of police officers. Combine the latter with the ritualistic, imbecilic, systemic and baseless drumbeat about oppression of blacks by whites\u2014and you have your catalysts (not causes<\/em>) for why so many blacks imagine they\u2019ve been wronged, and how some individuals are encouraged, inadvertently, to act on their anger.<\/p>\n

As to the former catalyst: In 2014 alone, attests activist William B. Scott, police \u201cgun-violence\u201d dispatched 1,100 people, an average of three every day of the year. Scott\u2019s son, Erik, a decorated ex-Army officer, West-Point graduate, and Duke Univ. MBA, was shot to death<\/a> by a slob of a cop in Las Vegas. Erik\u2019s BlackBerry was mistaken for a firearm. (Excellence runs in this family. Senior is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.)<\/p>\n

One can\u2019t help but wonder at the incongruous specter of black leaders and advocates (media, pols, pedagogues) complaining when those they consider incorrigibly racist\u2014cops\u2014make themselves scarce in black neighborhoods. The \u201cRacial Industrial Complex\u201d conflates higher arrest and incarceration rates among blacks (rather than lawbreaking and too many laws), with \u201cscientific\u201d proof of systemic racism. Surely, then, police presence in black communities will only increase arrests and bolster these \u201cracist\u201d statistics. Surely a lack of police presence in black communities is to be celebrated.<\/p>\n

Go figure!<\/p>\n

As kids, we knew our local policeman by name. He patrolled our neighborhoods regularly and joshed around with us. He lived among us. Community policing, however, is a thing of the past. Former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson\u2014notorious for shooting Michael Brown\u2014gave a clue as to why. Wilson told The New Yorker that while he didn\u2019t want to work in a white area, liked the black community and had fun there\u2014he had experienced \u201cculture shock.\u201d Wilson described venturing into a \u201cdifferent culture\u201d: a \u201cpre-gang culture where you\u2019re just running in the streets, not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.\u201d For his candor about an alien culture, Wilson was called racist by CNN\u2019s Boris Sanchez and Kate Bolduan.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,\u201d said Edmund Burke, in his \u201cReflections on the Revolution in France.\u201d Darren Wilson\u2019s words suggest a variation on Burke\u2019s theme: To make cops love the communities they police, the communities they police ought to be lovely.<\/p>\n

Burke further reminded us in 1790 that, \u201cTo love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.\u201d But what happens when those little platoons are not so little and not so lovely?<\/p>\n

A country that is without a modicum of cultural cohesion and is, by D.C. design, comprised of ever-accreting, competing factions\u2014this kind of country cannot be lovely in the Burkean sense. In fairness to law-enforcement, communities in America must be damn difficult to police.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, thinking logically about crime and the criminals who commit it is likelier to lead to solutions than irrational thinking.<\/p>\n

Repeat after me: It was not an inanimate object or an abstraction\u2014\u201cgun violence\u201d\u2014that murdered innocent cops and cub reporters, but malevolent men with murder on their minds and weapons in their hands.<\/p>\n

Columnist Jack Kerwick\u2019s reductio ad absurdum<\/em> illustrates<\/a> the absurdity of \u201cgun violence\u201d speak:<\/p>\n

Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about \u2018gas chamber violence,\u2019 or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of \u2018machete violence.\u2019 Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to \u2018rope violence.\u2019 None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described\u2014the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us speak, then, of \u201cgoon violence.\u201d For to grasp the distinction between goons with moral agency, on the one hand, and inanimate guns with no such thing, on the other, is to come to grips with reality. (Of course, it would help a lot if stupid liberals quit their litany of lies about eternal, never-ending black oppression.)<\/p>\n

We’ve covered the catalysts<\/em>. Let us address the causes<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Guns are not the root cause of man\u2019s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can\u2019t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay.<\/p>\n

Bad people do bad things. Deal,<\/a> as they say in the hood.<\/p>\n

**
\nIlana Mercer<\/a> is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is \u201cInto the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.\u201d<\/a> Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.<\/a> Follow her on Twitter.<\/a> \u201cFriend\u201d<\/a> her on Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a short while, the thing called \u201cgun violence\u201d was uppermost in the minds of the blabbering class. Two lovely young people, Alison Parker (news reporter) and Adam Ward (photojournalist), of Roanoke, Virginia, were gunned-down on live TV, is a scene reminiscent of the film \u201c15 Minutes,\u201d in which an anchor\u2019s drive for ratings and … Continue reading “Ilana Mercer: ‘Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2957,"featured_media":16009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,80],"tags":[12339,12338,2115,2910,3476,12342,12341,3874,10104,9275,65,157,12340,745],"class_list":["post-20247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-ilana-mercer","tag-adam-ward","tag-alison-parker","tag-america","tag-edmund-burke","tag-george-orwell","tag-goon-violence","tag-goons","tag-gun-violence","tag-jack-kerwick","tag-oceania","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-racisme","tag-usa"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/ilana_nuut2.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20248,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions\/20248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}