The Devil and Gun Control
Gun control proponents have a problem. Irrefutable data shows that, since 1992, as American gun ownership has gone up, crime has gone down. When pressed about the dramatic decrease in crime, the best that the Left can do is to point to anything but the increase in privately held weapons:
Possible reasons for the decline include the country’s high incarceration rate, an aging population and an increased use of security cameras and cell phone videos capturing incidents.
If gun grabbers were forced to grapple with the fact that the increase in guns tracking precisely with the decrease in crime, they’d also have to acknowledge that all the aging Americans, the imprisoned Americans, and the video cameras are irrelevant. Why? Because if more guns really meant more crime, as they insist, the 300 million guns in America today would more than offset age, imprisonment, and video.
The fact is — as even the CDC was forced to admit — that guns are used defensively as often as 1.2 million times a year. This short John Stossel piece gives a very down-and-dirty explanation for the fact that, while guns are a problem when they’re in criminal hands, they’re not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens (and, in America, most citizens are law-abiding or at least non-violent):
So what do you do if you desperately want gun control, but the data refuses to cooperate? Well, I can imagine Lucifer and his chief minion having a meeting that goes something like this:
The scene: A well-appointed office in Hell. Satan, in a snazzy red suit is seated behind a heavy oak desk. Standing in front of the desk, facing him, is Jezebeth, a pimply young demon, who’s one of his primary Earth operatives. The year: 2009.
LUCIFER: Jezebeth, you know and I know that too much freedom is good for human souls and therefore bad for our business. Without an all-controlling government, there’s so much less scope for the corruption that fills our Hell halls. After all, every time a petty official is given the power to control a person’s activities, we’re going to start seeing all sorts of wonderful bribery and other graft.
JEZEBETH: Oh, I agree, Satan the Supreme, I agree.
LUCIFER: Don’t interrupt again. We’ll take the groveling as given. Now where was I? Oh, yes. It’s very hard to empower a corrupt, despotic government when the people are armed. Those bureaucrats may crave power, but never enough to put themselves on the wrong side of an armed citizenry. You understand, then, what we have to do: We have to take guns away from Americans.
JEZEBETH: Your Supreme Evilness, you know that we’ve been working in America for years to get guns out of people’s hands. We’ve arranged with our earthly operatives to ensure that every single time more than two white people are shot with a gun in the same event, that our friends in the Democrat party blame guns and demand gun control. But it’s just not working. People keep getting more and more guns — and let me tell you, 9/11 didn’t help us at all. Neither did Hurricane Katrina. Those people we couldn’t sway directly or through our media imps actually realized that, when there’s a crisis, that non-damned NRA was right all along — when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
LUCIFER: Stop babbling, Jezebeth, and focus here. I know that your team has been pushing gun control for years, but you’re failing. We need to brainstorm here. The problem, as I see it, is that the more that ordinary Americans get guns, the fewer guns crimes there are. It’s devilishly hard to convince people to give up their guns when they’re feeling safer. We have got to make them feel less safe.
JEZEBETH: Well, your Evil Lordship, I have been thinking about this and I’ve got an idea. How about if we increase the violent crime rate so that people feel less safe?
LUCIFER: How in the Hell are you planning to do that, Jezebeth? I just said that the problem is less crime.
JEZEBETH: I was thinking that maybe we should make it so that the police can’t do their jobs?
LUCIFER: Hmm. Not bad, not bad at all. While guns have helped reduce crime, there’s also the fact that one of the things that’s helped the drop in crime is that Mayor Giuliani and Police Chief Bratton were on to something when they latched onto the “broken windows” theory and started community policing. Ever since America’s police started cracking down on small crimes, there’s been a disgraceful decrease in big crimes. I have to say, that was a failure on our part not to stop them from figuring out that, if you stop criminals early, you often stop them entirely. But tell me this, Jezebeth, since you’re so clever: Since the broken windows school of policing has been working, how are we going to convince Americans to back away from community policing so that police can’t do their jobs?
JEZEBETH: Okay, Mighty Lord of Darkness. This may be a bit confusing, but I think I’ve got an idea here. No one in American politics wants to admit it, but American crime is concentrated in urban areas, especially in urban areas with large black populations. And if you’ll pardon me for digressing a moment, I have to say that our demonic ground team has done a spectacular job of trapping blacks in Democrat hellholes by giving blacks minimum stipends, which our team cleverly called “well-fare,” even though the opposite happens, so that they lose the incentive to learn in school and get good jobs that will take them away from these ghettos. We also got our team in the Democrat party to give women cash incentives to have babies out-of-wedlock. This was a really brilliant insight on some demon’s part, because it makes fathers superfluous in the black community. The beauty of this is that the men think they’re getting no-strings sex (along with proof of their virility) and the women think they’re making bank off the government, but the kids do horribly! Those kids, without stability, without role models, without basic security, are growing up to be the next generation of the poor and the damned.
LUCIFER: Fine, fine, Jezebeth. We’re entitled to pat ourselves on the back for that one. I agree that our “destroy the urban blacks” program was a brilliant idea. The Democrats and Progressives really carried the ball once we gave them the idea. But I’m still not clear how you’re going to use the breakdown of the black community to advance our gun control push.
JEZEBETH: King of the Damned, don’t you see? Because our plan for destroying America’s blacks is working, the urban blacks have much more frequent and adversarial contact with the police than people living in smaller and safer communities do. Even though we’ve lost the choke hold we used to have on the police, back in the day when we could get those Southern and urban police departments to treat blacks like crap, blacks in America haven’t forgiven or forgotten the treatment they used to receive. Our mistake in the last few years has been to allow too many police departments to become integrated, responsible, and honest, with officers who genuinely care about the communities they’re protecting. We’ve tried to seed American police departments with bad apples in the hopes that we can once again rot everyone else, but we’ve failed. Policing is better and, the statistics show, way less racist than it used to be.
LUCIFER: Speed it up. I’m getting old here.
JEZEBETH: Well, I humbly beg your pardon for this, my Liege Lord of Hell, but the fact is that we’ve failed completely when it comes to bringing the police back to our side. Considering how often police end up interacting with blacks, the sad reality is that they’re less likely to kill blacks than they are other racial groups in America. We just can’t seem to crack that police nut and reinvigorate them with some good old-fashioned corruption, dishonesty, racism, and violence.
LUCIFER: So your point is that we’ve failed? Some minions I’ve got. I want a nation of corrupt police and you give me honest ones. Why are you telling me all this and what does it have to do with gun control?!
JEZEBETH: I’m telling you this because I’ve realized that we’ve got to stop wasting our time trying to corrupt the police. We’re trying too hard and putting our demonic energy in the wrong places. I’ve got a simpler plan that just requires reminding the media and the rest of the Democrats that they work for us, not for the good of all Americans (including black Americans). What our earthly team needs to do is make blacks think that the police are corrupt, evil, racist, and violent. No actual racism or violence required — just the appearance of it.
LUCIFER: You intrigue me, Jezebeth. I’m listening. Tell me more. But this had better be good, or there’ll be Hell to pay for you.
JEZEBETH: Yes, of course, Glorious Evil One. What we have today that we didn’t have in past years is technology. With everyone running around today with smart phones, sooner or later, someone is going to make a video showing the police beating or shooting a black person.
LUCIFER: So you’re going to instruct our earthly operatives to tell the corrupt cops to beat up or kill blacks? I like it. I really like it.
JEZEBETH: No, Great Lord. You’ve forgotten that the beauty of this plan is that we don’t have to work on those irritatingly decent cops. Instead, we work with our own team — the media. Have them hype those videos like crazy. It doesn’t matter whether the cop involved in the video is an operative or an innocent. It also doesn’t matter if the cop’s actions were righteous or wrong. All that matters is that our media operatives get the video out there and shill it like crazy. Thanks to all the groundwork our team has been doing in the media and universities about race hatred, triggering, microaggressions, et cetera, the black community is going to retreat to old memories and newly radicalized emotions — and boom! It’s going to go batshit craaaazy!!!
LUCIFER: You still haven’t explained how this is going to help us disarm Americans to increase government control. I want a glorious increase in government corruption and a new age of despotism and evil in America. And you’re talking about using cops and brainwashing blacks — an idea I like in principle, but I’m still not seeing the gun-grabbing element here.
JEZEBETH: Well, think about it, my Dark Lord. With those videos playing endlessly on TV and in social media, two things are going to happen: First, our Democrat and media operatives (but I repeat myself) media are going to put huge pressure on police to play it safe. They’ll get help from the useful idiots in Hollywood, who think their ability to read someone else’s script well gives them moral authority — something our operatives have encouraged at every opportunity, of course. Second, the hot heads in the black community, with a little push from our operatives in the universities and media, are going to start attacking police. With luck, they’ll start killing the police, maybe even in mass shootings and ambushes.
LUCIFER: Dead police. I like it, especially since those damn American police are refusing to play with my team. BUT WHAT’S THIS GOT TO DO WITH GUN CONTROL?
JEZEBETH: Don’t you get it?! I mean, respectfully speaking, Great Lord, scared police, or police who are being micromanaged to death, don’t do their jobs. And when the police aren’t in the communities policing, and especially when they’re not in the most vulnerable and violent communities policing, the crime rate soars. And when the crime rate soars, the best argument against gun control goes out the window. It’s no longer “more guns, less crime, so you can’t do gun control.” Suddenly it’s “more guns, more crime, so we better do gun control.”
LUCIFER: I see! That’s rather brilliant, Jezebeth, and I think it will work. The only question I have is whether anybody’s going to point out the obvious: Once we achieve our gun control plan and disarm Americans, the only people with guns will be cops — the same ones we’ve gotten Americans to hate.
JEZEBETH: Not to worry, Sir Lucifer. As always, a few conservatives and libertarians are going to point out the obvious, but the rest of the people. . . . Heck, once our minions in the Democrat party, Hollywood, the media, and academia get done with them, they won’t have enough brain cells left to understand what happened. They’ll be quivering masses of emotion, desperate to have someone take care of them, even if that someone is the mean police.
LUCIFER: Well done, Jezebeth, well done. If we work hard, we should have guns banned by 2016. And even if that fails, all we need to do is ensure that Hillary is elected then. After that, it shouldn’t take our favorite operative more than a year or two to get the job done. Meanwhile, get to work thinking of a good slogan for the movement. How about “Some lives are more equal than others?”
JEZEBETH: That’s good, Lord, but it’s a little too George Orwell-ish for me. Given the problems he’s caused our political ideology department, we really don’t need to remind people of his work. Maybe we should do something more along the lines of lives mattering. . . . You know, like, uh, “black lives matter.” What do you think?
LUCIFER: I like it. Now gather your team and get on with it.