Another Misfire
The bad people won’t technically hurt you. They don’t even exist, really. So, what explains violence? Sadly, mean old guns persist on discharging on their own while they happen to be held and squeezed in a particular manner by humans.
I’m trying to blame life’s problems on tools. But thinking in such a manner is challenging. Exuding as much smarminess as a lefty journalist is nearly impossible without buying a Honda. There’s no need to buy a Coexist bumper sticker, as they come standard.
Instead, I’ll let the professional smug piety dispensers employed by The Buffalo News explain. They never disappoint. Take the recent story about the dangers of being shot if you venture into one of the city’s sides helpfully titled “Danger on streets as guns proliferate.”
Notably, the harangue takes care not to place the scourge’s blame on trigger-pullers. In case that wholly objective headline missed the mark, the measured subhead emphasized that “Ease of buying weapons puts young lives at risk.”
These armed angels are seemingly oblivious to the effects of pointing, then pulling. Our city’s paper certainly isn’t going to teach them about consequences. To wit, present News staffer and future Brady Campaign board member Abram Brown breaks the news that there are people, some of whom may be involved in bad stuff, buying black market guns:
All it would take is about $100 and finding the right person, and a teenager can end up with a gun, those who work with young people say.
Buffalo’s East Side would be the easiest place to get one, and $100 would buy a teenager a small-caliber semiautomatic handgun—small but deadly.
“Small but deadly” really gets the point across about these devices, no? They could kill if used in a certain manner, yet they could fit in the microwave. Yes: small but deadly. Unfortunately, we have bigger worries, as alien cyborgs are bent on destroying Earth:
“We believe that this gun problem is a bigger conspiracy from those who are bent on the destruction of mankind,” said Arlee Daniels Jr., interim chairman of the Stop the Violence Coalition.
Well, that’s a downer: I’m a member of mankind. We have relatively trifling matters with which to deal while anticipating the apocalypse. For one, the article’s other noteworthy revelation is that messing with felons may endanger your life:
“We’ve seen people in the City of Buffalo get killed because they stole another criminal’s gun,” Daniels said.
Buffalo police have seen guns stolen in burglaries end up in the hands of the wrong people, concurred Michael J. De- George, a Police Department spokesman.
“The hands of the wrong people?” Um, you mean burglars? Thankfully, there’s cause to believe there may be a respite to the despair. Namely, there’s a movie starring Morgan Freeman waiting to be made:
Fear motivates most of the young people searching for weapons, said Bob Keubler, who runs the Youth With a Purpose program at Holy Cross Church on Buffalo’s Lower West Side.
At Keubler’s program, youth come in and talk about what they face at home. They tell of teenagers standing on their front porch and watching another teenager ride by on a bicycle and threaten them.
Even if there isn’t an immediate threat, a young person might search for a gun out of a fear of retaliation for other reasons, such as wearing the wrong colors or talking to the wrong person. It’s almost like a “kill or be killed” atmosphere, Keubler said.
Is not playing an option? Mentoring seems fruitless if we can’t first acknowledge that the adolescent perpetrators in question are actually capable of self-control. They could always behave and not pop caps in derrieres, could they not? Circumstances offer flimsy excuses: it doesn’t help to pretend that the youths making a hobby out of shooting each other are skipping CYO meetings only because they can easily acquire a sidearm.
The idea that people impulsively turn to crime simply because there are firearms about is as tired and demonstrably inaccurate as proclaiming humans are dooming the Earth with their prosperity. The liberal memes never fail to provoke amusement or headshaking.
Besides, there’s no way that the malicious can obtain guns: New York’s gun restrictions are perhaps the nation’s harshest. Don’t the shooters know it’s impossible for them to get their hands on handguns within the Empire State? Lamentably, murderers are audaciously ignoring gun laws.
As with the stimulus’s woeful failure to stimulate, the standard leftist reply to crime spiking despite harsh anti-gun provisions is that we merely haven’t gone far enough. If we’re serious about fighting crime, we clearly need to ban transportation, as feeble humans are just going to find a seller and Glock up if they’re permitted to move around.
But some may just happen to disagree. Is there anyone quotable who blames crime on criminals? Of course, Brown is entitled to applaud and weep during Obama’s Oval Office speeches on his own time. But packing every left-wing cliché about firearms, crime, poverty, and human nature into an allegedly impartial dispatch is just the billionth example of a News drone clownishly tipping his or her voting patterns via submissions.
In this case, the article compiler couldn’t manage to find someone who didn’t find the actual guns guilty. Googling the words (NRA) and (contact) would have been a hassle. The same goes for contacting someone from the Shooters’ Committee On Political Education as the writer could have done if he was looking for a local pro-gun perspective, which he was not.
But maybe the reporter just wants to make friends in nearby offices and cubicles. After all, the rag persists in allowing commie race hustler Rod Watson to call himself a city desk editor, so what kind of climate do they expect? The hacks have run amuck.
They’ll undoubtedly keep themselves busy: the next story in the local section cycle will either be a fawning look at a government-funded jobs training program or some blather about how hard it is for the working poor to make ends meet. Place bets.
Anthony Bialy is a freelance writer and “Red Eye” Conservative in Western New York. He also writes columns for Smart Girl Nation. Follow Anthony on Twitter.
If Bass Pro comes to Buffalo guns will be sold across the street from the Buffalo News… hehehe