They “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” said Barack Obama in 2008, describing mainly white, working-class voters. But it turns out that some “people who aren’t like them” are like them — in that they’re clinging to weapons, too.
While writing about the Kyle Rittenhouse case last month, I mentioned that there’s an immutable rule of life: “Since ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ citizens bedeviled by unrestrained criminals will become de facto law enforcement and do the job the government won’t do.”
This happened with the vigilance committees of the Old West. It happened in Kenosha, where many more residents than just Rittenhouse became armed defenders. Now it’s happening in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where almost exclusively non-white school students are arming up in “gun-free zones” because they fear violence. As the New York Post reported Friday:
Students at a Brooklyn high school campus awash in weapons said they are arming themselves due to growing safety concerns both in and out of the classroom.
Security agents at the Adams Street complex in downtown Brooklyn — which houses three schools and enrolls about 1,000 kids — have recovered 38 weapons from students over the past three days alone.
“I don’t feel safe,” said one female student before entering the building Friday.
A male student said self-defense has simply become part of life’s curriculum for many city kids.
“It’s just casual protection,” he said. When asked who he was fearful of, the teen said, “Ask the people with the knives.”
“The kids are arming up because they know that from their own ‘lived experience,’ they’re situated in the middle of a swirling crime hellhole,” relates commentator Monica Showalter. “Gangs, muggers, robbers — they are all cited in the report, with kids not only feeling like targeted prey on school grounds, but going and coming to school, too.” Showalter then presents the following Post excerpt:
“Those are for self-protection,” a 17-year-old senior said of the arms flow. “Some of it is gang related. But most of the time it’s for protection from people in general.”
Students said that kids are especially concerned about their sometimes perilous trips to and from school each day.
“We take the trains and some of us get out late,” he said. “We don’t live in safe areas.”
Parent Ali Shah said he fears for his 9th grade daughter’s safety and doesn’t allow her to trek to class by herself.
“I am scared for my child,” he said. “Every day I drop her off and pick her up.”
So just as with Rittenhouse and the other armed Kenoshans (who, to make the former seem like a lone-wolf vigilante, the mainstream media roundly ignored), these kids are forced to be their own shepherds because government has thrown them to the wolves.
Exacerbating the problem is not just the hobbled police or the “bail reform” that’s releasing criminals back onto the streets, but the general climate of lawlessness that develops when civil authorities signal weakness and coddle criminals. But then there’s something else, something perhaps even more fundamental.
“There are over 300 boards and commissions in the City of New York that fall under the Mayor’s purview,” relates the Big Apple’s government website. Many of these are what you’d expect in a large metropolis and are involved in nuts-and-bolts city affairs. But then there are entities such as the
- Commission on Human Rights. Such bodies are generally involved in enforcing woke-joke standards such as “transgender” pronoun guidelines;
- Initiative for diversity and equity. “Equity” is a euphemism for officially sanctioned anti-white discrimination;
- Commission on Gender Equity;
- Equal Employment Practices Commission;
- Climate Change Adaptation Task Force;
- Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability; and
- GreeNYC (GNYC), whose About page states that it’s dedicated to “generating net-zero carbon by 2050.”
Add to this that NYC is rife with “educational” lunacy such as Critical Race Theory.
Now, even if you support these things (which are actually destructive), should a single cent be spent on such endeavors when a government can’t even perform a basic function such as ensuring domestic tranquility? It’s shameful. Imagine how safe NYC could be if all the money, time, and effort devoted to woke social engineering were focused laser-like on policing and criminal/justice.
Summing up the actual outcome of the Left’s policies, Showalter penned a money line. “Instead of the kumbaya society they envisioned by getting rid of the cops,” she wrote, “now they have every kid his own cop.”
As for Obama’s 2008 bigotry-born lamentation, if only he were even partially correct. For if more people clung to (good) religion along with the guns, we’d have far less crime — including the crime against humanity known, euphemistically, as “leftist policy.”
