In my book Hands Off My Gun I devote an entire chapter to the racist roots of gun control. Michael Bloomberg's latest remark is emblematic of this chapter; the bigoted sentiment is, historically, a huge motivation of the anti-gun movement, apparently so to this day. Via the Washington Times:
Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.
Criminals don't follow laws. The larger government grows the fewer opportunities for those who live under it. Bloomberg feels this is a blessing, not a burden that contributes to desperate people doing desperate things for money or to escape their reality. Disarming minorities for their own good? The KKK would agree with him. This was the logic behind the first federally-backed gun grab at Wounded Knee. It was the rationale used by white Democrats to prevent free black men and women from excercising their Second Amendment rights during Reconstruction. If you want to know who is the oppressed simply look at who is disarmed.
Additionally, Bloomberg can't do math.
To Bloomberg's credit, there is a 93% statistic on murder but it describes the percentage of black Americans killed by other black Americans. The Bureau of Justice Statistics's report states that 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black individiuals. It is not a number that nationally represents the number of murders as a whole:
Nearly half of the nation's murder victims in 2005 were black, and the number of black men who were slain is on the rise.
A majority of the black murder victims were relatively young — between 17 and 29, the Justice Department said in a study released Thursday.
The department's Bureau of Justice Statistics report offers a snapshot of racial disparities among violent crime victims. Black people represented an estimated 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, the latest data available, but were the victims of 49 percent of all murders and 15 percent of rapes, assaults and other nonfatal violent crimes nationwide.
Most of the black murder victims — 93 percent — were killed by other black people, the study found. About 85 percent of white victims were slain by other white people.
No, 95% of murders are not young black men.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics show that 6,329 blacks were murdered in 2011 vs. 5,825 whites. While my math skills are notoriously bad, there’s no way you can read that data and claim that “95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25.” Unless you really wanted to.
Worth repeating? Sure! Here’s the FBI’s bullet point on the subject:
Concerning murder victims for whom race was known, 50.0 percent were black, 46.0 percent were white, and 2.6 percent were of other races. Race was unknown for 175 victims. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 2.)
Click here for a chart of murder victims by age. Again, the idea that 95 percent of these poor souls fall between the ages of 15 and 25 is completely devoid of any factual basis.
I want to point out the irony of the mayor who championed the loosey law in NYC—which brought officers to engage Eric Garner—discussing black male lives.
This also isn't the first time that Bloomberg has fabricated numbers to support his agenda. He's falsely claimed that there is an epidemic of gun violence and inflated gun deaths with suicides to boost the number (CNN even debunked their statistics). Bloomberg's professional anti-gun lobbyist group, Everytown, even inflated their list of “gun victims” by including criminals shot by police and the Boston bomber's name. His lobbyist trio of Everytown, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (quiet about its members who've child predation convictions), and Moms Demand Action are the Brian Williams of the Second Amendment conversation. It's becoming more evident to the rest of America day by day.
