Murder in America

How bad is it?  In the wake of the V-Tech mass murder the Europeans are tut-tutting about a US history of violence.

The official story since 1900 is not pretty: two huge murder waves, one peaking in 1933 and one peaking in 1991.  See Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends chart.  Interestingly, according to Eric Monkkonen in Murder in New York, murder has not been a unique New York City phenomenon.  Murder in New York was under the national average right through the first half of the 20th century.  Until the murder wave that began in 1965.

You can see country-by-counntry murder rates on this page from Wikipedia.  At the beginning of the 20th century the murder rate in the United States was about the same as the United Kingdom: about one per 100,000 inhabitants.  In about 1905 the murder rate took off in the US, peaking in the 1930s and the 1980s at 10 per 100,000.

Now it’s down to 5 or 6 per 100,000.

Where will it go next?

VT: The Tradeoffs in a Free Society

The horrific Virginia Tech shootings have, as they should, inspired every political activist to use the event as a hook to their perennial issue.  As usual, commentator Charles Krauthammer does so in as sensible a way as possible.

There are, we should never forget, tradeoffs that a free society makes in favor of freedom and against safety and security.

It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly... [S]tricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

How many innocent lives would be saved by stricter gun laws and how many violent crimes would be deterred by more guns in homes?

Maybe a deeply disturbed person like Cho should have been institutionalized.

But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.

What we can all agree, surely, that the kind of rambling political nonsense generated by presidential candidate Barack Obama is not the solution.  At a speech captured by Politico’s Ben Smith he connected the Virginia Tech violence with Don Imus’s radio insults.

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur[.]

But if that is what Sen. Obama believes let us hear more of it.  It is not, after all an extremist position.  That sort of political free association is exactly what passes for serious political analysis among our liberal friends.  It’s all part of the “cycle of violence” paradigm, “arms are for hugging,” and other magical thinking that proceeds from the assumption that humans are naturally peaceful rather than naturally violent.  And nothing so exactly represents the mood as the comment made on The Volokh Conspiracy:

Schools and guns do not mix. Period.

One is tempted to quote Sir Toby Belch:  “Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?” 

Iraq war is 'lost' says Harry Reid

The US “surge” is failing to bring peace to Iraq, according to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and so he believes “that this war is lost.”

as reported by Breitbart.com, Reid said: 

"I know I was the odd guy out at the White House, but I told him at least what he needed to hear ... I believe the war at this stage can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically."

 Oh, so he doesn’t actually believe that it’s all over bar the shouting.  He just believes that the US should use non-military means in its war with... yes, that’s a good point. 

What would Sen. Harry Reid say that “the war at this stage” is all about?

Is it a war to bring peace to Iraq?  Is it a war to contain the imperialist designs of Iran?  Is is a war to contain the spread of Islamofascism.

And what exactly does Sen. Reid mean by winning “diplomatically, politically and economically?”

By economically, does Sen. Reid propose, for example, that the United States should increase nuclear power generation and domestic hydrocarbon exploration and production so as to reduce demand for Middle East oil?

Or does he just mean that we should wave our hands and threaten sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran while the Islamic Republic of Iran continues its program to acquire nuclear weapons?

Liberal Foundations Equals Liberal Costs

It’s not just that charitable foundations often end up doing exactly the opposite of what their founders intended.

The problem is that they spend so much money doing it. As William Rusher writes:

Robert Wood Johnson’s charitable contributions for 2005 were a majestic $419 million. But the "administrative expenses" required to distribute this largesse totaled $69 million. Kellogg contributed $285 million, but chalked up "administrative expenses" of $65 million. And the Rockefeller Foundation, in the course of giving away $148 million, found it necessary to spend $36 million on — you guessed it — "administrative expenses."

That’s a pretty big tariff.  Of course, when you are hobnobbing with grantees with expensive tastes no doubt you have to meet and beat their expensive tastes. 

I mean, there’s an argument that in discussing compassionate and sensitive programs to help women and children with like-minded compassionate souls you can’t really be super-sizing it at McDonalds.  A more nuanced location for nuanced thinking and planning is needed.  And that costs money.

But still, giving yourself 25 cents of every dollar you give away does seem excessive.

Especially when you consider the case of The Walton Family Foundation—you know, the foundation founded by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

The Walton Family Foundation managed to give away $232 million in 2005, while charging expenses of only $2 million. As Neal Freeman, Chairman of the Foundation Management Institute, remarked, "Ol’ Sam would be proud of that 1.2 percent mark-up."

Of course, Wal-Mart was always a low-rent corporation.  No class.

The Adolescent Society

Don’t expect a big liberal best-seller like John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.  But you and I can talk about the Adolescent Society, you know, as adult to adult.  And the epicenter of adolescence, of teenage adolescence verging into adult adolescence, is the modern government mega-university.  As Michelle Malkin puts it

There’s no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries.

Coddling for liberals, of course.  They have “safe places” to protect students from hurtful conservative opinions while they turn a blind eye to lefty mobs.

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.
And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

How about a “culture of self-defense,”says Malkin. 

And Mark Steyn makes much the same point.

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Er, just a minute, Geraldo.  Those are not children at Virginia Tech.  They are women and men.  Or at least, at any other time and any other place in history they would be considered men and women.

Or perhaps, as Steyn argues in America Alone, they are adult adolescents.  With all their basic needs met they live a life buying toys and entertainment with their allowance while they show up at class.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket. Geraldo-like "protection" is a delusion: when something goes awry -- whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus -- the state won't be there to protect you. You'll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision.

Thats why voices from all across the political spectrum are beginning to wonder how to do away with adolescence.

The problem is, as always, how to get there from here.

After VT: Gun Control Doesn't Bark

After the horror of the shootings at Virginia Tech and the innocent lives cut down, two thoughts.

First of all, has nobody thought about just what a cruel place the modern university is?  It is perhaps the epicenter of privilege and injustice in the modern world.  You cannot just walk into a university like a Wal-Mart and say, here’s my $50; I’d like to take a course.  Oh no.  First of all, you put on your knee pads.  And that’s just the beginning of humiliation.

OK, so we learn that dozens of people knew about the killer Seung Cho.  And they had told the administration and the campus police about him.  And the powers-that-be did nothing.

This is where conservatives have something to say.  About the mediating institutions between the megastructures—like government and big research universities—and the individual.  Healthy societes have a vibrant space for the mediating institutions.  Welfare states and the like are constantly attacking the mediating institutions because they believe in top-down control by the educated elite ensconced in government.

We conservatives mourn, deeply mourn, that we haven’t done enough to get this message through.  Why not?  It’s so obvious, so self-evident.  People are social beings, they need to be embedded in social networks.  And social networks mean mediating, voluntary institutions free of the dead hand of government.

Second, did you notice the dog that didn’t bark?  Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid are saying: Gun control?  What gun control?

What is going on here?

Democrats are soft-pedaling gun control because, as Roger Simon writes, Democrats believe they lost the 2000 election because of gun owners.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it.

We conservatives believe that the gun control issue is an epiphenomenon.  It stands for something much bigger, that people should be responsible for their own lives.  That the government cannot promise to make everyone safe with its big programs and its reckless promises.  People must look to their own resources. They must build and maintain their own networks of mutual aid and security.

And not the least of the value of these networks is to fold adolescent loners into the social network of community.

So for conservatives the spectacle of an adolescent loner going berserk in a government megastructure like a government university makes complete sense.

For us the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?

It is our job and our sacred mission to tell the world how to walk back from the dreadful anti-social society that the educated middle class has built in the last century.  In this society everything has been stripped away except government power and individual helplessness.

We know better.  And we live with the awful truth that we have failed to make our voices heard.  We have failed to break through the wall of liberal power to demand an end to the monstrous society of alienation and privilege.

So today we start again.  Break down the megastructures!  Shatter the privileges!  Grow the human-scale mediating institutions like families, churches, associations, and clubs!

And above all connect the adolescent loners back into society.

Let's Don't Kill All the Lawyers

The Duke “rape” case was won by good defense lawyering, writes lawyer Randy E. Barnett, and don’t you forget it next time you tell a lawyer joke.

When innocent people go to jail is is usually because of an incompetent defense.

In every case I knew about where an innocent person had been convicted, there had been an incompetent defense lawyer at the pretrial and trial stages.

In a competent legal system, moreover, the defense has a difficult problem.  If the prosecutors are competent then people tend to assume that anyone accused of a crime is probably guilty.

While knowing that mistakes do happen, the accuracy of the system leads everyone, including defense lawyers, to assume that anyone who is charged is probably guilty. After all, they usually are. Notwithstanding the legal "presumption of innocence," in a system that generally gets it right, there is a pragmatic presumption of guilt.

So if you are accused of a crime and you really are innocent, you have to prove your innocence.  That means that you have to hire good defense lawyers.  And the Duke case defense lawyers were good.

Their skillful questioning at pre-trial hearings revealed the prosecutor’s misconduct that eventually forced him to give up control of the case and now threatens his law license. They uncovered compelling exculpatory evidence and made it available to the press; they let their clients and their families air their story in the national media.

All’s well that ends well.  Just don’t forget how much you depend on a good defense when the legal system says: “J’Accuse!”