From Salon:

Joe Biden is right about the rise in crime: Blame guns — not police or protesters — for the violence

Conservatives are using crime as cover for ugly race-baiting, but their own lax gun policies are the real culprit

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
PUBLISHED JUNE 23, 2021 1:11PM (EDT)

Shoppers wait in line to purchase ammunition and guns at Gun World in Burbank on Tuesday, March 17, 2020 as US sales of guns and ammunition soar amid the coronavirus outbreak.

This store is part of the Gun Run, where for John Nash reasons there are five gun stores in a couple of blocks on Magnolia in Burbank (rather like the Mile of Tile in Anaheim and the Block of Rock in North Hollywood).

There were lines of customers waiting out front of these stores in March 2020, when people worried that the pandemic would lead to unforeseeable consequences, and then again in June 2020 when it did and The Establishment declared looting and arson to be Peaceful Protesting and, after months of shutting beaches and golf courses, almost completely safe from spreading the virus. (The latter turned out to be true. The Peaceful Protest part not so much.)

California has fairly strict gun control laws, such as a ten-day waiting period.

My impression from driving down Magnolia frequently was that the people standing in line to legally buy guns didn’t look much like the people who have gotten arrested since then for murder. In general, the customers tended to look like the ex-Eastern Empires folks: ex-Soviets, ex-Ottomans, and ex-Persians: Armenians, Russian Jews, Russians, Persian Jews, Ukrainians, the usual San Fernando Valley 21st century types. These folks are not without their flaws, but a proclivity to shoot up block parties in South-Central is not usually one of their failings.

Violent crime is on the rise and it’s making Republicans happier than a fire sale on wraparound sunglasses.

Conservatives will find any excuse to indulge in their favorite sport: racist fear-mongering. The current uptick in violent crime fulfills their desire to use police to terrorize and stigmatize people of color while spinning it as merely in the interest of “public safety.”

… It’s not just that it’s gross, seeing all of this GOP glee in the face of murder and mayhem, it’s that it’s all based on misinformation.

Republicans want to blame Democrats for rising crime, but, in reality, they should be pointing the fingers at themselves. The reason that Americans are experiencing a bloody crime surge is because it’s way too easy for people to get guns.

And that suddenly changed on May 26, 2020? Here are seven-day moving averages of gun murders in 2019 (blue) and 2020 (red):

Here’s a question:

Has anybody proven that legally purchased new guns contributed significantly to the huge surge in murders in 2020? Here’s a methodology for a reporter: go to Wikipedia’s list of mass shootings in 2020 and sort them in descending order of total number of victims. Then work down from the top of the list, starting with the 22 people shot at a Washington DC block party on August 9. (By starting with the biggest mass shootings of 2020, they are probably ones that have had a lot of police attention.)

Follow up to see if the gun or guns used in these shootings have been identified. Keep going until you have, say, 30 cases where the provenance of the weapon(s) is known. What percentage were legally bought in 2020?

We have one spectacularly vivid example of gun control working in urban America: in 2001, Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York after murders had fallen dramatically under his predecessor Rudy Giuliani. I figured that they had fallen about as low as they could go, but Bloomberg didn’t agree. He had the NYPD enforce New York’s harsh gun control laws against illegally carrying a gun by stopping lowlifes and frisking them. After a while, NYC criminals largely stopped carrying guns, so mass shootings in NYC went out of fashion.

In 2019, NYC, despite having twice the population of any other city in America, did not make the top ten cities in the country in absolute number of mass shootings. About two weeks into the racial reckoning, the lowlifes realized they could safely start carrying guns again, and so NYC wound up in 3rd place for mass shootings in 2020.

The problem of course with aggressive enforcement by the police of gun control laws is because it has disparate impact on black males.

So the Biden Administration doesn’t want to enforce gun control laws on the kind of people who are most likely to murder, it wants to enforce gun control laws on store owners. Perhaps this might work, but it’s hard to see how it has much to do with the causes of the murder surge during the racial reckoning.

[Comment at Unz.com]