The violent crime rate has been plummeting since its peak in the early 1990s, which now looks like the crest of one of America’s periodic (and slightly mysterious) waves of violent crime. (In the long term, the homicide rate has been steadily falling for hundreds of years. We are genuinely much more civilized now than we used to be.) Back when this country actually had race riots, and not just large gangs of kids briefly fighting and scaring white people on summer nights, there were … actual race riots, motivated by racial tensions. It’s absurd to imagine a secret pandemic of black-on-white violence motivated by anti-white racism that the media and all of our law enforcement agencies conspire to keep secret for reasons of political correctness. There would have to be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of crimes that no one is reporting in order for the current violent crime rate to come close to matching what it was a generation ago. There can’t be an epidemic of black crime that coincides with the least amount of total crime in America since the 1960s. The point, of course, isn’t to make an argument supported by statistics. It’s to marshal all available anecdotal data to support the paranoid white conservatives’ gut feeling that this country is on the brink of Charlie Manson’s Helter Skelter.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:22:02 +0000