Moskos: "It's The Criminals, Stupid (Or Why Cops Can't Stand Gun Control)"

Moskos is always good, and this is definitely worth a read. It's really crazy that this is one of the only places I can go to find someone writing in an objective way about this stuff. Other than this, I mostly just find tribal cant of the left and right.

Cops see danger coming from a small subset of criminals with guns, and not guns in general. Remember: police officers and all their friends are (for the most part) legal responsible gun owners. Cops want laws to focus on criminals and crimes, rather than guns. Collectively, most cops are incredibly pro-gun and equate the 2nd Amendment with freedom (just as you and I might do with the 1st Amendment). Inasmuch as gun laws are seen to infringe their rights while doing nothing to prevent criminals from shooting each other and shooting cops, cops aren’t going to support it. 

Consider this: there are (almost) no shootings in Chicago or New York or Baltimore that involves a legally possessed handgun. We’ve already “controlled” these guns and made them illegal. So what would passing *more* restrictive gun laws do to stop this violence? Are we going to double-dog-dare make them illegal? They’re already illegal. We don’t prioritize the laws we do have.

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Here’s what scares me right now more than guns: the potential right-wing law-and-order backlash. The official 2015 crime data comes out, get this, the day of the next presidential debate. Homicides are way up in America. We know this. Black homicides in particular. It will be the largest increase in decades. And yet the Left has been in denial about this (and/or discounts its significance). By talking about guns rather than crime, we’re virtually conceding law-and-order issues to Trump and the fascist Right. Politically and morally, this is bonkers.

   IMO this is part of what made the "Reagan revolution" possible: liberals became unmoored from reality. (Note: I don't think Carter had anything to do with that; but he came too late to stop it.) And I think it's happening again. When you absolutely cannot even imagine that people on the other side might be right about anything, you're virtually guaranteed to be wrong about something. And I think that's what's going on now. The PC left arose, in part, I'd say, simply because the American left drifted leftward. Liberalism seems to be out of fashion. The vanguard of the American left is now "progressives" and PCs / SJWs. And those people live in a fantasy world every bit as fantastical as the farther reaches of the right. They cannot imagine that guns per se might possibly not be evil, and they they might possibly not be the main source of the problem. They cannot imagine that BLM may be wrong, and that pure, evil (white) racism (the only kind!) may not be the main driver of the racial disparity in police shootings. And, as Moskos notes, many of them have, thus far, refused to admit that crime is on the rise in certain ways. I'm beginning to think that the left can convince itself of anything. Its imaginative powers have become prodigious, and it seems to now be able to believe that night is day or whatever else political correctness might demand. That all would be bad enough, but the relevant sector of the left also doesn't seem to care that it's detached from reality unless it leads to conservative political victories. The truer this seems to me, the more I drift away from the left. And not so much toward the right as...I don't know...out into la-la land, I suppose...
 

                                                        As usual...I could be wrong about everythiiiiiiing....