Chaos and Deflection

Crime is on the rise. This is not in dispute. It's not rising uniformly across the nation, but it is in the aggregate. Where you perceive its rise the greatest most likely depends on where you get your news, but I doubt there's a news source out there that rejects the plain evidence.

Where matters diverge is in the blame.

A rational approach to considering the causes for a change in conditions is to look at what else changed, what shifts in the social or legal or cultural landscape correlate with the problem at hand. Where things get tricky lies in deciding whether those correlating changes are causative - whether the problem can be blamed on them. When someone or a group of someones implemented a change that can be reasonably concluded as causative to the problem, he or she or they are apt to reject that causation, because with causation comes blame.

This past Independence Day, a twenty-two year old man fired seventy shots from a "high powered rifle" into a parade, killing six and wounding over two dozen. This was one of those "national headlines" crimes, but it was only one 'gun crime' incident among dozens across the holiday weekend, and only a subset of the total crime blotter.

The responses are as routine as the crime has become, with many of them emerging before the facts and specifics of the matter were even ascertained, let alone disseminated. Across the board, the phrase is "gun crime," not "violent crime," because the presumptive, begging-the-question blame is on the tool rather than the perpetrator. This, even as the early information suggests that the culprit had offered much in the way of "advance notice" with his behavior and public presence (including social media). By the way, Illinois, where the shooting took place, already has a red flag law on its books.

Appended to the broad denouncements of gun crime are calls for gun restrictions, of course. Congress just passed a law, one whose ink is barely dry and is in the earliest stages of implementation, but those who want more gun control don't seem interested in seeing if their handiwork will make a difference (never let a crisis go to waste, and all that).

The problem the gun-control crowd has is that access to guns hasn't really changed in the past couple decades. Concealed carry laws have, in a pro-gun-rights direction, and making guns at home has become easier due to advancing consumer grade technology, but a survey of both the high-visibility and more 'routine' crime suggests neither of these is of much significance.

So, what has changed? On the legislative side of things, we have bail and other criminal justice reforms that have gone "soft" across the board, including on violent crimes against others. I've written often about reform-done-wrong, the correlation is obvious, and the causation seems just as obvious. On the cultural side, we have a couple candidate culprits. The toxic state of political discourse, the rise of social media and its depersonalizing and isolating effects, the rejection of the virtues of equality in favor of exalting victimhood, the "defund the police" movement and the concomitant rejection of traditional law and order, and the increase of echo-chamber tribalism both encouraged and facilitated by all of these.

A case can be made that every one of these changing parts of the landscape contribute to the rise in crime - not just gun crime, not just the high-visibility mass shootings that make for big-splash headlines, but all crime.

Unfortunately, the source of these changes happens to be the dominant cultural and political voice of the day, and since the mainstream news and opinion outlets are part of that voice, there's little incentive to hang blame on it and much incentive to point fingers elsewhere. Especially at favored bogeymen, including guns (where little has actually changed), right-wing extremism (extremists and sociopaths exist across the spectrum), and 'the other team' (everything is the Republicans' fault because they haven't accepted the wisdom of the Best-and-Brightest).

Japanese business culture in the 1980s embraced a "fix the problem, not the blame" philosophy. Politics, especially today, is however primarily about blame. Hang blame on your opponent, and even if you lack good remedies for the problems of the day, you are apt to defeat him. Taking blame, accepting that "the buck stops here," and remediating or undoing that which you did to fix the problem is what a good leader does, but that doesn't serve politicians if it is apt to cost them their jobs.

New York (city and state) has been experiencing a surge in crime, both violent and lower-level, in the past few years. The COVID lockdown is being blamed for some of it (but do not forget that 'COVID' and 'lockdown' are not synonymous - one happened, the other was a conscious decision), but the real landscape changes are the bail reforms, the soft-on-crime approach taken by progressive prosecutors, and an anti-policing attitude at the top of the political food chain.

To confess to any of this, however, would not only require a fundamental reversal of political beliefs, it would invite voter retribution. Can't have any of that. Instead, we will witness the usual blame game. It's the Right's fault, it's the guns, it's the pandemic, it's Russia, it's legislative gridlock, it's beyond our control.

Barely two weeks ago, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in NYSRPA v Bruen that rejected New York's "may-issue" doctrine regarding concealed-carry permits in the state. After a massive hue-and-cry, the legislature and the accidental governor leapt into action, banging out laws and regulations intended to press hard against the Bruen ruling, and skirt its intent as much as possible in preserving New York's anti-legal-gunowner zeitgeist. There'll be many court challenges, and much more gnashing of teeth before all the dust settles, but the speed of this response puts the lie to any assertions that Albany can't resolve the spike in crime born of its recently enacted policies.

Were I a believer in grand Machiavellian manipulations, I'd suggest a long con, where soft-on-crime policies were installed in order to cause crime to spike, and thereby to corral the public into supporting more gun restrictions. They're not that smart, not by a long shot, and they're not that capable. Politicians are either reactive, responding to the prevailing cultural whims, or ideological, clinging to a philosophy or belief no matter its failures, past and present. In both cases, the response to every problem starts with "it's not my fault!" and ends with blaming everyone but themselves.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The rise in crime, in societal chaos, and especially in the phenomenon of the mass murderer, is born of a societal sickness. That sickness has roots in both the advent of social media and in the morphing of progressivism into a coercive and divisive malignancy. The incentives are strong for both to continue metastasizing, unfortunately, making the problem very difficult to address. The first step has to be admitting to it, rather than seeking bogeymen and deflecting blame.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter