Saturday, March 31, 2012

WHY RICH LOWRY IS AN IDIOT

Rich Lowry at National Review Online, in a post titled "The Murders That Don't Count":

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a national symbol of random violence.

Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. "She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant," a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18, shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a rival gang member.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow did not write a column about Jefferson's killing as a symbol of the perils of being a young black woman in America.

Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach, N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A 19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the boardwalk, was charged in the shooting. Tysha's heartbroken mother was not featured on all the national TV shows.

In January, 12-year-old Kade'jah Davis was shot and killed when, allegedly, 19-year-old Joshua Brown showed up at her Detroit house to demand the return of a cellphone from Davis’ mother. When Brown didn't get the phone, he fired shots through the front door. No one held high-profile street protests to denounce gunplay over such trifles....

An allegedly racially motivated killing, though, gins up the outrage machine in a way the routine murder of young blacks doesn't....

In America, the lives of young black people are cheap, unless they happen to fit the right agenda.


You know what's one huge difference is between the Zimmerman killing and every killing Lowry lists?

It's simple: In every case Lowry lists, everyone in America acknowledges that a crime has been committed. No one questions the notion that these killers should be arrested and tried. No one thinks the law protects the killers -- no one thinks the law ought to.

There's more beyond this. Liberals would like to see more economic opportunity for America's have-nots, and a reduction in easy access to guns. Liberals believe that personal responsibility plays a huge part, but that societal conditions do also.

But changing those conditions doesn't fit the right's agenda.