Violence is growing, and rioting is now moving into neighborhoods

Violence in America’s larger cities, like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and New York, has been going on for decades. Recent violence in other cities, that began as peaceful protests of police misbehavior or malfeasance, have been going on for more than a hundred nights. And in neither case have these situations been effectively dealt with, or in the case of the recent riots, hardly dealt with at all.

The violence in Seattle, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Kenosha, Wisconsin and St. Louis, Missouri began as peaceful protests of the treatment of black residents by police. But while there may still be some peaceful protesters in these cities, they have been pushed aside by violent rioters.

 

These people are bent on violence and destruction, looting businesses and sometimes setting them on fire, trashing and burning police vehicles and even police stations, attacking police officers who are trying to protect people and property, and threatening and assaulting bystanders. How this violence is supposed to help anyone, the rioters have not said.

 

The violence is moving from the downtowns into neighborhoods, with homes being threatened. After rioters broke through the gate of their St. Louis residential community, a couple appeared outside their home holding firearms to protect themselves and their property from the criminals. The rioters appeared at the curb, threatening to take over their home, arguing about who was going to occupy which room in the house, or perhaps, to burn it down and kill the owners.

 

Not so many years ago, these groups would have been quickly dealt with, many arrested and charged with crimes. Not today. Today, the two people trying to protect their home from criminals were the ones charged with crimes.

 

Today, instead of protecting the citizens and businesses in their cities, mayors tell the police to keep their distance, and leave the rioters alone, still inexplicably referring to them as “protesters,” as if there is no violence. One mayor’s plan is to just let things take their course until the rioters get tired and give up.

 

Another mayor did act, but only after the rioters approached her home. And still another mayor has moved his family after rioters tried to burn down the condo building where they resided.

 

The longer it takes to start countering the rioters, the stronger the actions against them will have to be to get them to stop, as this period of doing nothing has greatly emboldened them.

 

People across the nation have taken notice that this violence against innocent people and destruction of their property is growing. They have begun to worry about their own safety. If elected “leaders” will not allow police to interact to protect their citizens, the citizens understand that they will have to protect themselves and their property.

 

People are arming themselves in greater numbers than before. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports that as of July, 2020, 40 percent of firearms purchases were by people who have never owned a firearm before.

 

The NSSF, utilizing the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, determined that from January through July, 12.1 million background checks were recorded, which is 71.7 percent higher than the same period last year. The NSSF notes that this equates to nearly 5 million first-time gun owners in the seven months surveyed. More than a few gun purchases were by women who fear for their security.

 

“This is a tectonic shift in the firearm and ammunition industry marketplace and complete transformation of today’s gun-owning community,” said Lawrence G. Keane, a senior vice president of NSSF. Many or most of those purchases are due to the out-of-control riotous element causing so much damage and injury in recent weeks. It is likely that some of these new gun owners were previously not strong supporters of our Second Amendment, but have seen the light, and now appreciate the right to bear arms for their own defense.

 

Evidence is growing that the riots involve people who don’t live in the cities where the riots take place. Police in Kenosha report that 175 rioters were arrested. More than 100 of them were not Kenosha residents, and in fact, had come there from 44 other towns and cities, according to local media.

 

Following the Republican National Convention event in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 27, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and his wife were shoved, shouted at and threatened as they walked to their hotel, and had to be protected by police. Paul believes the crowd that protested President Donald Trump’s speech was not there by chance.

 

He said they were organized, well-equipped, and had a neater appearance than rioters usually do. "My feeling is that there's interstate criminal traffic being paid for across state lines, but you won't know unless you arrest them,” he said, adding, “I promise you that at least some of the members and the people who attacked us were not from D.C....they were paid to be here."

 

If rioters are financially supported and being bused to locations, they are much more dangerous than groups arising spontaneously, and riots will most likely continue. And, they will move into other parts of the country. This violence must be stopped.

The emotional whitewashing of history is an enormous mistake

The tragic and indefensible killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of city police officers created understandable emotions of pain and anger in the country.

We have all witnessed the resulting peaceful protesting of police brutality against citizens. But in many cases protests turned into violent, dangerous rioting, and now rising anti-slavery emotion has spawned tearing down statues associated with that dark period in American history, and condemnation of other things reminiscent of that period.

While these efforts have strong support, other people see them as wrong; as trying to whitewash history, instead of leaving these statues and other things to remind us of the evils of slavery, now gone from America for more than 150 years.

If slavery was a mistake of our nation — and it was — so is trying to erase every last vestige of it. We learn from our mistakes, so that we don’t make them again. But if there is nothing to remind us of our errors, at some point in the future we may again travel down those paths.

Through the years people have made important, illuminating comments about such situations.

One of the most relevant is this one: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell, 1984

Two more are from a current source, the brilliant Thomas Sowell: “Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.”

And: “Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people ‘feel’ have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick.”

HUD Secretary Ben Carson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” recently, “We’ve reached a point in our society where we dissect everything and try to ascribe some nefarious notion to it,” he said. “We really need to move away from that. We need to move away from being offended by everything, of going through history and looking at everything, of renaming everything. I mean, think about the fact that some of our universities, some of our prestigious universities, have a relationship with the slave trade. Should we go and rename those universities?

“It really gets to a point of being ridiculous after a while,” Carson said. “And, you know, we’re going to have to grow up as a society.”

And then there is this: “The modern Left: they cancel ‘Gone with the Wind’ ... and then burn Atlanta.” — U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX.

Other targets include brand names that have been part of American life for decades, without hurting anyone: Eskimo Pie, Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix and syrup, Uncle Ben’s rice, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, and Cream of Wheat breakfast mix. These brands are considering changing their names and/or appearance due to pressure from the change culture.

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, recently ordered the removal of four portraits of former Speakers. “As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” she wrote in a letter requesting the removal of the portraits, “there is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

The portraits are of Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, Howell Cobb of Georgia, James L. Orr of South Carolina and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia. Crisp served in the Confederate Army, but entered politics after the Civil War in the 1870s. The other three were in Congress before the War, and then held high civilian office in the Confederacy.

Pelosi has been in Congress for a lifetime, and is Speaker of the House for the second time. Why did the presence of these four previous Speakers’ portraits not drive her crazy before now?

But let’s not ignore the other side of this coin. The advocates of whitewashing unpopular items from our history sometimes goof.

Along with the statues of Confederate luminaries, the cleansers of history also wanted to remove the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was in fact the leader of the Union Army that defeated the Confederates, and became the President of the United States after the War from 1869 to 1877. Yet, the cancel culture wants his statue destroyed.

And then there are objects that fit the definition of things that they want removed, but maybe after thinking about it, they might change their minds.

A Facebook tweet reads: “Yale University was named for Elihu Yale. Not just a man who had slaves. An actual slave trader. I call on @Yale to change its name immediately and strip the name of Yale from every building, piece of paper, and merchandise …”

The idea of whitewashing history is not a good thing.

The push to defund police is an ill-advised and unnecessary move

For weeks the country lived in fear of being infected with and dying from the COVID-19 virus. And thousands did become infected, many suffered but survived, and more than 110,000 lost their lives.

Then suddenly, the daily focus on COVID-19 was replaced by the death of a black man at the hands of a white Minneapolis, Minnesota policeman, and the aftermath. Video of parts of the arrest of George Floyd stunned the nation, resulting in the initial firing of the policeman and three of his fellow officers, who now face criminal charges.

Peaceful protests of this death quickly turned violent, groups of protesters turned into mobs, businesses were robbed and burned, innocent people and police were attacked and injured, rioters saw strong police response, and many were arrested.

Curiously, some of the people who witnessed Floyd dying by a criminal act protested against that criminal act by committing their own criminal acts.

These riots are not about justice for an undeserved death. They are an insult to the true, conscientious protesters and to the memory they have of George Floyd. They are all about causing damage and pain for the sake of causing damage and pain.

There is no justice in burning down random buildings, looting stores for TVs and whatever else they can steal, attacking innocent bystanders and police officers, throwing bricks and water bottles at them, and killing a retired black police captain who was protecting a pawn shop that was being robbed.

Clear thinking has been told to stay-at-home, and raw emotion now controls the mobs. Some say there are outsider-anarchists whose goal is to stir violence and are fanning the flames of revolution.

New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones said in an interview,

"And violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. And to put those things — to use the same language to describe those two things I think really — it's not moral to do that." In her mind, destroying things in response to what happened to Floyd is okay: “Destroying property … is not violence.”

Tell that to the numerous victims of rioting in Minneapolis who face damages to their businesses and other property that are said to exceed $55 million. Millions more damage has been done across the nation.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo believes that “protests” shouldn’t be peaceful. "And please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” he said. 

Perhaps the U.S. Constitution can help Cuomo correct his gross mis-understanding. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people ‘peaceably’ [emphasis added] to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” A non-peaceable assembly — a violent riot — is not protected, no matter what the reason for the assembly.

It is stunning to see the breadth and depth of the attitude to now accept the injuries, deaths and destruction from riots as a normal part of protesting.

In what may be the goofiest idea of all, celebrities — those possessors of ultimate wisdom on all things — endorse the idea of “defunding police departments.” These self-important folks say the money spent on police would be better spent on “building healthy communities.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wants the 800-officer Minneapolis Police Department disbanded. In a tweet she said, “The Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. It’s time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis.”

“Yes,” said Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender. “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.”

Someone breaking into your home? A riot on your street? Who you gonna call? Ilhan Omar, Lisa Bender?

In Los Angeles, $100 million to $150 million may soon be cut from funding the LAPD. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced Sunday that the city would move funding from the New York Police Department to youth initiatives and social services.

However, we must decide if the current situation truly warrants such drastic actions against all police departments nationwide, which seems to be what celebrity advisors want.

Far more important than the pure number of people killed by police is how many of them were unjustified, and how many contributed to their deaths by resisting police? The former number is easier to find than the latter two numbers.

Last year, nearly 1,100 people were killed by police, according to Mapping Police Violence (MPV), a research group. MPV defines police killing as any time someone dies as a result of “being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.” 

The MPV data does not say how many contributed to their own demise by resisting arrest, how many were unjustly killed, or died by accident. That is critical information in determining how great a problem police criminality actually is.

Eliminating unjustified killings by police is a critical goal, and the solution must be a sensible plan, not an emotional, chaotic one.