There is one certain way to make sure everyone knows you're an idiot -- get out your keyboard.

I absolutely boil over when I see yet another fool blame gun violence on black people. It is almost as bad as blaming it on the guns themselves. The latest story being linked to by the “alternative media” is by Karl Denninger, for his The Market Ticker website entitled “The Real Gun Violence Issue.” After poking fun at a couple anecdotal stories meant to expose the complete disregard for human life by inner city black people

Poking fun?  Murder is FUN?  Since when?

You know who the worst racist assholes are?  The ones who invent racism that doesn't exist in an attempt to label someone.

Of course you have dance around the accusation.  Like Paul did:

Then, after noting that our current President is in fact black (actually only ½), Mr. Denninger meanders into a vague conclusion that if somehow we didn’t allow the criminalization of drugs with “racist” propaganda, somehow all of these problems wouldn’t exist. He also wanders into blaming the ills of gun violence on alcohol and prescription opiates…I think.

Oh, so reading comprehension wasn't your strong suit in school?  Let me help you out.

Black people are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of gun violence. Black people shoot each other at a rate of five to six times that of any other ethnic group.  I didn't make this up, it's a fact. And it is also a fact that most of these homicides are black-on-black.  This isn't some grand revelation, it's a statistical reality.  Paul goes apeshit about my not linking the DOJ's statistics -- is that because he didn't want to look himself?  Oh darn, they really are there.

If there is a point to the article, and you have to look pretty hard to find one, I guess his point would be that if we just give black people easy access to what are now illegal drugs, and make our black President admit that black people are shooting each other in disproportionate numbers, they wouldn’t shoot each other anymore? Could this somehow be the magic bullet to end gun violence?

This is exactly the kind of thinking that brands gun rights activists as racist.

Oh really?  So let me see if I get this right -- we prohibited alcohol and got gun-toting violent gangs across our country as a result.  This taught us exactly...... nothing.

You see, guns are expensive never mind the penalties for misusing them -- like shooting a competing dealer on the street corner.  Therefore, given a choice most people with a dispute would rather sue or ask the government to prosecute.  

However, you can't sue someone for doing an illegal thing.  So when we make a "crime" out of an act that is a voluntary, consensual adult thing, such as drug use, then when there is a dispute exactly what method of resolving that dispute do you think people will use?

It gets worse.  Irrespective of whether you think duels are a suitable way to resolve disputes what's not in dispute is that shitty marksmanship gets innocent people killed. Those who are doing illegal things are not generally interested in openly displaying their acts; therefore said people don't go to the range and practice.  As a result the first time they fire said gun may well be when trying to settle said dispute, and they often miss and hit unintended people instead of their targets.  Sometimes they even shoot their own friends by accident while trying to shoot someone else.

One of the big issues here is that for everyone shot and killed somewhere between 5-10 more people are shot and don't die, which means that the problem is actually much worse than it appears.  And I mean, it's not like 71.4% of those doing the dying aren't Black in places like Chicago, right?  Oh wait.... damn, there's twice that shithead Denninger actually cited a source and statistic.

Mr. Denninger makes a completely undocumented statement about gun violence:

“Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called “blood-red streets” that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of “endemic gun violence” you find that something like three quarters of all gun murders disappear.”

Completely undocumented eh?  Uh, nope.

You do have to have a brain.  You also have to take a few seconds to look.  And you can choose your source of data; reports in the media (which often omit the race of the offender; the victim is harder since bleeding people sell newspapers and TV ad time; how do you show the blood without showing the person?) work just fine or, if you prefer, just go to the DOJ.

And then the shibboleths come out:

“The War on Drugs,” the ever expanding militarized police state, and our broken legal system are indeed problems. Most gun crime is generated by recidivist felons who have been let out. But those are symptoms. The problem itself is about opportunity, or a lack thereof, and if you want to boil it down to black people, like Mr. Denninger, since before the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, black people have been cheated out of the American Dream by a margin of 2 to 1. Measuring unemployment data , which is consistently 2 to 1 blacks against whites, food stamp data, also showing 2 to 1. And disproportionately, again, 2 to 1, the percentage of blacks trapped in the inner cities it becomes clear that just pointing a finger at black gun crime just isn’t fair. None of these trends have changed in the last 50 years, regardless of the color of the president.

Really?  We still have plantations, complete with gun-toting patrols and chain-link fences keeping those black people trapped in the inner cities?  Really?

So who's cheated out of what, exactly, and more to the point who's doing it to them?  Every human infant is born trying to learn something, even if it's just how to grab at some food.  It takes real talent and effort to block that, or worse, redirect it into criminal violence.  And how does that happen again in a nation where there are no restrictions on where you choose to live and public libraries dot the landscape?

No, we can't talk about how we enable people to sit on their ass and collect a check, instead of demanding that they get off their ass.  You see, if we enable people to sit on their ass and collect a check we can steal more than half of the check for ourselves and claim we're "helping" people.  (More on that later, complete with the math.)  We also can't talk about how we establish a system of unlawful acts that are illegal just because we say so, not because anyone else (other than the participants) is possibly harmed.  If we make all those acts illegal some people can make billions of dollars by caging others, destroying their economic opportunity with permanent felony records when the "offense" is simply doing something in the privacy of their own home that some "moral majority" believes merits caging them like a wild animal.  Oh, and then for good measure we can have branches of our government involved in providing and making available those very same things, you know, like the CIA has done for the last 50 or so years when it comes to the drug trade and our own DOJ has been doing here and now with drug gangs in Mexico, never mind the money laundering for same our banks have committed?

We didn't do that same sort of thing with gays, right?  We didn't criminalize being gay, did we?  Oh wait, we did. Now there are risks if you happen to be a gay man and like it in the back, but who's risks are they?  Yours.  Why is my business whether you choose to accept said risks in exchange for what you find to be a fulfilling adult choice?

We didn't criminalize black and white people intermarrying, right?  Oh wait, we did that too.  Exactly what harm came of black and white people deciding they loved one another?  Apparently plenty, because the entire purpose of marriage laws in the US originally was to prevent that from happening.

And then we criminalized people drinking alcohol.  Now certainly the overuse of alcohol is bad.  But who gets hurt if it's overused?  The person doing the over-using, right?  But gee, after we did that and removed disputes over alcohol distribution and production from the courts, and it instead went to the streets to be settled with guns, did we learn anything about how dumb that was?

OH HELL NO.

And you read correctly by the way. I said EVERY law abiding American should own and carry a gun. Those who need guns the most are black people in our inner cities, but unfortunately they have the ones that the anti-gunners have fought the hardest to disarm.

Ah, Paul thinks I'm an anti-gunner.  Boy, he doesn't read me much, does he?  Indeed, it's my position that everyone has a right to be armed, all the time.  Yes, even those who did bad things previously, provided they've served their time.  Why?  Because our justice system claims that once one has "paid their debt to society", well, it's paid!  We have a desperate need in this country to stop being hypocrites in damn near everything we do.

If we have a problem with recidivism it's not found in continuing restrictions on a lifetime basis.  It's that we don't lock people up until they're not dangerous any more!  In some cases that means locking them up forever, especially when you lock someone up for a crime, let them go and they do it again.  Like, for instance, the case I wrote about a few years ago where a jackass shot and killed a Marshal that came to serve him some papers in Florida.  He blasted said Marshal with a shotgun.

The problem is that he had done felony time twice before, not just once.  The first time for carjacking, an apparently fine way to earn a living.  We let him out after a few years (!) and he decided that sexual assault was a better idea than carjacking, got arrested and was convicted of that offense.

But we didn't learn a damn thing about dangerous people in that instance, did we?  Obviously not or we wouldn't have let him out again, and he wouldn't have been shooting a Marshal.

At the same time we imprison huge numbers of black people, destroying their civil rights and job prospects with a permanent felony record when their "offense" is nothing more than consensual adult conduct!

This, Paul thinks, is just fine and not really part of the problem.  Riiiiiight.

Most Americans, of all colors and creeds, are law abiding and only want a good life with a good job and opportunity.

Define "good job" please.  And while you're at it, please tell me how you're going to redefine the common law of business balance.  You know, the one that says you have to produce more than you cost, or you have no job in the first place.

Now square that with all the taxes, fees and assessments that our current government programs produce.  Tell me how the so-called "inner city trap" is real, other than by one's own decision to be a sponge off society.  And what does taking that welfare, EBT, Section 8 and other things do?  Why it makes the cost of employing people much higher, especially in those same cities, which means that it depresses employment prospects for the people who live there while raising their cost of living.  Ever price a gallon of milk or a pound of meat in those areas .vs. in the suburbs?  Try it sometime -- if you have the balls to visit the south side of Chicago.

It's simple economics, really.  What do the so-called "progressives" want to do?  Why they're interested in raising the minimum wage, further ratcheting up the price and removing people from the labor market on a competitive basis.

Nobody ever dreams of drug slinging on the streets one bullet away from either the grave or the jailhouse. But for the many of the most ambitious and promising of inner city black people, that is where they end up.

Oh, we agree on something.  Now let's talk about why, as soon as I get done with the list of points on which we do agree.

If you have to nail the inner city violence problem on one thing, it has to be the export of our manufacturing jobs to China. Nearly every industrial city in America has been decimated by a mass exodus of manufacturing from here to overseas, or more accurately, to China. 

Ah, we agree on something else.  Paul doesn't read me often, because if he did (or if he bothered to read Leverage) he'd know that one of the positions I advocate strongly for is wage and environmental parity tariffs (p164, if you're too damned lazy to read the whole book.)

Oh no, Denninger actually believes we ought not to provide incentives to exploit people!

Wait a second...... 

How come this only applies to international trade and not government handouts Paul?

It is the ignorance of writers like Denninger (and the idiots who say they are smart ALEX JONES) that portray 2nd Amendment supports as a bunch of narrow minded racist fools. Yes, black-on-black crime does account for a great deal of gun violence in America. But legalizing drugs to sedate ourselves with isn’t the answer (though legalizing some drugs does have many other benefits in taking the wind out of the overall police state). People with no legitimate opportunity will seek illegitimate opportunity, whether it be selling crack or selling fake Beanie Babies. And because black people find themselves disproportionately in inner cities, unemployed and poorly educated, the import culture of American manufacturing has hit them especially hard, and this is reflected in violent crime rates, including firearm violent crime rates.

So let me see if I get this right.  We provide a system of "free, public education" and spend well beyond $10,000 per kid per year attempting to prosecute that.  By the way, if there are 20 kids in a class (that's low by the way) and a decent teacher costs $50,000 a year in salary can someone explain where the other $150,000 went?  This system fails while at the same time districts spending about half that much manage to succeed.  Paul claims that we didn't "provide opportunity."  I instead allege that what we did was provide $150,000 of graft and the entire true purpose of said system has exactly zero to do with opportunity -- or education.

Paul also appears to think that I may be some sort of person who doesn't support the 2nd Amendment.  He obviously hasn't read much of my writing.  If there's a man or woman who needs a gun, it's that person who is most likely to get shot with one -- so they can attempt to defend themselves.  That would be the black person who lives in a big city, by the way.  But don't tell Bloomberg or Rahm that because both have done everything in their power to prevent said people from exercising their right to lawful self-defense.

But heh, intentionally claiming that someone has a position they don't actually hold is nothing new.  Bloomberg does it all the time.  So does Paul.  Paul could read what I wrote right here and apologize, but he won't.  That would require actually looking at the facts -- and my seven year history of public exposition on these very topics.  When it comes to real solutions to our economic issues, including those that fall disparately on people of color, he could have read Leverage, or just read my column.  

But he didn't do that either.

Instead he piles on the shibboleths and outright lies, such as the claim that public education will "save" us, while ignoring the fact that before there was free public education in this country the literacy rate was higher than it is now.  Educational spending and cost has advanced much faster than inflation and yet we get poorer and poorer results.  Quite clearly and objectively it's not working.

But you know someone has lost their mind when they take your positions and try to claim them as their own, along with claiming that you don't hold them.  For example:

And let law abiding Americans in our inner cities, regardless of how much melanin they have in their skin, have open access to inexpensive firearms. 

That, incidentally, has been a centerpiece of my writing on the 2nd Amendment and the issues facing our cities.

The fact is that big government doesn't work.  It doesn't work because it's laced with corruption, grift and fraud.  We can't educate kids in government schools because education is not what we do any more; as I've written repeatedly where did the shop classes go?  How do you hire someone to weld for $30+/hour who doesn't know how?  I learned how in Junior High School in the 1970s and so did every other kid in shop class!  Am I good at it?  Not really; I can do it well enough to re-attach the suspension to a car that's falling apart but it's not pretty.  However, some kids in that class were both competent and skilled.  How do you know if you're one of them if you never get to try?

How is it that we have a medical system that sucks one dollar in five out of our economy?  Who do you think pays for that?  The poor person who allegedly gets "free" medical care gets nothing of the sort; that "free" medical care costs them a job because the tax rates (or purchasing power dilution) that it forces results in the cost of employing them ratcheting beyond their value to the enterprise.  Nobody gets a job when they cost more than they benefit the enterprise -- period.  We have a four trillion dollar Federal Budget of which almost 60% is comprised of welfare, "pensions" and "free" medical care.  That's more than two trillion dollars a year that is sucked out of the economy and handed to someone.

Now let me point something out.  Let's take the 50 million lowest-earning (on a per-capita basis) Americans of working age.  That's the bottom 20%, approximately (there are about 247 million working-age Americans as of last count.)

Let's stop all of the Welfare, Pension and "free" Medical spending.  

All of it.  Right now, today.

That would be $2.3 trillion dollars this fiscal year we would not spend at the Federal level.

What are we going to do with the $2.3 trillion dollars?

We could simply leave it in the economy, but if we did that some of those 50 million (and their children) would starve.  Not very many of them and not for very long, because economic opportunity would blossom if left alone, but some would undoubtedly starve.  Some of those who did would be little old Grandmothers, and that would look very bad on the evening news.

But -- you say -- those people need these programs.

Ok, how much are they getting?  Put a different way, what if we got rid of the programs but not the money?

Well let's do the math:

$2,300,000,000,000 / 50,000,000 = $46,000.

Each.

Economic "opportunity" eh?  Can you explain to me exactly what we get for our $46,000 per working-age adult in the bottom 20%, an amount that were we to have married couples among that bottom 20% of the adult earning population would have each of those couples (households) gifted $92,000 a year tax free?

How many inner city people have $46,000 to spend -- say much less $92,000 per household?  Zero!

Naw, we can't have that discussion when it comes to whether we should do moar public spending, can we?  Why not?  Maybe because if we did the inexorable conclusion would be that we should do zero public spending of this sort and shut down all of these programs!

Instead Paul and others continue to run the shibboleths about "public education" (which has never worked as a public enterprise as demonstrated by literacy rates before and after it came into effect), medical care being a "right" (while ignoring the monopolies that can only exist because of government force) and so-called "public safety nets" that in fact have available, on a combined basis, forty-six thousand dollars per person in the lowest 20% of earning capacity among adults of working age and yet we have people who are alleged to be "trapped" in inner cities when we are quite-capable on a fiscal basis of simply giving them that same $46,000.

It is the willful and intentional refusal to face facts as demonstrated by Paul and millions of others that has both created and continues to place the boot of government thugs on the necks of minorities.

Exactly who is the racist asshole here, eh and why is it that people like Paul won't pull out the paper and pencil or -- if that's asking too much of his government school education -- a calculator?