Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment

Crime’s Up, Crime’s Down

Perception isn’t the same as reality. Americans often perceive, for instance, that crime is increasing. But the truth is that crime has been on the decline for decades.

Can’t say that about crime in Great Britain, though. Crime rates there are up. According to a recent report, “Robbery is now 1.4 times more common in the UK than on the other side of the Atlantic, while assaults are 2.3 times more likely.” And though the U.S. still leads in murder, the situation is getting worse, not better, in Britain: “The murder rate has risen by 26 per cent in London and 85 per cent in Northumbria.” Yikes.

The report’s authors attribute the cause for this rise in crime to “the leniency of police towards suspects and the reluctance of the legal system to convict criminals and jail them.…” A government spokesperson, blaming previous administrations, insists that the “risks of being caught have been declining.”

This analysis sounds reasonable. And yet, my perception — based on what I read, that’s all — is that another set of factors has almost certainly contributed to England’s crime jump. While in America it is becoming easier to own, carry and conceal personal weaponry, it has become much more difficult in Great Britain. Even knives and hunting rifles are heavily regulated, and sidearms are pretty much prohibited. (In the past I’ve related some of the stories.)

With diminished capacity to defend themselves, peaceful Brits become easy targets for those who would abuse them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture incumbents term limits

Burial Rites

Libyan dictator Mu’ammer Gaddafi is dead. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez roams free.

Chavez recently returned to Venezuela from a cancer-​fighting tour of Cuba, proclaiming that “there is not a malignant cell in this body.”

  1. This is almost certainly not true, but
  2. let’s pretend it is, and just say that Hugo reserves his malignancy for his politics.

Usually, I’d contrast the lives of these two headmen with the more peaceful careers of term-​limited U.S. presidents. But if we stick to the news, to the very latest breaking stories, another contrast appears: The thousand-​year-​old Viking recently uncovered in Ardnamurchan, in the Scottish Highlands.

His burial was “high status,” we’re told. With him were his sword, his ax, his spear, and his shield. “He was somebody who had the capacity to do an awful lot of damage to people,” says one archaeologist.

In that way, the big-​shot Viking was like Gaddafi and Chavez. But we’ll never know what this particular Viking did, in the way of harm. Of Gaddafi’s and Chavez’s crimes, we know all too well.

Gaddafi won’t likely receive as respectful a post-​mortem treatment as the Viking received, at least if his “Weekend With Bernie” jaunt through Libyan streets is any indicator. It pays to die while still on top.

Which Chavez might be wise to ponder, instead of gloating about his cancer-​free cellular composition.

Dictators might not be term-​limited, but the ends of their careers tend to be pretty grim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

The Uncontroversial .45-​Caliber Slug

Some legislation is “shoot from the hip” … not carefully thought out, but obviously echoing a not-​uncommon sentiment, if not common sense itself.

Florida’s Representative Brad Drake (R‑Eucheeanna) has concocted a fine example, HB 325.  He got the idea from an overheard conversation. He was in a Waffle House, and one of his constituents was chatting about the Manuel Valle case in the Supreme Court. The convicted murderer had appealed many times, and what the Supreme Court was mulling over was the Valle’s objection to the manner of capital punishment, particularly the drug used in the lethal injection, to which he had been sentenced.

“You know, they ought to just put them in the electric chair or line them up in front of a firing squad,” said the Floridian.

So Drake wrote up a bill to junk lethal injection, offering, instead, the electric chair as the standard method, with a “firing squad” option.

“There shouldn’t be anything controversial about a .45-​caliber bullet,” Drake insists.

None of this addresses my big problem with capital punishment — our American states’ actual, sorry record on the issue. There have been far too many wrongfully convicted innocents.

I freely confess: If I had to be executed, I might prefer a firing squad.

But since I’d almost certainly be innocent, I’d rather not have to make any decision regarding my unjust killing.

Shoot-​from-​the-​hip legislating is not the proper response to the death penalty controversy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Becoming What You Oppose

A bombing, then a shooting. Norwegians reel from the Oslo and Utoya massacres. The casualty count has hit the nineties.

Early reports mentioned jihadist terrorism, but the malefactor appears to be Norwegian, white, and Christian. “It’s not just that Anders Behring Breivik is not a jihadist,” wrote Jesse Walker at Reason​.com. “It’s that he hails from the wing of the right that defines itself by its opposition to jihad, and to the leftists that it sees as jihad’s enablers.”

Like so many examples of jihad in the Mideast, Breivik’s “anti-​jihad jihad” is as puzzling and self-​defeating as was the anarchist “propaganda by the deed” of just over a century ago, as pointless as it is horrific. 

What’s worth noting is the demonstration of that too-​human propensity to adopt the tactics of one’s enemies. Desperate, hate-​filled zealots of Islam commit horrible crimes, indiscriminately killing innocents. Everyone with a lick of sense opposes such horrible actions (including most Muslims). But some people really worked up about this decide not only that “some have got to pay,” but that terrorism itself is worth emulating.

Human history is filled with such irrational over-​reaction: feuds, vendettas, even wars. 

Norway’s prime minister immediately assured everyone that his government’s reaction will be “more democracy, more openness.” “More democracy” might be vague, but he foreswore naivety, and besides, the sentiment is spot on. We who oppose violence must never resort to matching the criminals’ criminality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom

Thou Shalt Not Trespass

Some people are creeps. 

On Independence Day, someone — or a group of someones — broke into Fox News’s Twitter account for politics and put out false notices about the death of the United States President. Apparently, they meant this to smear Fox News, which, though calling itself “fair and balanced,” is in truth a conservative counter to the vaguely-​to-​staunchly leftward bias of ABC/​CBS/​NBC/​CNN/​MSNBC. The popularity of Fox really bugs many folks; some become unhinged on the subject.

And they forget that they should obey the law. And principles of decency.

Now, I don’t know what law in particular was broken. I can’t name it. But, just as I need no city council ordinance number to tell a stranger to get out of my house, after he entered without permission (finding the key, perhaps, in its secret spot in the garden — and hey: what was he doing in the garden anyway?), just so no one needs a special law to know that logging in to Twitter and trying a bunch of obvious and not-​so-​obvious passwords to gain access to someone else’s account is wrong. 

We know this by common law and common sense and simple, everyday morality.

I have a simple bit of advice for all political activists. Say you are angry and you want to really hurt your “enemy.”

First ask yourself: Is what I want to do unjust?

Lastly, you might want to consider: Is it tasteless?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Disarm Power-​Trippy Bureau-Thugs

“This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society,” says Quin Hillyer at the Center for Individual Freedom site.

By “this … sort of thing” Hillyer means pre-​dawn raids in which “thuggish bureaucrats … burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan payments.”

I’ve already commented on this vicious and stupid Department-​of-​Education-​sponsored raid. I return to the story to echo Hillyer’s suggestions for reform.

He observes that such baseless assaults on innocent citizens are “an increasing problem.… [A] horrific number of similar stories [show] that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.” More and more commonly, agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have no business having armed agents, nevertheless do.

Hillyer suggests that the SWAT-​like raid teams and the people who order them should both be subject to imprisonment for these flagrant abuses of power. He also wants Congress to stop criminalizing mere clerical errors and to “de-​arm federal agents.” The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, concurs, saying he’d “like to see some Tea Party members of Congress pass bills to disarm all non-​law-​enforcement agencies.”

Yes. Let the congressmen openly debate and vote whether rampant, arbitrary, armed raids of innocent citizens should or should not continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.