Mayor Giuliani brought down the crime rate in New York City, an seemingly impossible task, by enforcing the little laws. When bums are allowed to litter they tend to go on to outfight robbery.
Every Jewish comedian criticized this as “fascism.” Even Leno mentioned comedians as part of the liberal complex, so I’m not saying anything wild here.
It did, however, WORK. I would never have imagined it would work so well.
This is also, as the comedians said, a form of profiling. The guy who harasses people or openly throws paper on the street is likely to more serious crimes. They are largely minorities, of course.
In other words niggling enforcement of laws works, not because it is niggling enforcement, but because it is a cover for profiling those who, by the color of their skin, are clearly more likely to be lawbreakers.
But niggling enforcement has an entirely different beneficial effect on law abiding people in America.
In America, the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it rigorously. When I came up absolutely everyone who was fashionable was for New York gun control. That ruined Rosie O’Donnell.
I think Zero Tolerance for Weapons has done the new generation a lot of good. Everyone knows about some little kid who was thrown out of school for carrying a plastic knife or something to school.
Gun control is a struggle liberals have lost big time. You know that because they don’t mention it any more. The cops really enforced it because they wanted to be the only high-school graduates who got to walk around with guns.
For people without inferiority complexes, having to carry a weapon is a bother. What really stopped pilots from carrying guns was not he knee jerk reaction to it by liberals. Pilots don’t have the cops’ inferiority complex and they don’t WANT to have to carry a gun.
So they don’t.
That was something most people didn’t THINK about, my continuing theme here. They were arguing over whether a man who had over two hundred lives in his hands should be ALLOWED to carry a gun.
Unlike flying a passenger jet, they said, a gun is a big responsibility.
On TV, the detectives are always taking off their coats and showing guns on them, which makes cops feel Macho. But a pilot has no need of that to get respect in HIS costume.
That’s how human beings think, gang.
If a cop doesn’t have his gun, he usually gets fined. If we want pilots to carry weapons, we will have to pay them to do it. Most lawmakers seemed to think they were “giving” pilots guns, and the pilots would have to take a course to learn how to use them on a plane.
I would guess that if you don’t know the mechanics of planes, training you in the use of guns on a place will be very, very hard. But the lawmakers were so fixated on guns they considered any kind of that magic word police, or Air Marshals, should carry the guns.
Walking in line to board a plane with my shoes off and my pants sagging without the belt, I have mentioned o others around me that the oil countries that sponsor terrorism should have to help pay for this crap.
I point out that if you ask any terrorist one thing he really wants, his answer will include making sure nobody on board is armed. I worked in a prison, and I have yet to find a single prisoner who is not all for gun control.
I have also never found a single prisoner who had the slightest difficulty getting a gun to commit a crime with, in New York or South Carolina. The gun that shot Reagan was bought in Hawaii and used in DC, two places which have gun laws that make that make New York look wimpish.
I have also never had a single passenger disagree with me about how the terrorists should help pay for this nonsense.
#1 by Dave on 08/17/2010 - 9:49 am
The police in Manhattan and in NYCs public housing made a decision to create a culture by ceasing to tolerate disrespect of public values on the street, in the common areas, and in the subway system and certainly proved it could be done on the basis of HEAVY POLICING.
Manhattan has the vitality that you would expect in any prison – prison being an accurate description of what Manhattan is for most ordinary people.
And it is true that crime can be suppressed and a much more reasonable public environment created by heavy policing that invests the seemingly more minor violations with their real meaning in the enforcement of public order and the suppression of crime.
But Screwtape is far wilier than that. There is not one police officer in NYC that is capable of penetrating the veils of the evil dominion they blindly serve. And thinking them capable of the kind of profiling that really counts is like asking a dog to pick a lock.
Ask very little of the police for it is only very little they are capable of.
#2 by seriouswon on 08/17/2010 - 11:51 am
Great play on words with “niggling” Bob. Love it.
#3 by BGLass on 08/17/2010 - 5:33 pm
After 9-11, Giuliani’s clean-up vanished, the law breakers were around, less police, and then more military-looking street guns, too. They switched to dumb looking really young people wearing fatigues and swinging around their machine guns in train stations. The youth gunners had the look of people who might “go off.” Not even the protection of the Giuliani days. Swats just standing around. But people accused of being backward white rednecks still see the inclusion of such things in their lives, sometimes, as “progress.” They are catching up with the big cities where people have all this incredible sophistication, the inevitability of police state.
#4 by Wandrin on 08/21/2010 - 5:18 am
“Even Leno mentioned comedians as part of the liberal complex, so I’m not saying anything wild here.”
Comedy is a huge part of it – especially for the young. To a large extent comedy is the vanguard because they can say things as jokes and get away with it thereby preparing the ground well in advance of the time when serious multicultists can say the same thing seriously.
If you look at early political satire programs in the UK like Monty Python what they were actually doing was undermining the moral authority of the established order – army officers dressed as ballerinas, judges in women’s underwear etc. The Pythons themselves may not have been consciously political but i bet the producer who chose that show over other alternatives understood.
TV comedy shows, especially political satire, are more powerful than the news imo because more people watch them.