Guns Don't Kill People; Liberal Policies Kill People !

Uh-oh! An agenda-driven, lobby-funded, anti-gun report has just come out, and you know the media has to jump on it like an un-neutered puppy onto a plush toy...from Arms and the Law:

Yesterday the antigun Violence Policy Center (as in Joyce Foundation is its main income, $400,000 a year) issued a press release focusing on black homicide rates. Chuckle--it's a study of how to pick and choose statistics to get the desired result . Example: the states with the lowest black homicide rates are gunnie South Dakota and Montana. DC is omitted, probably because it would have an astronomical rate -- despite its handgun ban. And its lead target is Pennsylvania, with the study proclaiming it has the highest black homicide rate in the country.

Other oddities I noticed within the report:
Wyoming ranks 19th highest for black homicide rates, despite having only one black fatality in all of 2004.
Vermont ranks even higher, at 12th, with also a mere single black fatality
Idaho ranks 15th, with two black handgun deaths. For shame! And speaking of which...

This insane skewing of statistics to produce a desired result does not deter insane editorials in newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer:

...shamefully, Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of black victims; in 2004, the most recent year statistics are available, Pennsylvania reported 398 homicides with black victims, a rate of 29.5 per 100,000, one-and-a-half times the national rate among black victims, and six times the national rate of all homicides.
Over half- 65 percent - came from Philadelphia. Firearms were the cause of deaths of nearly 90 percent of these.
We can almost hear the sermons that will be delivered from pulpits on this subject come Sunday, especially those in black churches:
Why are young blacks killing each other? (Most of these homicides are intra-racial.)

How dare the blacks look inward! The Philly Inquirer reminds them not to blame themselves for black-on-black violence, but to blame "The Man" instead:

...guns occupy a unique position: They're a problem that can be fixed more quickly, by passing better laws.
Then again, "quick" is no piece of cake when it comes to Congress, either, who is responsible for the outrageously lax gun laws now on the books. Actually, we call to task not only Congress but the National Rifle Association, which breaks into hives at the prospect of any criminal not able to get his hands on as many guns as he wants, whenever he wants them, in the name of Liberty.

"Liberty" for the comman man? Perish the thought!

But who (or what) is actually killing the black men of the Eastern Inner Cities?

I'll help you out; based on something I posted a few weeks back...you see, the federal government is to blame, but not the way the simpletons at the Inquirer think. It is not about lax gun control laws – see those pesky stats above on Montana and South Dakota.
But maybe...just maybe...it has something to do with the fact that the New Jersey Turnpike has now become the major gun-running road on the East Coast, if not the whole damn country. And the police legally cannot do anything to stop it:

Weapons seizures plummet on Turnpike
Uproar on racial profiling spurred State Police shift

Cops and politicians call Interstate 95 the "Iron Pipeline" because it is a popular route for criminals smuggling firearms from the South into Newark and other Northeastern cities where gun violence abounds. A big link in that pipeline is the New Jersey Turnpike, where the State Police used to seize scores of guns every year.

But they don't anymore.

Gun arrests and gun seizures have plummeted on the Turnpike in the last decade, according to data provided by the State Police in response to a request under the Open Public Records Act...

The decline comes at a time when homicides and shootings are on the rise in Newark, the state's largest city, where cops are taking record numbers of firearms off the streets. When those illegal guns are traced to their original sale, the most common source states turn out to be along the I-95 corridor in the South

For many years, troopers made a priority of pulling over Turnpike motorists and searching their cars in hopes of catching drug traffickers and gun runners. That effort was abandoned in 1999, after a state investigation found troopers were stopping drivers based on their skin color, a civil rights abuse known as racial profiling. Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, the State Police were put under the oversight of federal monitors and forced to change its patrol tactics....

Now Turnpike cops cannot pull over black motorists for fear of persecution by the PC thugs in Congress.
The gun-runners know it, and flaunt it.
And black folk die in droves, especially in Philadelphia, and Newark.
Incidentally, the Turnpike goes right through these cities.

The liberal left is killing blacks with their misguided policies. It’s not “lax gun laws”, it's the handcuffing of the officers that are charged with interdicting illegal weapons - that is the problem here.

Any chance of getting Congress to fix it? Unlikely; seems like they cannot wait to apply this broken writ to National Security as well....

UPDATE 2/1: More Philadelphia stupidity exposed at Blonde Sagacity:

Mayor John Street suggested that the war in Iraq was the cause of the city's gun violence increased.