It's All Been A Lie

After listening to the left whining for the last 20 or so years about the plague of the dreaded "assault weapon" upon the land to the point that some folks probably are surprised to not find them lying in the gutters outside their houses, the NYT is admitting that it's all been in vain.

“We spent a whole bunch of time and a whole bunch of political capital yelling and screaming about assault weapons,” Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans said. He called it a “zero sum political fight about a symbolic weapon.”

So neither the near mythical Kalashnikov nor the M-16 turned out not to be the corner drug dealers weapon of choice for rectifying inner city boundaries after all.

The AWB of 1992 was probably responsible for saving the Clinton presidency from itself by triggering a turnover of the House and Senate to the Republicans whose policies kept Clinton from enacting his worst ideas like Hillarycare.  That and the Republican tradition of nominating the fellow who finished second in the previous primaries gave Slick Willie his second term.

David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argues that the issue of gun violence can seem enormous and intractable without first addressing poverty or drugs. A closer look at the social networks of neighborhoods most afflicted, he says, often shows that only a small number of men drive most of the violence. Identify them and change their behavior, and it’s possible to have an immediate impact.

Or you could simply identify them, convict them and jail them. That works too.