“How many more times are we going to watch this on the news? How many times are we going to read about it and say, ‘Oh we can’t do nothing to stop it?’” House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford demanded three years ago while pushing for gun control. "It’s time that we do all that we can to protect our children, to protect the lives of other people’s children, to protect the lives of people that simply want to go to Wal-Mart and go back-to-school shopping."
Now, acting as the lawyer for Jewayne Price, the suspect in the Columbiana Centre mall shooting in which 14 people, as young as 15 and as old as 73, were injured, the South Carolina Democrat watched as his client was released with an ankle monitor so he can go back to work.
All that we can do to protect our children involves banning guns while freeing criminals.
“We’ve got to take common-sense approaches towards controlling gun ownership to make sure bad people don’t get guns,” Rutherford has insisted.
Except when those bad people are his clients.
“I need the students of South Carolina to know that we are paying attention and that ‘never again’ actually means something in South Carolina,” Rutherford had argued during a previous gun control proposal. I’m sure that the 15-year-old injured in this attack is happy to hear that.
As are the children he wanted to condemn to death when he led a walkout to protest the fetal heartbeat bill, putting the abortion lobby ahead of the lives of babies.
Never again, to Rutherford, means banning AR-15s and freeing criminals from prison.
Rutherford’s involvement hammers home the paradox of Democrat politicians who believe that guns need to be controlled and criminals don’t. Their efforts have unleashed an unprecedented wave of shootings in major cities even while they clamor for more gun bans that don’t work.
Instead of criminalizing guns, we need to criminalize criminals.
Murder are up 51% in South Carolina in the last 5 years.
Why might that be? The disastrous Omnibus Crime Reduction and Sentencing Reform Act of 2010, backed by Democrats and far too many Republicans, led to the closure of six prisons and cut the prison population by thousands of criminals. The prison population has declined from 24,000 a decade ago to less than 19,000. The projected population, accounting for demographics, should have been close to 30,000. That’s a difference of around 10,000.
What happens when a third of the prison population is roaming around South Carolina?
Murder rates are the highest they've been since 1993. In the 90s, growing crime rates were rolled back by locking up criminals with a clear turnaround kicking in by the end of the decade so that despite significant population growth in the new century, murders fell sharply and so did most other crimes. The same prison system that Rutherford decries and that pro-crime South Carolina politicians helped dismantle had done its job. Now that job has been undone.
If Rutherford really cares about protecting children, he would fight to lock up criminals. Instead, not just as a lawyer, but as a legislator, he has battled to keep criminals out of prison. And he has blamed anything and everything for shootings except the criminals carrying them out.
Rutherford, who had previously opposed attempts to keep Drag Queen Story Hour out of children's libraries, also blamed FOX News for shootings, claiming, "these networks that broadcast what they call news, but it's not. It's really hate speech and coded language."
FOX News doesn’t kill people. Neither do inanimate objects. Criminals kill people.
Rutherford previously blamed the NRA and gun owners for making it too difficult to pass gun control legislation, but the latest mass shooting isn’t a call for gun control, but criminal control.
Controlling criminals is a much more just solution than gun control which means controlling everyone. And yet given a choice between controlling criminals and everyone, Democrats like Rutherford invariably choose to restrict everyone’s rights instead of restricting criminals.
But if they can’t even control criminals, how do they hope to control everyone?
The politician and lawyer has addressed anti-police rallies and represented the family of a teen shot by police while advocating for police defunding.He pushed a bill to ban law enforcement from using automatic license plate readers, but proposes “controlling gun ownership”.
Rep. Rutherford's House Bill 3322 would, in its original form, have released kidnappers, robbers, and killers while wiping out mandatory minimums.
None of this is a “common sense” approach to crime.
Rutherford has fought for mask mandates in schools, denouncing Gov. McMaster for proposing to protect people "without forcing them to do things that they do not want to do."
The House Dem leader supports governments forcing people to do things when it comes to COVID or gun ownership, but not when it comes to murder, robbery, and drugs.
People not wearing masks are not a threat. A firearm is not a threat. A criminal however is.
The Columbiana Centre mall shooting shows how crime has begun to affect the state’s capital.
Police Chief Skip Holbrook has been reported as saying that around four percent of the population are committing 80 percent of the violent crimes in the city. That’s as true of Columbia, as it is of most major cities. A small population of career criminals and gang members is committing most of the crimes. When that population is locked up and closely monitored, public safety dramatically improves, and when they’re set free, they rob, stab, shoot, and kill at will.
“When you have a country in which you have more firearms on our streets than you actually have people, we got a problem,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin whined. "We need more help from the State Legislature, we need more help from the national government, the federal government, and we need more help from each and every one of our citizens doing our share.”
Benjamin, like Rutherford, is wrong. The number of guns isn’t the problem, the number of criminals is. When Democrats free criminals and lock up guns, everyone lives in terror.
The Columbiana Centre mall shooting is just the latest reminder of that simple reality.
The way back begins with reversing South Carolina’s disastrous pro-crime measures which were enacted with “guidance” from left-wing and libertarian pro-crime groups that cut prison populations while growing the size of the criminal population roaming the streets.
Politicians boasted of saving hundreds of millions of dollars by closing prisons. Now as crime rates soar, the money gained has been lost ten times over.
And we can't even begin to put a price on the loss of human life.
House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford is right. "It’s time that we do all that we can to protect our children, to protect the lives of other people’s children, to protect the lives of people that simply want to go to Wal-Mart and go back-to-school shopping."
Mall shooters shouldn’t be roaming the streets. We can protect our children from them.
All we have to do is lock them up.
All that we can do to protect our children involves banning guns while freeing criminals.
“We’ve got to take common-sense approaches towards controlling gun ownership to make sure bad people don’t get guns,” Rutherford has insisted.
Except when those bad people are his clients.
“I need the students of South Carolina to know that we are paying attention and that ‘never again’ actually means something in South Carolina,” Rutherford had argued during a previous gun control proposal. I’m sure that the 15-year-old injured in this attack is happy to hear that.
As are the children he wanted to condemn to death when he led a walkout to protest the fetal heartbeat bill, putting the abortion lobby ahead of the lives of babies.
Never again, to Rutherford, means banning AR-15s and freeing criminals from prison.
Rutherford’s involvement hammers home the paradox of Democrat politicians who believe that guns need to be controlled and criminals don’t. Their efforts have unleashed an unprecedented wave of shootings in major cities even while they clamor for more gun bans that don’t work.
Instead of criminalizing guns, we need to criminalize criminals.
Murder are up 51% in South Carolina in the last 5 years.
Why might that be? The disastrous Omnibus Crime Reduction and Sentencing Reform Act of 2010, backed by Democrats and far too many Republicans, led to the closure of six prisons and cut the prison population by thousands of criminals. The prison population has declined from 24,000 a decade ago to less than 19,000. The projected population, accounting for demographics, should have been close to 30,000. That’s a difference of around 10,000.
What happens when a third of the prison population is roaming around South Carolina?
Murder rates are the highest they've been since 1993. In the 90s, growing crime rates were rolled back by locking up criminals with a clear turnaround kicking in by the end of the decade so that despite significant population growth in the new century, murders fell sharply and so did most other crimes. The same prison system that Rutherford decries and that pro-crime South Carolina politicians helped dismantle had done its job. Now that job has been undone.
If Rutherford really cares about protecting children, he would fight to lock up criminals. Instead, not just as a lawyer, but as a legislator, he has battled to keep criminals out of prison. And he has blamed anything and everything for shootings except the criminals carrying them out.
Rutherford, who had previously opposed attempts to keep Drag Queen Story Hour out of children's libraries, also blamed FOX News for shootings, claiming, "these networks that broadcast what they call news, but it's not. It's really hate speech and coded language."
FOX News doesn’t kill people. Neither do inanimate objects. Criminals kill people.
Rutherford previously blamed the NRA and gun owners for making it too difficult to pass gun control legislation, but the latest mass shooting isn’t a call for gun control, but criminal control.
Controlling criminals is a much more just solution than gun control which means controlling everyone. And yet given a choice between controlling criminals and everyone, Democrats like Rutherford invariably choose to restrict everyone’s rights instead of restricting criminals.
But if they can’t even control criminals, how do they hope to control everyone?
The politician and lawyer has addressed anti-police rallies and represented the family of a teen shot by police while advocating for police defunding.He pushed a bill to ban law enforcement from using automatic license plate readers, but proposes “controlling gun ownership”.
Rep. Rutherford's House Bill 3322 would, in its original form, have released kidnappers, robbers, and killers while wiping out mandatory minimums.
None of this is a “common sense” approach to crime.
Rutherford has fought for mask mandates in schools, denouncing Gov. McMaster for proposing to protect people "without forcing them to do things that they do not want to do."
The House Dem leader supports governments forcing people to do things when it comes to COVID or gun ownership, but not when it comes to murder, robbery, and drugs.
People not wearing masks are not a threat. A firearm is not a threat. A criminal however is.
The Columbiana Centre mall shooting shows how crime has begun to affect the state’s capital.
Police Chief Skip Holbrook has been reported as saying that around four percent of the population are committing 80 percent of the violent crimes in the city. That’s as true of Columbia, as it is of most major cities. A small population of career criminals and gang members is committing most of the crimes. When that population is locked up and closely monitored, public safety dramatically improves, and when they’re set free, they rob, stab, shoot, and kill at will.
“When you have a country in which you have more firearms on our streets than you actually have people, we got a problem,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin whined. "We need more help from the State Legislature, we need more help from the national government, the federal government, and we need more help from each and every one of our citizens doing our share.”
Benjamin, like Rutherford, is wrong. The number of guns isn’t the problem, the number of criminals is. When Democrats free criminals and lock up guns, everyone lives in terror.
The Columbiana Centre mall shooting is just the latest reminder of that simple reality.
The way back begins with reversing South Carolina’s disastrous pro-crime measures which were enacted with “guidance” from left-wing and libertarian pro-crime groups that cut prison populations while growing the size of the criminal population roaming the streets.
Politicians boasted of saving hundreds of millions of dollars by closing prisons. Now as crime rates soar, the money gained has been lost ten times over.
And we can't even begin to put a price on the loss of human life.
House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford is right. "It’s time that we do all that we can to protect our children, to protect the lives of other people’s children, to protect the lives of people that simply want to go to Wal-Mart and go back-to-school shopping."
Mall shooters shouldn’t be roaming the streets. We can protect our children from them.
All we have to do is lock them up.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles.
Thank you for reading.
Comments
"All we have to do is lock them up."
ReplyDeleteAlso please consider the death penalty where applicable.
This article defeats itself by combining
ReplyDeleteincompatible issues. I strongly agree that
violent criminals be locked away from society.
I oppose police defunding. Citizens' rights
to bear arms should not be infringed.
To mix in Abortion, Mask Mandates, Drag Queen
Story Hour, Libertarians jumbles constituencies.
These issues are all over the place.
Charlie
They're all sub-issues of one big issue.
DeletePray Hard: I may agree with you on some or
Deleteall; but a politician who goes after wide
morality portrays himself as "Holier than
Thou". He's immediately vulnerable to a
"Pussy Tape" the Left will find or fake.
Trump had nothing to be ashamed of because
he didn't lie about who he was. He's tough
and crude; and keeps promises to restore
our Great Country for us.
If you want an Altar Boy, go to church.
Charlie
I agree with "PRAY HARD". One of the amazing about Greenfield's articles, is his uncanny ability to connect the dots, and show us cause-and-effect where we otherwise might not see it. He also lumps in libertarians because they, like Dems, support releasing criminals. I will just add this (although somewhat tangential to the point of the article: I don't like "Stop and frisk"; it does not seem to work against making the streets safer and it is rife with the potential for racial profiling. "Broken windows", however, has been shown by study after study to keep crime down. If you lock up a perp for throwing a battery through a window, you will find that more violent crimes will drop because the perp who will smash and grab one day, will likely shoot you the next. Lock 'em up = we are safe from these evil people. Period.
DeleteKing WesternMan
Dear Pray Hard and King W.: Then we all
Deleteagree on more than we differ; especially on
our esteem for Daniel. That's a win all
around in my book. Thanks for sharing!
Charlie
I think that you are missing the point. The model is Compton, Calif. Compton was ~100% Black with ~100 murders per year. The state moved in a Hispanic population (and their gangs). The Black gang-bangers, their friends, and families were specifically targeted. After 2-3 years of "troubles", Compton was ~70% Hispanic with virtually no violent crime. The current violent crime surge in most American cities is most likely part of, the
ReplyDeleteimplementation of similar plans. The ghetto population has their chance but as the surviving businesses and "normies" are driven out of the city, the elites have an excuse to import a new population.
The push for "gun control" is a way to discourage and/or disarm the suburbans so they will not put up much of a fight against the ghetto refugees. Active resistance might discourage the evacuation of the ghetto population and prevent the anticipated grift for the Pols and the profit for the property owners. The ghetto population is lazy and faced with a hostile suburban and rural place of migration, they might just hunker down leaving the elite with no grift or profit.
It isn't a hard thing to understand if you don't focus on random crime and firearms. They want you to focus on the bright shiney thing while they destroy your world. Try paying attention to the game.
If he actually cared and actually looked around, he'd be all-in on banning gun sales to Blacks. They are doing all the killing... of each other.
ReplyDeletePost a Comment