Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”. The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence. “There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted. The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like...

If you want your murder to matter, you need to be shot, not stabbed. How much coverage did the four University of Idaho students stabbed to death in their apartment last year get? Even though theirs was the first murder in Moscow, Idaho in 7 years, you probably didn’t hear about it. Mass stabbings don’t have the same sexy cachet as mass shootings. Unlike the UK, no one responds to mass stabbings by proposing to ban chef’s knives. (Yet.) But not all guns are equal. If you really want people to notice your murder, you had better arrange to be shot by an AR-15 or some mean-looking gun that Democrats want to ban as a “weapon of war”. Handguns are used in 78% of mass shootings. Like the kind that happen every weekend all over Chicago. And you don’t want to be just another statistic among the “15 shot over a bloody Sunday afternoon”. Handguns don’t count. If you want your murder to matter, don’t get stabbed or shot with a pistol. Remind the shooter that if he doesn’t invest in an AR-15, he ...

In 1968, LBJ’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence claimed in its report that “half of the nation’s 60 million households possess at least one gun, and the number of guns owned by private citizens is rising rapidly.” The Gun Control Act of 1968, a supposed response to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK by, respectively, a Communist, a ‘Palestinian’ terrorist and a white racist, failed to head off a decade of leftist political violence during the 1970s. Next year, in 1969, black nationalists took over a high school and college campus in Greensboro, North Carolina and opened fire on police officers and the National Guard in what became an extensive armed siege and the largest battle fought on a U.S. college campus. Gun control was already working wonders. By 1972, an estimated 43% of American households owned firearms. The only two mass shootings that year were by an angry unemployed security guard and Mark Essex Essex, a black nationalist terrorist, opened f...

In April, a black nationalist terrorist named Frank James opened fire on the downtown N subway train in Manhattan. While the racist gunman had a large stockpile of weapons, he happened to use a Glock pistol that he had bought over ten years ago. Now Glock is being sued. James bought the gun in Columbus, Ohio in 2011 . So he quite clearly didn’t purchase it, intending to shoot up a New York City subway train. Nevertheless the lawsuit blames the gunmaker for having "contributed to creating and maintaining a public nuisance in the State of New York" even though the gun wasn't even sold in New York. A month later, Andrew Abdullah, a career criminal, shot and killed Daniel Enriquez, a Goldman Sachs employee, on the Q train using a Luger. It’s not the brand of gun that’s the problem. Lugers and Glocks don’t shoot people. Racist criminals do. And yet the lawsuit against Glock, unintentionally, lays out a much more legitimate case. The lawsuit correctly notes that James is a ...

I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada. “There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head. We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month. Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers. Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous. The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns. The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was "puzzled". “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, a...

After the Uvalde school shooting, Biden, the CDC and the media are pushing a misleading claim that, "firearms were the leading cause of death for kids one and older for the first time in 2020." There’s no statistical reason for the CDC to group infants and teenagers together into the same category except to push a gun control agenda. 1-year-olds and 19-year-olds don’t have much in common when it comes to gun violence. And when the numbers are broken down, teenagers have catastrophically high murder and suicide rates, while babies are much less affected. The CDC’s letter to the New England Journal of Medicine claims that "in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death" for "persons 1 to 19 years of age". It blames that on the "COVID-19 pandemic" while shrugging that "the reasons for the increase are unclear". Blaming the upsurge in Chicago gang members shooting each other on a virus out of China based on correlation ...

“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 pe...

Senator Schumer began his pitch for gun control by falsely claiming that, "hundreds of thousands -- maybe millions -- of people walking the streets today because we passed [the 1994 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act] would be dead." The country hit an all-time high of 24,703 murders three years before the Brady Bill and even assuming that number had held steady in all the years since, we would be nowhere close to Schumer’s millions. Senator Schumer’s false claim that he saved millions of lives with his mostly useless background checks is typical of the lies that drive Democrat gun control hysteria. Then Schumer topped that howler with an even bigger howler when he argued that, “We didn't know there would be an internet, so we didn't prohibit internet sales without a background check." Not only did the internet exist at the time, but Schumer had voted for the bills that had helped fund the development of the internet. If only he had known what he was voting f...

A social ill takes place on three levels: the object level, the individual level, and the social level. Take alcoholism. There’s the object, alcohol. There’s the choice that the individual makes to drink the alcohol. And, finally, there’s the social problems that can be blamed for widespread alcoholism. The gun control movement operates in the same object-oriented space of the prohibitionist movement. For prohibitionists, the problem was gin. For the gun control movement, it’s all about the guns. Get rid of the gin and the guns, and the underlying problem goes away without having to do anything else. While the old prohibitionism of sin substances, liquor, drugs, and pornography has been ridiculed and its legal infrastructure dismantled, the obsessive certainty that guns are inherently corrupting holds sway. The lefty media insists that the only solution to gun violence is prohibitionism and more prohibitionism. Yet the argument for blaming guns is much weaker than the one for b...

"Bullets and booze don't mix," Alderman Edward Burke growled. Then the Chairman of the Finance Committee vowed to fight the NRA. He had spent much of his 50 years in power fighting for gun control. And the man dubbed “Alderman-for-Life”, whose wife who sat on the Illinois Supreme Court, had the heft. Five years ago, Chicago had lost yet another of its serial gun control battles. But Burke and the Democrat machine were vowing to go on fighting with more laws attempting to restrict the Second Amendment. Burke, an Obama and Blagojevich ally, and the godfather of Chicago politics (dubbed its real mayor), hated and loved guns at the same time. He had nearly as many guns as he had gun control bills. When the FBI raided the offices of the powerful Chicago Democrat, they found 23 guns. That’s a lot of guns for one man. Especially for a man who had worked hard to ban handguns in Chicago. "What it does do hopefully is put a freeze on the number of handguns that are pr...