XPost: talk.politics.guns, talk.politics.misc, soc.culture.usa

https://www.newsweek.com/you-can-have-gun-control-you-can-defang-police-you-cant-do-both-opinion-1794484

You Can Have Gun Control or You Can Defang the Police. You Can't Do Both
| Opinion
Published Apr 19, 2023 at 12:37 PM EDT
Updated Apr 19, 2023 at 2:36 PM EDT
By Rafael A. Mangual
head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan
Institute for Policy Research
68
In the wake of two recent mass shootings, at a private school in
Nashville, Tennessee and inside a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, familiar arguments have been playing out in cable news studios and throughout the Twittersphere. "The solution is obvious!" We're told authoritatively by
gun control advocates. "We want more gun control, and we want it now!"

But another debate puts the lie to that demand—or rather, reveals the
stark tradeoff that gun control advocates are forcing on the victims of
gun violence, thanks to another one of their demands, namely, for police
reform and decarceration. For some time now, the gun control debate has
been playing out alongside another debate about the proper role of
policing and incarceration as a response to rising crime, and many of
the prominent voices calling for more stringent gun regulation in the
former debate are also well-known voices pushing to curtail the power of
law enforcement institutions in the latter.

But you simply can't demand both that people relinquish their guns and
that the police be denuded of the power to protect them from criminals.
It's impossible to square calls for more gun control with the positions
many of the advocates making those calls hold on matters of policing and criminal justice. Existing gun regulations are essentially meaningless
empty threats without the will to enforce them, and additional
restrictions would be rendered even more superfluous by efforts to
actively undermine the very institutions tasked with such enforcement.

Yet the loudest voices on the Left are demanding both more gun control
and less law enforcement. So many of the same people who say things like
"we can't arrest or incarcerate ourselves out of our violent crime
problem" also seem to believe that we can somehow regulate our way out
of shootings.

It's a glaring incongruity that very few seem interested in exploring.

One of their favorite rhetorical tactics is to allege hypocrisy among
those who don't support what they call "common sense" regulations on
firearms. "One cannot be pro-life or support so-called parents rights
and yet do nothing about this," tweeted The New York Times' Nikole
Hannah-Jones of 1619 Project. But Hannah-Jones's argument can just as
easily be applied to those pushing for more gun regulation in response
to public mass shootings—well, those mass shootings that don't take
place in high-crime urban enclaves.


One might wonder just how folks like Hannah-Jones can express support
for depolicing or dismantling the so-called "carceral state"—which would leave likely shooters on the street and exacerbate violence in
vulnerable neighborhoods—and in the next breath accuse others of not
caring as much as they do about gun violence.

The evidence that their blindness costs lives is everywhere. Take the
2021 shooting of Adam Toledo, a visibly armed 13-year-old who fled the
scene of a shooting while still armed, and was shot by Chicago police
officer Eric Stillman after turning toward Stillman while tossing his
gun behind a fence, concealing his hand from the officer's view in the
process.

A Protester hold a sign reading "Defund
A Protester hold a sign reading "Defund the Police" outside Hennepin
County Government Plaza during a demonstration against police brutality
and racism on August 24, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. KEREM YUCEL/AFP
via Getty Images
While the loss of a young life is obviously tragic, the actions of
Officer Stillman—running toward gun fire and pursuing an armed suspected shooter through a dark alley—illustrated an heroic effort that placed
the safety of the community he was serving above his own. After all,
chasing an armed suspect can prove deadly for a Chicago cop—as it did
for Chicago police officer Andres Vasquez-Lasso, who was fatally shot
earlier this year while pursuing an armed man after responding to a 911
call reporting an armed assault. The suspect in that case? An
18-year-old who was on the street despite having been arrested on a gun
charge last summer.

Yet Stillman's heroics were met not with thanks but accusations of
cold-blooded murder and outrage, expressed by so many voices—including
Nikole Hannah-Jones—who have also condemned conservative opposition to
their favored gun regulations. Stillman's heroism was also met with a
two-year investigation that just culminated in the filing of
administrative charges with the Police Board and a recommendation that
Stillman "be separated from the Chicago Police Department."

No one seems to be asking the obvious questions here: How do they expect additional gun restrictions to suppress shootings without any enforcement?

Read more
New York Law Threatens First and Second Amendments
Democrats: Stop Shopping. Biden's Our Guy—and the Best President of My Life No, an Assault Weapons Ban Won't Stop School Shootings
The incoherence is infuriating. We know that in cities like Chicago, gun violence is disproportionately driven by repeat offenders with extensive criminal histories, or young, gang-involved youths without any impulse
control. Indeed, a 2017 study from the University of Chicago Crime Lab
reported that in 2015 and 2016, those charged with shootings or
homicides had on average 12 prior arrests. The study also found that a
quarter of homicide suspects in that city were between the ages of 10
and 19.

Yet none of the shootings or murders committed by repeat offenders have inspired any policy changes aimed at doing more to incapacitate armed criminals. The legally justified shooting of Adam Toledo, however, did
lead to a new policy—one restricting foot pursuits by police.

The message sent to police by the treatment of officer Stillman is
clear. But so is the choice that much of the American Left must make:
You can either have effective gun control, or you can defang police and continue to soften the criminal justice system. But you can't have both.

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow and head of research for
policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the push
for decarceration and depolicing gets wrong and who it hurts most.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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