Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
St. Paul Police Chief Axtell does not know what he’s talking about.
Gun violence is exploding in St. Paul. The Chief says “ . . . basically it’s yesterday’s fistfights are today’s gun fights.” But then he says it’s “ . . . a community health problem, this is a public health crisis.”
No.
A health problem is caused by disease. The cure is quarantine and medical treatment for those infected, and sanitation to prevent spread of illness. Americans know very well how to handle outbreaks of disease. St. Paul does not have a public health problem.
St. Paul has a cultural problem. Perfectly healthy people are choosing to shoot each other instead of fistfight. We’re not willing to quarantine residents in Frogtown and there is no medical treatment, no vaccine that cures bad behavior. Bad behavior is cured by deterrence and punishment, to make bad behavior unacceptably costly to the actors.
When Charles Napier wanted to end the Hindu practice of burning wives alive on their husband’s funeral pyre, he explained to the priests: “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” The practice of suttee ended abruptly.
In fairness, it may be that the Chief knows exactly what’s going on in his city, but he’s afraid to speak the truth because the City Council is a bunch of liberals more concerned with signaling their virtue by mouthing politically acceptable platitudes than with protecting their citizens by enacting effective law enforcement measures. As long as the people dying are young Black men and poor children on the East Side, what’s the big deal?
Can we talk about adding another light rail line now? Because that’s a big deal. That’s something we care about.
Joe Doakes
I have to hope that there’s a lot of smart cops out there acting dumb because they want to keep their jobs.
The alternative? Remember – today’s police forces didn’t exist when the Constitution was written. I have a hunch they are more like the standing armies our forefathers feared than our current standing army is.
The good chief is just parroting what “wisdom” he’s received of late from the CDC. The CDC has in the past 18 months made a big push to “organize and collaborate” with local state and federal law enforcement to “combat the second most serious (childhood obesity being first) health threat facing America, gun violence” – the CDC is another Obama swamp that needs to be drained.
Every year in June, leftists, wankers, reprobates and degenerates come together in the fetid corridors of urban centers to celebrate and endorse a public health crisis that has killed at least 700,000, and affected another 1.2 million still clinging to life thanks to a massive subsidy to Big Pharma. Cities roll out the red carpet; civic groups and politicians jostle for prime positions in the melee. People are encouraged to bring their children to join in the bacchanal.
Every year, billions of dollars, public and private, are spent keeping the revelers healthy enough not to just survive, but to continue to engage in the behaviors that caused the plague in the first place.
When Brokeback Mountain is declared to be the story of two anti-social pariahs, we can talk about guns being a health crisis. Until then, the leftist hoard can suk it…literally.
The CDC has been a cesspool of politically motivated “research” and bad metaphors for a long time now.
And here I thought that drowning was a bigger health threat than guns.
So, the sheriff is unable to do the job he was hired to do — stop people from assaulting and killing one another.
Whose fault is this? Not his.
Axtell thinks his job is not to keep the peace, it is to be a social critic.
Someone is protecting his phoney-baloney job.
Why would I entertain the sneaky suspicion that the story would be very different if the miscreants were infecting the neighborhoods of our self styled elites?
Perhaps quarantine St. Paul is the best option. It would let CDC and others study this gun violence outbreak and maybe come up with a cure. With the legislature lacking funds for the next session, they probably won’t be meeting anyway for a while.
If leftists are right and gun violence is a disease, quarantine is the only option available right now to deal with the problem. For the Right leaning, if the disease culls enough, electoral power would shift in favor of rural or at least equalize between city and county.
OK, the biggest public health thing besides child obesity…might well be smoking, or opiate abuse, or cancer, or adult obesity/sedentary lifestyle, or car accidents, Seems the CDC needs some remedial work on their math!
And for that matter, the chief of police needs a bit of a reminder about his job description. It’s not to directly prevent crime, but rather to investigate crimes and arrest criminals so they can be punished.
Drugs and gangs, that’s the crisis.
Scott, I’m thinking that “fatherlessness” is closer. It correlates far better than poverty or race to crime.
bike; I wouldn’t disagree at all.