“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”
“As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago’s tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century.
Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority of the legislature, lost “an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income,” syndicated columnist and Illinois native George Will observed last week. “In the past six years, $47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left….Illinois leads the nation in net losses of households making 200,000 or more.”
None of these or other grisly Windy City stats—including the murders and the pension liabilities—are obscure. As Illinois Policy Institute Vice President Austin Berg put it Saturday night at a live taping of the Fifth Column podcast, “I believe Chicago is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.””
“There’s no question that some undocumented immigrants have committed heinous crimes. But there are many reasons to be doubtful that recent incidents are evidence of a surging migrant crime wave.
For one, crime is down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas’ busing operations under Operation Lone Star, per an NBC News analysis. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC News reported.
David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, echoes that finding. “We don’t have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities,” he says. “The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
“National crime data, especially pertaining to undocumented immigrants, is notoriously incomplete,” since it “comes in piecemeal and can only be evaluated holistically when the annual data is released,” cautions NBC News. What’s more, “most local police don’t record immigration status when they make arrests.”
However, several analyses conducted at both the state and federal levels find that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. Looking at “two decades of research on immigration and crime,” criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide,” wrote The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. A 2015 Migration Policy Institute report indicated that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does.
The Cato Institute’s “research has consistently shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to end up incarcerated than natives,” Bier continues. An article this week by Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, indicated that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do, while legal immigrants have a lower conviction rate than both groups.”
“No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 565 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late October, including the Lewiston shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.”
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“According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker.
nother 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.””
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“In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns.”
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“As part of the new rules package approved by House Republicans this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) will now be required to score legislation on projected macroeconomic effects—including inflation.
That’s a welcome change that will provide more information to lawmakers and the general public about the impact of spending bills.”
“the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released new data showing a dramatic decline in test scores among American 9-year-olds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data indicate a devastating learning loss among American schoolchildren, marking the largest decline in reading scores since 1990, and the first ever recorded drop in mathematics scores.”