Sunday October 03, 2004

SOCIAL ENGINEERING. As you may know, crime in New York City went down quite a lot in the 1990s. Conservatives attribute this to "Broken Windows" theorizing (arrest squeegee men, murders will plummet!) and the godlike demeanor of strongman Giuliani.

But back in 1994, the NYPD, which actually did the job, had an alternate theory:

Police Strategy No. 1, entitled "Getting Guns Off the Streets of New York," sets forth the Department's plan to eradicate gun violence by stepping up efforts to find and seize illegal firearms. These strategies remain in effect through the present… as implemented by the NYPD, "stop & frisk" serves the Department's No. 1 strategic goal -- "getting guns off the streets of New York." Notwithstanding its origins as a technique designed to ensure officer safety, "stop & frisk" plainly has been used as a method to detect and seize illegal handguns.

In 2001, Giuliani and then-Commissioner Kerik bragged that the City had confiscated almost 90,000 guns since 1994. Even right-wing factota like Heather McDonald agreed that "by getting thousands of guns off the streets… the NYPD has saved thousands of lives and allowed a semblance of normality to return to once terror-stricken neighborhoods." And to this day, our gun laws remain among the most restrictive in the nation.

Anyone who actually lives here – especially those of us who have lived here a very long time, and more than once been serenaded by the sound of gunfire – would see the sense in this. The mean streets are no place to play John Wayne. An armed society may be, as the bumper sticker says, a polite society -- in Happy Valley or Oshkosh. But not in Brooklyn.

This piece of common sense does not seem to have penetrated the skulls of Congressional Republicans, who last week rammed a bill through the House designed to increase the number of firearms floating around crime-wracked Washington, D.C.:

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill yesterday repealing most of the District's gun laws, in a vote that handed an election-season victory to gun rights groups and was denounced by the city's leaders as a historic violation of home rule.

By a vote of 250 to 171, the House passed the D.C. Personal Protection Act, which would end the District's 1976 ban on handguns and semiautomatic weapons, roll back registration requirements for ammunition and decriminalize possession of unregistered weapons and possession of guns in homes or workplaces.

More semiautomatic weapons – despite the expressed wishes of the citizens! That’s the (forgive the expression) magic bullet that will curb D.C. crime, alright alright.

But, of course, no one is his right mind believes that the GOP Congressmen from Bumfuck give a rat’s ass about the security of the largely-black citizens of the District of Columbia. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R., Bumfuck), decreed that this result was "demanded by the people of the United States" – which translates roughly as "demanded by the nutcase core of Rep. Souder’s Party."

This would of course include the NRA, whose paper on what they consider to be the deleterious effects of gun registration in New York actually ignores (though written in 2000) everything that happened after the NYPD got tough on guns in 1994 -- showing far less interest in the crime drop than in the case of some guy in Staten Island who lost his weapons cache.

These malign agents are aided and abetted by conservative hard-liners eager to flood cities – including New York – with firearms just to show solidarity with gun-nut voters. One such, National Review’s Jack Dunphy, a pseudonymic "officer in the Los Angeles Police Department" (Mark Fuhrman?), actually derided the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s thorough (and thoroughly reasonable) endorsement of Senator Chuck Schumer’s tough gun-control stand, using the blind quotes of another alleged cop as his flimsy prop. Dunphy’s nameless mouthpiece derided PBA chief Pat Lynch as a wuss and a sellout – which would no doubt surprise New York’s real cops, who voted Lynch in, and who stand a far smaller chance of being killed in the line of duty since our gun count went down.

A similarly nutty piece was published (though under his real name) on OpinionJournal by John Fund (not a cop). "The debate over the district's draconian gun ban should provide valuable lessons for other cities that have foolishly tried to fight crime by disarming their citizens," says Fund. "Gun control is bad for public safety…" Unsurprisingly, he does not mention New York, leaving that to his published commenters -- "The cities in our nation, which have the most restrictive gun ownership and usage laws, also have the highest violent crime rates… You need only look at D.C., New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles to see it," says Ken Taylor of -- (wait for it) -- Heath Springs, SC.

Do any of you guys remember way back when the conservatives (and the mainstream media) were bitching about an alleged phenomenon called "Political Correctness" – whereby liberals were supposed to be foisting their untested, unsupportable social-engineering ideas on people via crackpot laws and codes?

Haven’t heard much about it lately, have you? The Right appears to have dropped it as a swear-word.

Maybe because they’ve decided it’s not such a bad idea.

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