Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Gun deaths fell by 39 percent in the United States between 1993 and 2011. Justice Department data from 2013 show that “In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns.”24 More remarkable is that this drop in gun violence happened at the same time that firearm purchases were increasing. In 2012 background checks for gun purchases reached 19.6 million, an annual record, and an increase of 19 percent over 2011. Some of the most violent cities in America, like Chicago and Baltimore, already have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet the political left continues to insist that disarming ghetto residents improves safety in those communities. Liberals like to obsess over how many people America incarcerates. They say that the number of inmates is simply “too high” or “excessive” without acknowledging the benefits of prison—benefits that accrue especially to the most likely crime victims: poor blacks. The relevant issue is not how many people we imprison per se but whether our higher arrests and conviction rates and longer prison terms affect behavior, wrote John Lott: Many blacks have their lives disrupted by the criminal justice system, but the lives and property of many blacks are also protected by that same system. . . . Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks. For example, in 2007, 90.2 percent of black murder victims we...