Posts Tagged ‘Crime’

LinkSwarm for Sunday, June 13

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

A few random links to while away your day:

(Hat tips: Instapundit, Real Clear Politics, NRO’s The Corner)

Amy Bishop Followup: It’s Not the Political Connections, It’s The Massachusetts

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Following up on the previous post, Jules Crittenden suggests that it wasn’t Amy Bishop’s mother’s political connections that got her off, but merely the fact she lived in Massachusetts:

That kind of thing actually happens a lot around here. Killers and rapsists being let off, and going to to kill or rape again. It’s our special gift to the nation.

Updated: Of course, it could be both.

El Paso vs. Juarez

Monday, February 15th, 2010

I’m not big on linking to The New York Times, and this is the sort of story that Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties covers more than I, but this article reveals some pretty shocking details about the drug war going on in Juarez. Like the fact that Juarez had 250 homicides. Last month.

By contrast, in 2008 (the most recent year I was able to find annual figures for), El Paso proper had 17 murders (plus another two for “other reporting areas,” which I take to mean unincorporated parts of the county). While it’s possible that the drug war across the border has increased that some, it’s fairly shocking to find out that more people are killed in Jaurez in a week than are killed in El Paso in a year. (Indeed going through each of the individual zip codes here, it appears that there have been no homicides so far in El Paso this year.)

Why the vast difference? A few thoughts:

  • Say what you will about U.S. government officials, but they’re at least a couple of orders of magnitude less corrupt than their Mexican counterparts. If drug cartels started killing government officials on a regular basis, Uncle Tex and Uncle Sam would come down hard. The rule of law matters.
  • Honest police officers seem to be a luxury good; rich nations can afford them, poor nations can’t. There are, of course, exceptions, but I can’t help believing that the average American cop is much more likely to be honest and responsive
  • Guns don’t cause crime. Texas has some of the loosest gun laws in the U.S. Buy contrast, Mexico’s gun controls are fairly strict.
  • Would legalizing drugs in America help? Probably. But I doubt it would solve all the problems, which are large, systematic, and endemic.

(Note that Reason (for which I’ve penned the occasional piece) covered this same paradox early last year, though I wasn’t aware of their article when I started working on this blog post. I do not agree with their conjecture that illegal immigration actually reduces crime, but pointing out problems with their reasoning would take a longer (and only tangentially related) blog post than I’m interested in penning to reply to a year-old piece.)

Further reading: Articles from The El Paso Times on the situation in Juarez.

Oklahoma Woman Kills Man Breaking Into Her Home In Self Defense

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

“Officials have released the 911 tape from this morning’s home invasion shooting that left an intruder dead from a shotgun blast.”

Good for her. If she lived in the UK, she’d be on her way to prison right now.

(Hat tip to Fark.)