It is amusing to watch the myriad ways in which the Left excuses criminal behavior, especially when the perpetrators are of color. Liberals are blaming all of America’s social ills, even violent crime, on Covid. Citing FBI statistics for a recent piece in Yahoo News, columnist John Meyers attempted to tie the rising homicide rate, nearly 30 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, to the pandemic. He then lists a series of recent mass shootings: a gunman in D.C. opened fire at a college prep school wounding four people; a mall shooting in South Carolina that same week left ten injured. In early April a deranged man opened fire in a Brooklyn subway leaving over a dozen wounded.
The message from the Left is clear: the pandemic is taking such a heavy toll on Americans that the criminal element can’t be blamed for committing acts of violence. Meyers quotes from interviews with several “experts” who attribute the spike in bloodletting to several factors. Covid, they say, “disrupted all aspects of life, with nationwide lock-downs leading to “increased stress and anxiety among the population. “That claim, on its face, is absurd. Millions of Americans found themselves isolated and separated from friends and loved ones, a vast majority of them did not resort to violence. The idea that the pandemic has turned otherwise peaceful men into lawbreakers is laughable.
Meyers cites one of these “experts,” Dr. Howard Kurtz, Professor of sociology and criminal justice at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, who believes Americans, forced to be locked away, became frustrated and violent. For about a year, I found myself “working” from home; I don’t remember feeling the need to take out one of my rifles and rail off shots into a crowded movie theater or a supermarket. The reason these men did what they did is because they are violent people. Liberals need to stop defending the criminal element, especially minority lawbreakers. I don’t possess an advanced degree in sociology from a major university, but my God-given common-sense tells me criminals do what they do because in most cases they don’t fear repercussions for their actions; they make a calculation: if I get caught, will it be worth the risk of committing the crime. Judging by crime statistics in most of America’s major cities, they deem it a risk worth taking.
The Bible in Jeremiah lays out the reason for much of man’s immorality: “The heart of man is desperately wicked, who can know it.” Violent crime is not caused by a lack of social interaction. If it were, many Catholic monks and nuns would be in prison. Acts of violence are committed by violent men. There are any number of societal factors at the root of criminality. The most common being single-parent families led by women. So let’s stop trying blame society, or white privilege or now, Covid, for the spike in violent crime. Much of the blame can be placed on the Democratic Party’s policies at every level of government; from its lack of will to support harsher penalties for those convicted of a crime, to its utter contempt for our law enforcement agencies.