Want Fewer Young-Black-Male Killings?

Dear Mitch:

I hope and trust you don’t mind that I place us on a first name basis. We’re informal in the Big Easy, are we not? This letter will be highly critical of your efforts to radically reduce the murder rate in The Big Easy, particularly that of young black men (YBM) as victims. So I might as well start off on a positive note. I greatly admire you for, and congratulate you for your courage in these politically correct times, for acknowledging that the main source of this tragic loss of life is not (white) policemen shooting YBMs, but, rather, the fact that they are all too often victimizing each other.

If you seriously want to stop this massive carnage, it behooves you to learn of its true causal antecedents. Only by dealing with them can you stop their results.  So let us dispose of a few supposed root causes that really have little or nothing to do with this dreadfulness.

The horrendous murder of YBMs is not the legacy of slavery. As Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams never tire of telling us, there was far less of this senseless killing in the period between the ending of the war between theWill ridding our fair city of any one of these causal elements entirely end the senseless killings of YBMs? No, of course not. Will eliminating all of them together do so? Not likely. But, in the latter case, such an initiative will radically reduce this horrific slaughter. The perfect is the enemy of the good. These free enterprise remedies will not entirely solve the problem. It is too deeply embedded for that. But all these lives are precious, and if we can save even some of them, we will be doing the Lord’s work. Is an intact family an absolute guarantee that there will be no murders? That is silly. There are killers from two parent-headed families and most children of female-headed households do not engage in any crime whatsoever.  Will the eradication of public housing constitute a complete solution? Again, no. Most inhabitants of this type of real estate are not criminals and there are plenty of miscreants who live in private homes. Will radically reducing the unemployment rate of YBMs end all of these shootings? Unfortunately not. The overwhelming majority of killers have been employed and most of the unemployed are law abiding. But will each of these changes help a bit, and will all of them together substantially turn things around? Yes. The same cannot be said for drug legalization. That in and of itself and alone will punch a really big hole in the murder statistics of YBMs.

Mitch, I know you’re a pinko liberal leftie progressive, but, I think you are also an honest man with a burning desire to radically reduce this carnage amongst YBMs. I full well realize that drug prohibition, public housing, welfare, minimum wages are all shibboleths of your end of the political spectrum. I appreciate it will be difficult for you to renounce these long-standing positions of yours and your fellow travelers. But if you are really serious about saving the lives of YBMs, and I think you are, you will eschew these stances and embrace the laissez faire capitalist system, the last best hope for these downtrodden young people

And, also, there will be side benefits of freeing up the economy in these ways. YBMs who are criminals by no means confine themselves to preying on each other. They also commit aggression against the rest of us. If they can become more civilized enough so as to stop shooting one another, all of us, young, old, black, white, whatever, will also be safer.

Yours truly,

Walter E. Block, Ph.D.

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