Would Obama’s Grandfather Look Like Delbert Belton

"A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." — James Madison

I have been extremely upset at the abject cowardice and hypocrisy of Barack Obama for ignoring the senseless thrill killing of Australian exchange student Christopher Lane after suffering multiple rhetorical compound fractures in attempting to create racial animus over the justified killing of thuglet Trayvon Martin. (When questioned about this, the White House spokesjuvenile, Josh Earnest, gave his trademarked stunned mullet stare and said he wasn’t familiar with the case.)

This was even a more disturbing response considering this senseless killing had been all over the news for several days and even the Prime Minister of Australia had commented on Lane’s brutal murder by three black tugs in Oklahoma. If nothing else Obama owes Australia a few words of condolence. But, you see he can’t because the killers look like his would-be sons.

Obama had another chance to redeem himself — but again he has remained silent. While it is understandable that he would be unable to empathize with a young white man gunned down while minding his own business, another case has emerged that he could have commented on.

Last Wednesday night 88 year old Battle of Okinawa veteran, Delbert Belton, was sitting in front of the Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge in Spokane, WA. Around 8pm he was approached by two black teenagers, now identified as 16 year old Demetrius Glenn and 16 year old Kenan Adams Kinard, who proceeded to beat him to death.

As we have been told so many times, Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was also an elderly white guy and World War II veteran. And he alleges in his multi-volume serial memoir that he has fond memories of Dunham. Obama could not find a microphone someplace to talk about how similar Belton was to his grandfather since he can’t find it in him to be “familiar” with the Lane murder after inciting mob violence towards a man who defended himself from a beating much like that Belton received.

"Ayeee I knocked out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!" young James Edwards tweeted on July 15 in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Edwards's tweets surfaced after he and two of his homies were charged with killing Australian baseball player Chris Lane in Duncan, Oklahoma, last Friday.

For the record, "woods" is short for peckerwoods, a derogatory term for white people. If Edwards, who is black, knocked out five woods as claimed, he would hardly be unique. As Colin Flaherty chillingly documents in his frequently updated book, White Girl Bleed A Lot, the "knock-out game" has become something of a recreational outlet for bored black youths.

This "game" is just one form of black-on-nonblack assaults. Although hard to quantify, they seem to have intensified after the media put a racial spin on the Martin shooting eighteen months ago. Occasionally, the attackers have made the link explicit, claiming they were "doing it for Trayvon," revenge being a more honorable motive than boredom.

Two weeks after the Martin story surfaced, President Obama had the chance to defuse tensions. "Obviously this is a tragedy," said Obama solemnly in response to a planted question. After some empty bromides about everyone pulling together and the like, the president cut to the chase: "But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon — If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon."

By this time, the White House had access to all the information the Sanford Police Department did. The courageous step for Obama would have been to defend the Sanford Police Department and to demand an end to the media lynching of George Zimmerman. As an African American, he had more latitude to do this than a white politician would have. Instead, he chose to identify fully with the black "victim."

If Obama's son would have looked like Trayvon, he would have also looked like James Edwards and Chancey Luna, both charged with first-degree murder in Lane's death. Although south central Oklahoma would seem to be a long way from south central LA, the national media have created a dysfunctional culture accessible to all disaffected youths everywhere, even the occasional white kid like getaway driver Michael Jones.

Was it a thrill kill or part of a gang initiation? That would be the bushwhacking of Chris Lane, an Aussie college kid and baseball star. Lane was gunned down running along a country road near Duncan, Oklahoma.

Does it matter what motivated Allen Luna and James Francis Edwards, Jr., Chris Lane's accused killers, and Michael Dewayne Jones, an accessory, to off a young man with a promising future who was just going about the routine of his life on a summer's day?

In one sense it doesn't matter. Whether those three gangsta-infatuated creeps were thrill killing or murdering an innocent to be "made" (as the mob is fond of saying) as Crips just points to the rot — the nihilism — that has debauched subsets of American society. Terming this nihilism a cancer is cliché. Cancer isn't communicable, as best I know.

What the nation suffers is leprosy — a scary cultural and societal decay that is only more advanced in many black and Hispanic urban communities. It's present, too, in a growing number of white underclass communities (here and in Europe). For too long, that leprosy has been spreading to the broader culture with all its attendant sickness.

We have the progressives to thank for the contagion. In fact, let's thank the left for Luna, Edwards, and Jones right now. Over the decades, the left's compassionate government policies have done to the black underclass what earlier Americans did to the Indians: made them dependents on Uncle Sam. Indians were welfareized and quarantined on reservations.

The nation's hoods and increasingly, barrios are modern-day reservations, where independence, initiative, self-worth, and self-respect have been stripped from residents. Where family, community, and church have been debased in favor of the government handout machine and minority leaders who pimp their own people for gain. And a white liberal political establishment that profits handsomely from subjugated minorities.

But human nature being what it is — possessing deep needs for independence, self-sufficiency, and self-value — means underclass blacks and Hispanics seek out perverse ways of expressing those needs. Gangs are replacements for families; they lend identity, security, and worth. They're enterprises where the ambitious, with talent and moxy, seek to better themselves — albeit through violence and crime.

There's also the anti-traditionalism, anti-establishmentism, and permissiveness that grew out of the left and the left's spawn, the 60s youth movement. This ethos of break the rules and do as you feel hasn't liberated the nation's underclasses; it's robbed them of anchoring principles and certitudes. In smashing compasses, progressives have served only to cut adrift millions of Americans, launching them on a sea where everything's made up as one goes and right and wrong are matters of perception and opinion.

The 60s ethos hasn't done much for the middle and upper classes, either — at least, among those segments that subscribe to it. Relativism and juvenile self-obsession and indulgence only hasten the rot.

Gangs and violence in underclass communities have been around long before Ellis Island, you say? True, indeed. But the Irish, Italians, and Jews, for example, didn't stay in the shanties and tenements. There was something called "upward mobility," which these ethnic groups aspired to. Poor immigrants and their families cycled through the nation's Hell's Kitchens and into the mainstream, adapting happily to the norms, values, and virtues that comprised traditional America.

Today, blacks and other underclass Americans are victims of generational poverty and welfare dependency. They're trapped not by lack of potential, but lack of social structures that instill virtues and channel their energies into constructive pursuits. Even government schools are nearly useless. The important social structures are family, neighborhood, and church; all were once the sinews binding poor communities together and giving poor kids the chance for better lives.

Does any sensible American really like rap or gangsta rap? Music full of anger, hate for authority — the police, in particular — and denigration of women. Full of talk of law breaking and killing. Full of idiotic preening and braggadocio about being unschooled and unmotivated toward conventional success. Does anyone think that wearing pants down around one's buttocks, tattooing one's body, and piercing one's nose, ears, tongue, nipples, and whatever else is indicative of anything other than the atavistic? Affectations that have seeped into the middle and upper classes.

Other than being a name on street signs and a day off in January, does Martin Luther King, Jr., matter much to urban black kids anymore? King who dressed in suits and spoke impeccable English? Who led a nonviolent civil rights movement and preached integration and unity among the races, not hate and division? Who wanted mainstreaming and conventional success for blacks?

Or Jackie Robinson, the subject of a recent movie, 42. One might dare say that Jackie Robinson is a stronger role model for nonblack kids than he is for poor black kids nowadays (if they even know who Robinson was and what he achieved).

The murder of Chris Lane makes apparent the advance of violent black urban culture into the hinterlands. Apparent — not recent, and it's been further facilitated by the internet and social media.

The accused murderers and their accomplice were "wannabe" Crips, according to James Johnson, a black man, who reported that the three teens were hiding out in a car at -- of all places — Duncan's Immanuel Baptist Church. Johnson says that the trio had threatened his teenage son on Facebook and feared his boy was next to be shot. Johnson says that Luna, Edwards, and Lane had attempted to recruit his son, but Johnson had shielded him from the teens. The trio, if Johnson is correct, had a "join or die" ultimatum for his son.

Said Johnson in a Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun report:

"I've been living here all my life and we never had this, but in the past few years gangs from Lawton have been coming here," Johnson said of the Crips.”

Again per the Herald Sun, Johnson furnished this background about the accused killers:

“Johnson's son also attends Duncan High School, where suspect Luna and Edwards Jr. were students. He said he knew both boys, and described them as "troublemakers" and "bullies" who had "no parental supervision."

Given the social media depicting the trio making gang-like gestures and one handling a rifle, these teens were infatuated by gang culture and gang violence. But Luna, Edwards, and Jones could have been more than taken with the Crips; they might have been initiating themselves into the gang.

The Crips and other street gangs often require an act of violence -- up to and including murder — to initiate as a gangsta, or as the Crips say, become a "cuzz."

Robert Walker, a retired state and federal law enforcement officer and gang expert, runs the website "Gangs or Us," a gang identification resource.

Of the Crips and Bloods, Walker writes:

“In the early 1980's, members of both gangs surfaced outside Los Angeles and the rest of California, primarily to sell cocaine. Investigative reports in 1991 placed Crips or Bloods in 32 States and 113 cities. However, these migrations are not orchestrated by any sort of national leadership. Instead, criminal acts often are committed or directed by individual leaders (who change frequently), rather than as the result of some hierarchical or collective decision making process.

The Crips is a loose association of some 200 gangs, many of which are at war with one another, and none of whom recognizes or exerts any kind of central authority. Individual gangs are equally marginal in their organization. Most are loosely knit coalitions of small, autonomous cliques.”

The Crips seem like Al Qaida precursors, with an emphasis on autonomy and independent action. The Crips, Bloods, and other gangs are opportunists, whose members have sought out communities (markets, if you will) where they can startup or dominate the drug trade.

That the Crips and gang culture enticed three Duncan juveniles and inspired them to commit a random act of murder is notable only because of the place and the victim. For Duncan citizens, Chris Lane's murder was novel and shocking. In inner-cities — hoods — across the land, senseless gang murders and mayhem are sorry ways of life.

What passes for “leadership” in the modern “civil-rights” community has frequently compared the shooting of Trayvon Martin to the brutal murder of black teenager Emmett Till in the 1950s. One of the people who did this is billionaire Oprah Winfrey, fresh from nearly destroying the life of an innocent Swiss shop clerk by falsely accusing her of racism. Asked about Winfrey’s comparison on MSNBC Friday morning, Emmett Till’s cousin Simeon Wright replied:

“The comparison to me is similar; there are a lot of parallels between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin. Number one: Trayvon was killed by a white boy that got out of his truck armed to the teeth — chased him down, did kill him. And then the jury did the same thing they did in 1955 with Emmett Till: they came back with a non-guilty vote. That broke my heart. That tells me that things have not changed as much as people would like to say they have changed. I asked my wife this morning if she had ever been consulted on one of these polls. I’ve never been asked about one of these polls.”

Every single thing Simeon Wright said about George Zimmerman is a lie. He’s not white, he’s not a “boy,” he wasn’t “armed to the teeth,” and he didn’t chase Trayvon Martin down. Zimmerman killed Martin in self-defense, quite unlike the heartless murderers of Emmett Till. Of course, the MSNBC anchor, Craig Melvin, challenged not a word of this ludicrous slander.

This is about more than the production of Trayvon mythology, which proceeds at a furious pace, moving the manufactured false narrative further and further away from the facts introduced during Zimmerman’s trial. Oprah Winfrey’s cooked-up anecdote about racist Swiss clerks refusing to show her an expensive handbag, because they assumed a black woman could not afford such luxuries, was not about Winfrey deciding to annihilate a random store employee for kicks. I doubt Winfrey gave the clerk a second thought. She clearly never imagined that her version of events would be challenged. She was just trying to throw out a quick talk-show-ready anecdote about how racism persists around the world, even in nations renowned for their peaceful tolerance, never mind squalid, hateful America.

The point of all this is to manufacture despair. The polls Simeon Wright disparaged, by claiming he and his wife have never been consulted for one, are polls about the improving state of race relations in the United States. He’s saying those polls are full of baloney, because there’s still racism everywhere. And he doesn’t mean the kind of racism that led a couple of teenage black gang-banger wanabes to shoot Australian college student Chris Lane in the back while he was out jogging. Wright means institutionalized white racism, a fog of hatred and disdain that hasn’t cleared much since 1965.

The most obvious difference between the Left/media response to the Lane murder, and the Trayvon Martin shooting, is that mighty efforts were made to portray George Zimmerman as the agent of a cruel and racist system, not merely a trigger-happy racist himself. He became a piñata for gun-control activists. Loud and repeated warnings were issued that a legion of heavily armed, bloodthirsty homeowners and neighborhood-watch volunteers lurked from coast to coast, waiting to prey upon any young black man who wandered into their suburban kill zones.

The aftermath of the Zimmerman trial has been a concerted nationwide effort to attack Stand Your Ground laws, which had nothing to do with the shooting of Trayvon Martin but they’re supposedly a totem of the evil system that keeps minorities down. The group that camped out in Florida’s capitol for a month, demanding a special legislative session to erase the state’s Stand Your Ground law, called itself the “Dream Defenders.” The implication is that the dreams of innocent young people are under attack because of SYG laws, which is absolute rubbish but quite consistent with the sustained atmosphere of despair hanging over America.

The racial grievance industry isn’t the only smokestack pumping into that atmosphere. Despair suffuses every aspect of our political culture. Those who would rule us as our permanent protectors want us to believe ourselves surrounded by unbeatable villains. Take one step onto the frozen tundra of the free market, and you’ll be torn apart by corporate wolves. You’ll need tax-raising politicians to help you get even with the rich bastards who stole your rightful prosperity. (Excepting millionaire politicians, entertainers, and athletes, of course. They earn their fortunes!)

ObamaCare is a broken-down wreck, and if any private corporation had been responsible for it, you’d be told to view it as a swindle whose perpetrators belong in jail but instead, the people who want to shut it down are depicted as callous brutes who enjoy watching poor people get sick. You’ll die without government insurance subsidies, you’ll starve without food stamps, you’ll go broke without a government-managed financial system, the Earth will be destroyed without government-enforced environmental orthodoxy, and if politicians weren’t insisting on higher pay plus mandated benefits, you’d be enslaved by evil corporate overlords.

The most powerful President since FDR, a man whose assumed powers would be labeled despotic by the Founding Fathers, excuses his failures by claiming he’s just a victim of these shadowy racist villains, too. He’s not responsible for anything that’s happened since 2009, no matter how many times he seizes new executive powers. The dead-parrot economy and moribund job market he’s delivered are the best you have a right to expect; it would be even worse, if President Obama hadn’t done whatever he did with all those trillions you’re supposed to forget he spent. If the government borrows or spends a dollar less, America will collapse into a pile of dust. If the dull, selfish people of the United States reclaim an inch of the ground they have lost to the State, mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. Despair, helplessness, doom.

We are actively encouraged to see ourselves as children. Grown men are frequently referred to as “boys,” and officially treated as such by ObamaCare. Teenagers sigh that they have nothing meaningful to do, and nothing is expected of them. They’re treated the way earlier generations would regard children half their age. Prolonged adolescence is another form of despair. People who are held responsible for nothing see little reason to make extraordinary effort. Responsibility is a core component of dignity, liberty, and achievement. If people are not accountable for their failures, who cares about their successes?

All of this is alien to human nature. It is enforced upon us by a vast political system armed with gigantic resources. In our hearts, we know we’re not supposed to rely on other people’s money for food and shelter. We know we’re meant to compete and cooperate with our fellows, not regard ourselves as hapless victims of their perpetual disdain. Economist Walter Williams, who is a person of color, recently observed that competitive sports teams don’t accept the low standards and excuses for failure found throughout the educational system, and black people do just fine on those teams. When much is expected, much is accomplished and the soul of every young person, black or white, boy or girl, yearns to hear the call to excellence.

Perhaps one reason kids love sports is that big games are played on lofty peaks that ride high above the fog of despair. After years of trudging through dumbed-down courses, lowered standards, and assurances that the deck is forever stacked against them, they long to step onto a brightly-lit field of honor and show what they can really do, win some victories, earn some applause. It’s not just about earning big bucks as a star athlete or entertainer, although the money is nice too. It’s the dream of commanding respect, standing tall, exceeding expectations, and taking your well-deserved seat in a great brotherhood of equals.

But who respects hapless children who believe they can never win? If you accept the right of the State to use compulsive force to correct inequality of outcome, you believe the targets of that force are your enemies, they deserve to suffer, and you could never beat them on your own. You can’t beat any of the Left’s boogeymen on your own. Your perpetual fear and despair are the source of their power.

Who Determines Your Constitutional Rights?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” Declaration of Independence, 1776

In yesterday’s blog I talked about the case for the Constitution. Today a report has surfaced that demonstrates just how far our political leaders and civil servants have strayed from the Constitution and our unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is a chilling example of how elite statists and masterminds are willing to bypass our fundamental rule of law to advance their progressive agenda.

In this recent and most egregious example Chicago’s Chief of Police, who previously blamed ”government-sponsored racism” and Sarah Palin for Chicago’s gun violence, declared that the lawful exercise of the Second Amendment was a threat to public safety. According to a report by the Illinois State Rifle Association:

“Chicago's embattled police superintendent dug himself deeper into a pit of controversy today by claiming that lawful firearm owners are agents of political corruption. Appearing on a Chicago Sunday morning talk show, superintendent Garry McCarthy expressed his conviction that firearm owners who lobby their elected representatives or who donate money to political campaigns are engaged in corruption that endangers public safety. McCarthy went on to express his belief that judges and legislators should rely on public opinion polls when interpreting our Constitution.

After totally dismissing the citizen's right to redress grievances, McCarthy trained his constitutional wisdom on the 2nd Amendment. Despite recent court decisions to the contrary, McCarthy opined that the 2nd Amendment limits citizens to owning smooth-bore muskets. McCarthy went on to say that he believes that the 2nd Amendment supports mandatory liability insurance for firearm owners and the mandatory application of GPS tracking devices to civilian owned firearms.”

"Garry McCarthy's understanding of our Constitution barely qualifies him as a meter maid, never mind the chief of the nation's third largest police department," commented ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson. "What on earth would possess McCarthy to assert that constitutional rights should be meted out based on public opinion polls? Let's not forget that public opinion polls once opposed a woman's right to vote while it would be a safe bet that, at one time, polls would have shown lynching as an acceptable form of justice. It has been said that our Constitution exists to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. McCarthy's view of our Constitution is dangerous and unbecoming of a civil servant."

There are several statements by Mr. McCarthy that, as the ISRA report state, that are not only chilling, but downright indicative of the ignorance of today’s progressives on the words and meaning of the Constitution and our God given rights.

McCarthy’s assertion that constitutional rights should be meted out based on public opinion polls is absolutely asinine and dangerous. According to a recent Rasmussen poll 65% see gun rights as protection against tyranny:

“Two-out-of-three Americans recognize that their constitutional right to own a gun was intended to ensure their freedom.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of American Adults think the purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny. Only 17% disagree, while another 18% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Not surprisingly, 72% of those with a gun in their family regard the Second Amendment as a protection against tyranny. However, even a majority (57%) of those without a gun in their home hold that view.

Many gun control advocates talk of the right to gun ownership as relating to hunting and recreational uses only.

While there are often wide partisan differences of opinion on gun-related issues, even 54% of Democrats agree with 75% of Republicans and 68% of those not affiliated with either major party that the right to own a gun is to ensure such freedom.

As Americans search for answers to the Newtown shooting, attitudes on gun ownership are “not likely to change in a nation where six out of 10 adults would rather live in a neighborhood where they can own a gun and most would feel safer if their children attended a school with an armed security guard.”

If McCarthy’s assertion that our constitutional rights should be determined by public opinion polls were followed abortion would be banned, there would be no gay marriage, and we would have unlimited school vouchers. Perhaps you agree with all of these examples, as I do, but we live in a representative republic where we elect representatives to pass laws and regulations that are constitutional. What Mr. McCarthy is advocating is a mobocracy — something that terrified our Founders.

As George Washington stated in his farewell address of 1796:

“Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

Obviously Mr. McCarthy as a high ranking official has expressed a prejudice against law-abiding citizens from an official who has the authority to arrest and give orders to fire at them.

McCarthy’s assertion that the Founders limited arms to smooth bore muskets is demonstrably false as well.

Let’s begin our rebuttal of McCarthy’s assertion with a look at Article I, Section 8.16 of the Constitution that states:

“To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;”

This clause in the Constitution gave Congress the authority to organize a well regulated militia. But what exactly is a “well-regulated militia”? To further define this term Congress, under the authority of Article I, Section 8.16 passed the 1792 Militia Act. The Militia Acts of 1792 were a pair of statutes enacted by the second United States Congress in 1792. The acts provided for the organization of the state militias and provided for the President of the United States to take command of the state militias in times of imminent invasion or insurrection. This authority was used to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. This act stated:

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, by the Captain or Commanding Officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this Act. And it shall at all time hereafter be the duty of every such Captain or Commanding Officer of a company, to enroll every such citizen as aforesaid, and also those who shall, from time to time, arrive at the age of 18 years, or being at the age of 18 years, and under the age of 45 years (except as before excepted) shall come to reside within his bounds; and shall without delay notify such citizen of the said enrollment, by the proper non-commissioned Officer of the company, by whom such notice may be proved. That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutered and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack. That the commissioned Officers shall severally be armed with a sword or hanger, and espontoon; and that from and after five years from the passing of this Act, all muskets from arming the militia as is herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound; and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes.”

It is noted that Congress demanded the arms of the day for the militia. This was a key element in the act. You will note that the Act prescribed either a good musket or a rifle — two distinct and different firearms.

Many anti-Second Amendment advocates use the silly argument that the Founding Fathers’ intent is anachronistic since they couldn’t envision greater weapons capability beyond muskets in their time. Really?

This is easily disproven simply noting the evolution of firearm technology during the time prior to, and during, the Revolution. Matchlit progressed into matchlock, which progressed into flintlock and so forth. In fact, muskets were slowly being replaced by long rifles during the time of, and after the Revolution. Rifling gave shots increased accuracy over greater distances. Nock guns were the arms of choice for the British Navy, an experiment of sorts that lasted a short time because the recoil was powerful enough to break the shoulder of those firing them. In 1718 the “Puckle gun,” the first machine gun, appeared. (One could argue that the so-called “assault rifle pre-dated the Second Amendment.) The Colt revolver followed not long after and in the late 1800s the Gatling gun, which fired 200 rounds per minute, appeared on the market. The evolution of firearms was observable during the time that the Constitution was drafted; to argue that the Founding Fathers were unaware of, or not living through, the ever-evolving capabilities of firearms is blatant ignorance of both common sense and fact. Jefferson himself was a noted collector and in letters explained what technological capabilities he favored in pieces over others in his collection.

The Founders were quite clear on their views regarding firearms. In fact, earlier proposed language of the Second Amendment read as such:

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”

From Jefferson’s drafts of the Virginia constitution:

“No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

Other figures of the period were of like mind. In the Virginia convention, George Mason, drafter of the Virginia Bill of Rights, accused the British of having plotted “to disarm the people–that was the best and most effective way to enslave them”, while Patrick Henry observed that “The great object is that every man be armed” and “everyone who is able may have a gun.”

Following the Civil War, the legislative efforts which gave us three amendments to the Constitution and our earliest civil rights acts likewise recognized the right to keep and bear arms as an existing constitutional right of the individual citizen and as a right specifically singled out as one protected by the civil rights acts and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, against infringement by state authorities. This is called the doctrine of incorporation and has been used by the Supreme Court today to strike down gun control laws in Washington D.C. and McCarthy’s home town of Chicago.

Much of the reconstruction effort in the South had been hinged upon the creation of “black militias” composed of the armed and newly freed blacks, officered largely by black veterans of the Union Army. In the months after the Civil War, the existing southern governments struck at these units with the enactment of “black codes” which either outlawed gun ownership by blacks entirely, or imposed permit systems for them, and permitted the confiscation of firearms owned by blacks. When the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was debated members both of the Senate and the House referred to the disarmament of blacks as a major consideration.

Some point to the list of requirements in the Second Militia Act as evidence that Congress has, in fact, required its citizens to purchase a good or service. The Second Militia Act of 1792 indeed states “that every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder.” Since the Second Congress passed the Second Militia Act that requires members of the militia to procure a musket and bullets, it is therefore suggested that the Founders (and the Constitution) would also have supported the recent health care bill that requires all members of society to purchase health insurance. Support of the Second Militia Act does not imply support for the health care bill.

Unlike the reach of the health care bill, the Second Militia Act applies to a narrow sub-section of society: white, male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who are members of the militia. Section I of the Act, which includes the list of required goods, begins: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” It follows that the Second Militia Act would not apply to anyone not enrolled in the militia: including non-citizens, the infirm, men younger than eighteen, men older than forty-five, or women.

Section II of the Act further exempts a whole host of men, despite fitting the age and fitness requirements, from participating in the militia and therefore the requirement of procuring muskets, bullets, and other such items pertaining to militia service. Specifically exempted from the militia are the Vice-President of the United States, judicial and executive officers, members of the House and Senate, post officers, certain ferry officers and stager drivers to name a few. Moreover, the language of the statute requires to a member of the militia “provide himself” with the list of goods. It is possible that a man could have inherited a musket, bartered for a knapsack, or made his own bullets, and still be in compliance with the Act. In contrast to the Second Militia Act, the health care bill applies to any living breathing person in America (except maybe top Hill staffers) to purchase health insurance. It is unlikely one could inherit, barter, or create one’s own health insurance and avoid the penalty of law.

The greatest difference between the health care bill and the Second Militia Act is constitutionality. There is solid constitutional basis for the Second Militia Act: Article I, section 8, clause 16 states that Congress has the power “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.” Articulating a list of goods required for militia service is certainly within the bounds of this clause. Indeed, Federalist 29 emphasizes that such regulation of the militia is part of “superintending the common defense, and of watching over the internal peace of the Confederacy.”

Then there are those progressives that claim the militia is defined today as the National Guard. This is blatantly false. In a Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate of the Ninety-Seventh Congress entitled The Right To Keep And Bear Arms:

“The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms therefore, is a right of the individual citizen to privately posses and carry in a peaceful manner firearms and similar arms. Such an "individual rights" interpretation is in full accord with the history of the right to keep and bear arms, as previously discussed. It is moreover in accord with contemporaneous statements and formulations of the right by such founders of this nation as Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, and accurately reflects the majority of the proposals which led up to the Bill of Rights itself. A number of state constitutions, adopted prior to or contemporaneously with the federal Constitution and Bill of Rights, similarly provided for a right of the people to keep and bear arms. If in fact this language creates a right protecting the states only, there might be a reason for it to be inserted in the federal Constitution but no reason for it to be inserted in state constitutions. State bills of rights necessarily protect only against action by the state, and by definition a state cannot infringe its own rights; to attempt to protect a right belonging to the state by inserting it in a limitation of the state's own powers would create an absurdity. The fact that the contemporaries of the framers did insert these words into several state constitutions would indicate clearly that they viewed the right as belonging to the individual citizen, thereby making it a right which could be infringed either by state or federal government and which must be protected against infringement by both.

Finally, the individual rights interpretation gives full meaning to the words chosen by the first Congress to reflect the right to keep and bear arms. The framers of the Bill of Rights consistently used the words "right of the people" to reflect individual rights--as when these words were used to recognize the "right of the people" to peaceably assemble, and the "right of the people" against unreasonable searches and seizures. They distinguished between the rights of the people and of the state in the Tenth Amendment. As discussed earlier, the "militia" itself referred to a concept of a universally armed people, not to any specifically organized unit. When the framers referred to the equivalent of our National Guard, they uniformly used the term "select militia" and distinguished this from "militia". Indeed, the debates over the Constitution constantly referred to organized militia units as a threat to freedom comparable to that of a standing army, and stressed that such organized units did not constitute, and indeed were philosophically opposed to, the concept of a militia.

That the National Guard is not the "Militia" referred to in the second amendment is even clearer today. Congress has organized the National Guard under its power to "raise and support armies" and not its power to "Provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia". [65] This Congress chose to do in the interests of organizing reserve military units which were not limited in deployment by the strictures of our power over the constitutional militia, which can be called forth only "to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." The modern National Guard was specifically intended to avoid status as the constitutional militia, a distinction recognized by 10 U.S.C. Sec 311(a). (Emphasis added)

The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.”

If Mr. McCarthy wants to curtail the crime and killings in Chicago he should look at the causes this problem and not at guns. It would be tantamount to banning cars because there are drunken drives killing and maiming people with their automobiles.

The real cause of the gun violence in Chicago, as it is in other major metropolitan areas is the culture that has been fostered by progressive policies of the past 50 years.

According to an article in the Christian Post:

“Studies show that about 40 percent of children in the U.S. have absent fathers, a condition which Rutledge called an "epidemic." Children who grow up in fatherless homes are twice as likely to be incarcerated, 63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes and 71 percent of all high school dropouts are from fatherless homes, according to statistics.”

Despite having some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago saw more than 500 homicides last year for the first time since 2008, and some 43 murders took place in January. That has prompted several pro-gun rights groups to say it proves new gun control measures aren’t the answer.

Even President Obama addressed this issue on his recent visit to his home town. Today 70% of babies born to African-American women are born out of wedlock. This is the real problem and the cause of much of the gang activity in Chicago and other urban centers. It’s not guns. The guns these gang members use to kill with are in the most part illegal. If Mr. McCarthy wants to address the high murder rate in Chicago he and other civic leaders need to address the cultural issues of fatherless homes and the continuing out of wedlock births.

Glenn Fairman writes in American Thinker:

“Without the anchor of a moral center, politics and culture move in tandem to and fro inexorably like a living pendulum — first migrating to one extreme at a glacial velocity and always alighting on the tempting antipode that evades moderation like a drunken man heading homeward. The victim in these cultural mood swings of political perception is always truth: whose tragic wreckage is caused both by the consequences of our destructive philosophies and the haunting desire to salvage whatever intellectual pride we have left, once our idols have come crashing down upon us.

While in the newspapers or on television you will not be informed about it in a form that makes sense, a growing cancer of racially-based violence is metastasizing in our cities. Moreover, unless you were to see these outrages first hand or in media outside the mainstream organs, you would know nothing of it — for it is being withheld from you. For reasons that we may want to speculate on, the news media have made an overt decision to avert your eyes away from the stone cold reality that a spectrum of young black men and women, motivated by race, rage, or entertainment, are increasingly committing crimes against life and property by the medium of flash mob violence.

From Oregon and Washington to New Jersey, packs of youth are targeting markets, shoe stores, county fairs, beach walks, and city parks in conducting brazen crimes by overwhelming police and security who find themselves increasingly unable to counter the element of surprise and viciousness that goes hand in hand with this phenomenon. As a result of this, brutal beatings of whites and Asians have become commonplace occurrences, resulting in public facilities being closed down to traffic as roving hordes materialize and vanish into the night like specters. And yet, the 900 pound gorilla in the room (that no one will dare look in the eye) is that there is an unassailable racial component involved. Furthermore, in the interest of multicultural harmony, cities which have long been in the clutches of Democratic political machines have lulled themselves to become anxiously oblivious to the mayhem. Because of this, those molders of opinion have taken to calling a serpent a stallion in hopes that the world, in turn, would also close its eyes.

In speaking to this epidemic of interracial mob beatings, robberies and maimings, Colin Flaherty's 2012 book, "White Girl Bleed a Lot:" The Return of Racial Violence and How the Media Ignore it, offers an exhaustive account of this racial brand of violence. Moreover, it charts the reprehensible actions of: police chiefs, intellectuals, and media editors to sweep the undeniable racial aspects underneath the rug. In the media accounts of these crimes, rarely are the races of the perps and the victims given, except in the rare instances where blacks are on the receiving end of the injustice. Only then does unholy hell breaks loose as the usual coterie of racial extortionists flood the airwaves with their travelling Dog and Pony Shows of white racial condemnation. Rather than face the fact that an urban pandemic of this brand of violence, theft, and robbery is tantamount to a subculture gone amok, the newspeak term generally applied towards these perpetrators is simply "youth." If, however, one scans the areas wherein these incidents occur or views the ubiquitous You-Tube videos, often posted by the assailants themselves, the shocking images provide the necessary information as to their salient identities.

While the media remain intent on echoing the drum beat of white America's persistent Jim Crow mentality or the perpetual congenital debt owed to African Americans for past discrimination, the pendulum has nevertheless swung Left to rationalize or diminish this reversed incarnation of racial violence. And as the racial component of this wilding is dismissed as uninteresting by the Usual Suspects, for he who has eyes to see, it is a direct consequence of a volcanic hatred that has been brewed from a well-cultivated array of cultural grievances. Grievances kept enflamed by liberal narratives of a divided society kept perpetually at war.

If one looks to the 2011 FBI crime statistics, one notices that whites (Hispanics included) make up 78.1% of the U.S. population while Blacks comprise 13.1%. By race, blacks commit 45% of their crimes against whites while 43% target fellow blacks and 10% of their victims are Hispanic. when Whites commit violent crime, only 3% of their victims are black. By considering these crimes as a percentage of the population at large, blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against whites than vice versa and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

…

Holding a segment of a population to a lesser standard by excusing them from the burden of responsible conduct is the apex of pathological discrimination. This is akin to pronouncing a people exempt from accountability and thereby condemned to a state of ethical incoherence and perpetual adolescence. Moreover, by knowingly obfuscating the truth behind this novel form of racial wilding, government and civil society give assent to a volitional blindness that becomes outraged only when a pre-certified pack of wolves devour innocent sheep. In the end, those minorities afflicted by this Progressive ethical cancer are themselves revictimized as a result of liberal society's cowardice in feeding a Frankenstein-like evil they have wrought with their own hands. Through the recurring injustice of denial, such lives are again fated to be crushed by that blind pendulum whose bitter inertia truth would not forestall.”

One way of addressing this issue is to stop the progressive policies of the past 50 years of aid to dependent children, welfare, and the myriad other Great Society programs that are the real cause.

Bad Behavior Begets More Bad Behavior

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Several years while on a cruise I had a conversation with couple from Great Britain. They were decrying he violence and hooliganism prevalent at European soccer games and how it was impossible to take a family, especially with young children, to one of these games. They said the combination of “low class” fans, alcohol, and lack of proper security made the games off limits for the average family. They also said that this combination along with the out of control passion displayed by supporters of one team over the other was the cause of onging verbal assaults leading to fights.

The went on to say that they had watch games of American football on television and though he game was much more exciting and the fans seemed more friendly and well behaved.

When the NFL had their minor league teams in Europe according to an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading papers in Germany, comparing the crowds attending the NFL style football as opposed to soccer games the writer claimed the crowds were more “upscale” and well behaved. Even the Frankfurt chief of police said he needed about half the security at he NFL games than the soccer games.

That was several years ago, but things have taken a turn for the worse in the United States. Football and baseball games are becoming unfriendly events for families. The crowds are becoming more hostile and he fans more aggressive to fans of the opposing teams. The language you will hear spouted around you as you sit in you $75 or $100 dollar seat will make sailor blush and there is a constant display of bad behavior and fights in the stands. In fact these fights draw more attention than the plays on the field.

Over the weekend there were fights and shootings at Candlestick Park, in San Francisco during a game between the San Francisco 49ers and their arch rivals the Oakland Raiders. While the Oakland Raiders have always had a reputation of bad unruly fan behavior it reached a new height on Saturday night when two fans were gunned down in the parking lot for wearing the jersey of the wrong team. ESPN reported:

“A man wearing a shirt slamming the San Francisco 49ers was seriously wounded as gunfire erupted in the parking lot after the team's NFL preseason game, while another man sustained lesser injuries in an earlier shooting, police said.

The violence occurred after the 49ers' 17-3 victory Saturday night over the Oakland Raiders at Candlestick Park, police Sgt. Michael Andraychak said.

A 24-year-old man was treated at San Francisco General Hospital for life-threatening injuries, and a 20-year-old man was hospitalized with less serious wounds, Andraychack told The Associated Press.:

Their names were not released.

The violence comes months after a San Francisco Giants fan was severely beaten by two men in Los Angeles Dodgers gear outside Dodger Stadium after the teams' season opener March 31. Two suspects have been charged in the case.

Police Sgt. Frank Harrell said that in Saturday's attack the 24-year-old man, who was wearing a T-shirt referring to the 49ers with an obscenity, was shot two to four times in the stomach, according to reports in the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. He drove his truck to a gate and stumbled to security, Harrell said.

The other man was shot before that in the parking lot and had superficial face injuries, Harrell said.

"We are treating it as separate shootings, but we believe they are related," Harrell told reporters outside the stadium.

Harrell said police took a man in a Raiders jersey off a party bus before it left the stadium and were calling him a suspect.

The suspect and the two victims had all attended the game, Harrell told the newspapers.

The 49ers issued a statement acknowledging the shootings and the investigation, but offering no further details.

In violence during the game, the Oakland Tribune reported that a 26-year-old San Rafael man was assaulted and knocked unconscious in a men's restroom. Police said he was hospitalized and a suspect was arrested. There was no immediate indication that it was connected to the postgame shootings.”

In another report on Fox News this morning a horrific brawl broke out in the stands at the same game. Click here to watch the video, it will tell you much more than I can. There were other numerous fights throughout the stadium.

What is amazing, when watching the video, is to see the fans urging the brawlers on and other fans taking video so they can post it to YouTube. The looks on the faces of the fans urging the fighters on is downright scary and the security guard seemed totally overpowered by the brawlers.

Consider if you had taken your wife and child to the game and laid out from $100 to $250 dollars for the three tickets and then had to have your well being threatened by being exposed to this behavior.

I recall when I could afford to go to the games and had games I could go to (I lost my team to St. Louis years ago) it was fun. You booed the opposing team amd the officials when they made a call you did not agree with. You even booed your own team when you thought they were playing badly. People would talk with each other and critique he play on the field. Now you have to watch who you root on for fear getting punched in the face by some irate fan.

What drives this bad behavior? In my view it’s an extension of the overall bad behavior in our general society. We have flash mobs running through the streets breaking windows and beating on people. We have riots after a team wins a championship game, riots that end in looting and vandalism that is more like the invading Huns than a civilized society.

We also have bad behavior by mobs protesting political events like the recent bad behavior by the union mobs in Wisconsin protesting Governor Scott Walker’s legislation to curtail collective bargaining and pension contributions by union thugs, college students and teachers. The recent strike by unionized Verizon working on the east coast also showed union thugs exhibiting the same bad behavior. It seems that this bad behavior always come from the left.

You can see example after example in the left-wing blogs and publications like the Daily Kos where invectives like “racist”, “moron”, and “fascists” are thrown around like so many snowballs in a snowball fight. It is not only the invectives but the foul and obscene language they use in the comment sections. They seem incapable of expressing themselves in a cogent manner without using ad hominines and four letter words that sailors would not use in mixed company, yet they feel totally at ease with. Just look at his latest example in the Daily Kos’ week in review: Obama vs. Moronic, Racist, Violent Anita Bryant Fans as reported by News Busters:

“Even Kossacks who've been hugely disappointed in President Obama are starting to realize that for them, he's clearly preferable to anyone the Republicans might nominate. For that reason, they've dialed back their criticism of Obama for falling short of the progressive ideal on issues from health care to the deficit in favor of blasts at their enemies on the right.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.”

Is it any wonder people feel empowered to behave badly when they cannot type a simple sentence to deliver their opinion without resorting to bad language and insults. This is what the left has learned over the years. Facts don’t matter, screaming and invectives will do.

They are so blinded by hatred for everyone who disagrees with them, so cocksure of their moral superiority and their towering intelligence that they can only attack with unhinged verbal vengeance like those fans at the football game. If they weren't somewhat frightening, they'd almost be funny.

Look at what happened in the United Kingdom last week. Crowds ran rampage through the streets of London, Birmingham, and Manchester looting, burning and smashing everything in sight.

We accept this behavior today and give it excuses like, they are poor, they are underprivileged, and they are just expressing their frustrations with society. When the ones doing the rioting and looting are arrested, which is all to rare, they go to court all decked out in suits and ties and their attorneys play on the sympathies of the judges and juries begging them not to ruin this young person’s or family man’s life by convicting him of a felony and sentencing him to jail. Most of these offenders get off with a slap on the wrist suffering much less consequences than their victims.

It’s time for society and our judicial system to begin cracking down on these hooligans and their anti-social behavior. No excuses, no exceptions.

Class Warfare

"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." — Frederick. Hayek

Last week, the U.K. burned. Several nights of rioting, looting and general mayhem began in a London neighborhood following the police shooting of a black man (who was armed with a blank pistol) and spread across the country.

Simultaneously, a quarter of a million people took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Israel, to protest the rising cost of living. CNBC reported the protests actually began a month previous when some people set up tents in an expensive part of town to protest rising property prices.

In Spain, Greece and Portugal, strikes, protests and rioting have occurred off and on for much of the spring and summer over government austerity measures and corruption.

Rising prices of consumer goods fueled demands for better pay and job protection by workers in the Philippines in May. Workers left their jobs and marched in the streets.

In China, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon and Kuwait, people have risen up in protests of varying degrees. Some of these led to a change in government, some fizzled out, some have been bought off and some have been quashed by violent repression.

While none of these protests are exactly alike and the spark that ignited them often came from different sources, they do have some common traits. Among them are the roiling economy, inflation, loss of liberties, class warfare and seemingly hopeless job prospects.

In Great Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal, the protests demonstrate the failure of socialism.

Governments have run out of money, so they are cutting back on programs supporting the parasite class that developed off government largess. The crash of the economy has left many without jobs, and cutbacks in unemployment, food subsidies, housing subsidies, education subsidies, healthcare subsidies and the like are either being implemented or discussed.

That’s not sitting well with the parasites who grew dependent on the nanny state and have seethed and simmered over the injustices — whether real or perceived — they have endured. They’ve heard the elected elites blame the rich for their troubles, so they’re lashing out at those they consider “rich.” It doesn’t matter to them that these “rich” people are their neighbors and they’re burning down their own neighborhoods. All that matters is the rich have “stuff” and the parasites want “stuff,” so smashing windows, looting, robbing and setting fires have become legitimate things for them to do.

Kids as young as 7 or 8 were photographed looting stores of everything from liquor to clothing to expensive electronics. Drunken teenage girls were questioned by journalists about why they were burning and looting their own neighborhoods, and they responded with the incomprehensible, “Because they are rich.”

May this be a foreshadowing of what’s coming to America? We certainly have some of the same conditions here: long-term high unemployment, politicians playing the class-warfare game, government corruption, rising prices, austerity measures, a culture of dependency and elected elites ignoring the will of the governed. All that’s lacking is the right spark.

The potential for that spark is certainly there. Already in cities across the country there are almost daily reports of flash mobs looting stores and robbing and beating innocent bystanders. At the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee there was a violent incident on Aug. 5 of blacks attacking whites.

Wisconsin, of course, was the scene of protests over austerity measures that curtailed some of the bargaining rights of public sector unions. Again, the parasite class living off the sweat of the producers enjoyed benefits far exceeding those available in the private sector, and they didn’t like losing even a small percentage of their perquisites.

Wisconsin, of course, was the scene of protests over austerity measures that curtailed some of the bargaining rights of public sector unions. Again, the parasite class living off the sweat of the producers enjoyed benefits far exceeding those available in the private sector, and they didn’t like losing even a small percentage of their perquisites.

Meanwhile, the elites in Washington, D.C., continue to fiddle while the American economy burns. They failed to make any significant cuts in government spending and Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s sovereign credit rating from AAA to AA+. The result: The stock market reacted by dropping more than 634 points in three days. And that’s on top of a 1,341 point drop while Congress and President Barack Obama dithered.

People are growing increasingly desperate. There are a growing number of reports of people stealing metal items of all sorts — from doors at construction sites to manhole covers to copper wire — as items for recycling in an effort to find the money to stay alive. States and municipalities like Lakewood, New Jersey and Sacramento, California are considering setting up tent cities to accommodate the growing number of homeless people many of them driven out of their homes because they have lost their jobs and have found no prospects for meaningful employment.

The Obama Administration is considering using government-owned foreclosure properties as rental housing, but how will people pay the rent if there are no jobs? And how will companies — particularly small businesses, which are the backbone of the economy — add jobs if there is no one who can afford to buy their products and the government continues to stifle business expansion because of increasingly stringent regulations and uncertainty about what it might try to implement next?

Chilling events going on in London of the massive riots and the breakout of class warfare is very scary and as we watch it we wonder if that can come to our shores.

We were blessed that our revolution had nothing to do with class warfare. In fact our revolution was led by rich people like Jefferson, Washington, and John Hancock and included poor people as well. It was a national effort

Around 1820-1830 Andrew Jackson, a populous Democrat, took that impudence and made it about class by expanding the suffrage of white males and destroyed the national bank of the United States, which he claimed was the source of all corporate power. His enthusiastic followers created the modern Democratic Party, and the 1830-1850 period later became known as the era of Jacksonian democracy.

After the civil war class warfare got tuned on its head and became class warfare of the rich. Social Darwinism had come into play where it became survival of the fittest. That reinforced the Presbyterian idea of predestination — If your successful it meant you were blessed and God really likes you.

In 1890 there was a huge rebellion against that idea led by the farmers and the citizens in the western United States. There was period of tremendous deflation due to our being on the gold standard.

There wasn’t enough currency and the farmers were in terrible shape. That led to the populous rebellion were government tried to inflate the currency. It also led to women’s suffrage, the income tax and the direct election of senators along with the referendum, imitative and recall as we saw in Wisconsin.

It was William Jennings Bryan, the perpetual Democratic candidate for the presidency who gave his famous Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. The speech advocated bimetallism. Following the Coinage Act (1873), the United States abandoned its policy of bimetallism and began to operate a de facto gold standard. In 1896, the Democratic Party wanted to standardize the value of the dollar to silver and opposed a monometallic gold standard. The inflation that would result from the silver standard would make it easier for farmers and other debtors to pay off their debts by increasing their revenue dollars. It would also reverse the deflation which the U.S. experienced from 1873 to 1896.

Class warfare in the 1920s turned on its head once again as we began to look at rich people again as favored. This was the period of the roaring 20’s when almost every American was invested in Wall Street. The great recession of 1919-21 had ended with the Republican Congress taking draconian measures to reverse the policies of the progressive Woodrow Wilson.

At the conclusion of World War I, U.S. officials found themselves in a bleak position. The federal debt had exploded because of wartime expenditures, and annual consumer price inflation rates had jumped well above 20 percent by the end of the war.

To restore fiscal and price sanity, the authorities implemented what today strikes us as incredibly “merciless” policies. From FY 1919 to 1920, federal spending was slashed from $18.5 billion to $6.4 billion — a 65 percent reduction in one year. The budget was pushed down the next two years as well, to $3.3 billion in FY 1922

When the Great Depression hit in 1929 there was a tremendous impudence towards class warfare. FDR played it an interesting way. In his first administration he would have nothing to do with class warfare. He wanted to save the banks and the capitalist system and make it work.

Then when he saw he wasn’t able to solve this depression and lower the unemployment for 26% to 13% in 1936, but it was not going any lower. He figured he could campaign in 1936 on an explicitly populous class warfare platform. In a campaign speech in Philadelphia he said the economic royalists hate me and I welcome their hatred.

He then introduced a whole series of legislation aimed at the upper class and disenfranchising them. That had the effect of rekindling the depression and unemployment went back up to 26% until WWII took it down.

In the remaining 1940, 1950 and into the 1960s there really wasn’t much in the class warfare. There began to be, on the other hand, a social populism that was the conservatives answer to the economic populism of the left

The economic populist vilified Wall Street while the social populist vilified Hollywood. In effect it was an attack on values — hence the Moral Majority. The big concerns of the social populists Communism, school bussing, flag burners and opposing the Vietnam war protesters.

In 1992 during Clinton’s campaign class warfare was tried again. He realized he had to appeal to a Democratic Party base. And if he could 40-42 percent of the vote he would win because Ross Perrot was in the race. He tried the overt attack on George Bush — he was a preppy, a rich inherited fellow.

Ann Richards said at the Democratic convention that George bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth. He work up and thought he was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple. That stuff was effective because the Democrats could win with only a relative small vote share.

The fact is that economic populism has been roundly rejected by the American people. It wins the Democratic primaries, something the Democrats can focus on.

But in the end we have always regarded class as totally different from Britain. In Britain “I’m working class and I’m proud of it and I don’t want my son to grow up and be some sort of entrepreneur. I want him to make an honest living as a carpenter, bricklayer or miner and belong to a union like I do” is common among the “working class” And when a boss comes in in his Rolls Royce the British factory worker hates him because he has a Rolls Royce.

Now in the United States there is such upward mobility that patents want their son to have a Rolls Royce. I want my son or daughter to have a better live than I’ve had.

And the upward mobility that is at the core of the American social and economic political structure has diffused the potential for class warfare.

But now we have no upward mobility. The only upward mobility we have is through political action where you increase government entitlements and handouts. And that really is a recipe for class warfare.

Now we have a president who is explicitly stoking class warfare. That’s a very dangerous thing. When you look at the disruptive effects that is having in Europe that could bring a poison into our body politic in the United States, that thankfully has been absent until now.

In a recent report on Fox News Obama has begun his class warfare strategy by blasting Republicans and the Tea Party. As he has no record to run on this will be his modus operandi for the next 15 months. The report states:

“Not knowing who the eventual Republican presidential nominee will be in the 2012 election, President Obama's supporters are taking the opportunity to blast all of the GOP candidates, using aggressive language to argue that the crop of contenders is either uninterested or incapable of helping Americans.

Much of the criticism is focused on describing the candidates as lackeys to the Tea Party, which establishment Democrats have classified as right-wing zealots bent on destroying the U.S.”

The Fox report continues:

"While protecting tax breaks for the wealthy and big oil while proposing to end Medicare, slash Social Security and pile additional burdens on the middle class might win plaudits with the Tea Party, it's not remotely what the American people are looking for," Democratic National Committee Communications Director Brad Woodhouse said in a statement Sunday after Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race.

"In a Republican field that has already pledged allegiance to the Tea Party and failed to present any plan that will benefit the middle class or create the jobs America needs to win the future, Governor Perry offers more of the same," Obama campaign spokesman Ban LaBolt said Saturday after Texas Gov. Rick Perry jumped into the race.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz noted that Obama asked for compromise on a debt reduction plan but all the presidential candidates at the Fox News-Washington Examiner debate on Thursday night agreed that they would not back a deal that would be 10-1 cuts to revenue.

"That's how strangled by the Tea Party that they are, and that's not what Americans are looking for. They're looking for solutions," she said.

"If anyone is in trouble, it's the Republican Party," continued Wasserman Schultz, who was appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation." "Right now, they have a collection of candidates for president who are busy out -- trying to out-right-wing each other. Essentially, they are all so similar that they might as well be Legos; they're that interchangeable."

Obama’s class warfare strategy can only lead to the tearing of the American fabric. Watching London burn, one cannot help but sense something has gone awry in the west. London, the cradle of our law, spins toward lawlessness.

J. Christian Adams writes in Accuracy In Media:

“The law, the steady framework of our civilization, seems incapable of response. Americans don’t have the luxury anymore of watching the anarchy on television, assuming distance insulates us from the Mob-prowling neighborhoods like Camberwell and Tottenham. The howling rage has even come to our own Midwest.

Hopefully time and wisdom will reveal what has fractured, but for now, we are certain of some things.

We know that the House of Reeves in Croydon, South London, is a pile of ash and rubble. This furniture business had been in the Reeves family for 141 years, surviving even Hitler’s blitz. But the Mob burned it down. “I’m the fifth generation to run this place,” said owner Graham Reeves, “I have two daughters. They would have been the sixth.” It was a fixture in Croydon, which may have been its doom. The Mob loves to devour the fixtures of civilization. The Mob also delights in the destruction of a father’s dream for his daughter.

We know that the Mob is forcing victims to undress, to turn over family heirlooms such as wedding rings. We know the weapon of choice for this British Mob is fire.

We now sense that the British government is hopeless. A government that as recently as 1970 made “arson in a royal dockyard” a hanging offense dithers over whether to employ water cannons against the Mob. Americans who, for generations endearingly considered England a model of civility and decorum, know something must have failed catastrophically, but what?

We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.”

Mr. Adams reports of a similar incident in Akron, Ohio:

“The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.

Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.”

“Now Prime Minister David Cameron is taking a hard line towards the rioters with opposition from, as expected, the liberal left. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Prime Minister David Cameron sought to bolster his law-and-order credentials Monday with a speech promising a root and branch review of all government policy to tackle the "slow-motion moral collapse" he believes led to the U.K.'s worst rioting in decades.

Mr. Cameron faces many obstacles in turning round what he described as "broken Britain"—including his government's cuts to police forces, and divisions between the police and government that have erupted since the unrest.

Parts of his tough response are also causing disquiet with his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, whose support he needs to get any proposals moving. Meanwhile, the opposition Labour Party ramped up its criticisms of Mr. Cameron's reactions, splitting the cross party consensus on the riots.

In his speech, Mr. Cameron said that the riots came amid a culture in which people and parents increasingly don't take responsibility for their actions, and that the state has made it harder to impose discipline. Mr. Cameron added that the fear of "stigmatizing" people by addressing head-on topics such as single-parent families has made it more difficult to tackle such issues.

"In this risk-free ground of moral neutrality there are no bad choices, just different lifestyles," he said. He added: " 'Live and let live' becomes 'Do what you please.' "

Many of Mr. Cameron's views on the riots are in line with the post-riots public mood and hit on old Tory themes. In the long-term, the U.K. leader may benefit from his get-tough approach. An ICM Research poll in the Guardian newspaper over the weekend said 45% blamed "criminality on the part of the rioters" for last week's trouble; 28% cited "lack of respect within families and communities" and 8% blamed youth unemployment. About one in three asked by ICM and by fellow pollsters ComRes said they believed Mr. Cameron has handled the response to the riots well.”

Never in the recent history of our nation has the class warfare been as prevalent as it is today. The Obama administration and his progressive Democratic supporters are taking a great risk by using a strategy of class and race warfare to retain their power in the White house and the Senate. The damage they are doing will live beyond the election. If Republicans gain control of the White House and Senate and make the cuts needed to save the nation by reducing the size of government and cutting back on the welfare state the same civil unrest that rocked London and other cities in the United Kingdom will come to our urban centers. When those who are the beneficiaries of the plunder no longer receive their plunder from the state the will turn to plunder of others. If the 2012 presidential election is close and Obama loses the unrest will begin the next day. Obama and the Democrats have set the stage.

The London Riots From The British Perspective

"These socialist writers look upon people in the same manner that the gardener views his trees. Just as the gardener capriciously shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, vases, fans, and other forms, just so does the socialist writer whimsically shape human beings into groups, series, centers, sub-centers, honeycombs, labor-corps, and other variations. And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings. For this purpose, he devises tariff laws, relief laws, and school laws." — Frederic Bastiat

There has not been much coverage in the mainstream media about the criminal rioting, looting and vandalizing going on in the United Kingdom. Even when there is coverage the reporters or pundits usually add a caveat about austerity programs, budget cuts, needs of the poor, lack of access to free education, racism and the class system. They claim that the budget cuts recommended by the current conservative/liberal coalition government lies at the root of the riots. They do not tell you, however, that social program spending as risen 20% under the Cameron government.

The British press has a slightly different take on the situation. Max Hastings has a great column in the London Mail where he delves into the causes of riots, the deterioration of civility, the cultural breakdown and the failures of the British welfare system. He points out that years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalized youngsters. The following are a few selected excerpts from Hastings column:

“A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like.”

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorized communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.’

Hastings goes on to say:

“When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.

Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart. Who do we blame for this state of affairs?

Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.

But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behavior reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.”

Hastings points out the effects of lack of discipline and the family unit:

“A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalized sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.”

Hastings concludes his column with this admonition to British society, a similar admonition given by the mayor of Philadelphia the other day:

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

Philip Johnston writes in the Telegraph:

“Yet the riots we are seeing now are fundamentally different from those that have gone before. They might, ostensibly, have been triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a notorious gangster, in north London; but they are fuelled by pure greed, by a belief that something can be had for nothing. The usual brakes on such behavior – either an appreciation that it is wrong, or by the prospect that the culprit will be caught and punished – are largely absent.

For this, we have to thank four decades of politically correct policing, and a gradual breakdown of the informal network of authority figures that once provided an additional element of control over the bad behaviour of young people. Adults are now reluctant, or too scared, to step in and stop things getting out of hand, or to impose a wider moral code – and in any case, they are no longer listened to. Deference to age and authority has been eroded by years of genuflection to the twin gods of multiculturalism and community cohesion.

The police, bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots 30 years ago and the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994, have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order. And the places that have really suffered as a result are the most deprived: they have to bear the brunt of the criminality and the fear, squalor and alienation that accompanies it.

In recent years, a myth has been allowed to grow up – motivated in part by the approach of the Olympic Games – that London is one of the world’s safest big cities. In terms of its murder rate, that may be true. But no one living in the capital is unaware of the existence of a minority ready to descend into lawlessness at the drop of a hat. There has long been a disconnection between this reality and the self-congratulation of police and politicians inspired by dodgy crime statistics and phoney targets: the truth is the capital has far more crime than 40 years ago, and parts of the city are no-go areas for the police.”

Michael McCarthy writes in the Independent about the absence of civility and the lack of the rule of law:

“I think people were so frightened because something had been loosed and was on display, which was new to many people – and that was the sight of very large numbers of people, mainly young men, who were no longer constrained by our culture. The role of culture in making British society what it is, and in giving it its remarkable strengths, is not often remarked upon, but it is enormous. We are, or we have been, a culture-bound society: we have been governed largely by informal constraints on our behaviour.

This is in sharp contrast to a society like that of the United States, for example, which is largely a rule-bound society. To give just a single instance: drinking alcohol in the street used to be rare in Britain, because it was frowned upon – but in the US there are local laws specifically forbidding it. The rule-bound society, which is the reason for the vast proliferation of lawyers in the US, arose in America because the founding fathers created a new nation from scratch, starting with a written Constitution that set out the first principles and then writing down and proscribing everything else about people's behavior.

Britain, whose governing process evolved slowly and organically, does not even have a written constitution, merely a set of understandings about how things ought to be done.

But these understandings have, in the past, been widespread and very powerful. The bus queue and the idea of queuing generally is an example that persists; I remember my shock and spluttering resentment when I first went skiing, years ago, and stood patiently with the other Brits in the queue for the chairlift and watched as the little French and Italian kids skied to the front and forced their way in. (An example that has fallen by the wayside is giving up your seat to a woman on public transport. When I was a boy, no woman on a bus or a train would be standing if a man had a seat to offer her; now the man who gets up is the exception.”

It’s clear evidence that destructive social policy — from winking at crime to rewarding single motherhood to shunning legitimate discipline of children — has a lasting impact on a culture’s health, including its economic vibrancy.

The unnerving aspect is that the United States might be a decade or two removed from the United Kingdom’s youthful chaos. Much of the blame, Hastings argues, can be laid at the feet of liberals who fear calling bad behavior bad, and enacting punishment. Frequently, Western cultures no longer feel comfortable punishing negative behavior. Indeed, we often reward it with a welfare check.

Consider an able-bodied young man or woman. Don’t want to work? Government will step in and provide out of a misguided sense that the rest of society owes these people a free ride. It’s a classic example of a hand out rather than a hand up.

What's to blame? Hastings has an idea:

“The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.”

I believe, that while Hastings is hitting some strong points he has neglected to mention the media’s and the politician’s role in this issue. For years the progressive left, with the help from the left-wing media, has consistently bombarded us with how mean we are by not sharing the wealth with our underclass and that we needed bigger and bigger government programs costing more and more money to provide economic justice to this so called forgotten poverty class. This was the premise behind Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Since 1986, when the Great Society began pouring billions into so called poverty reducing programs poverty in this country has not been reduced by one percentage point, in fact it has gone from 14% to 14.3%.

These programs have been the backbone of the Democrat Party to retain their power in the urban cities of America. Like Great Britain, we have dumbed down our society through our public education system and diversity programs. Our youth expects more and more from government and the sense of entitlement has reached the highest level in our nation’s history. As Bastiat said; everyone wants to plunder everyone else.

The anarchy in British cities should surprise no one. Britain has been sleepwalking into this catastrophe for 40 years. The riots up and down the country this week are the logical conclusion to the decades-long disintegration of civilized behavior. While youths throughout the Arab world rise up to demand basic human rights and democracy, British kids smash shop windows for want of an iPad.

Any visitors to England in the last decade who have ventured beyond central London have seen it for themselves. In town centers on weekends drunkenness and anti-social behavior abound. There's no place to take your family for a quiet meal, unless you want to witness gangs of marauding youths and beer-swilling thugs urinating against people's door steps and throwing up on street corners. I know this through a close friend who live in England and is planning to move to Switzerland.

The British riots are another link between a society’s social and economic health. Stable, two-parent families would not have produced such a stampede of vengeful rioters. In the moral vacuum brought about by Europe's abandonment of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethic, mixed with scant punishment for crime, young people have no reason to behave responsibly. “Love your neighbor” rings hallow when hedonism and moral relativism are the order of the day.

Family structure, faith, and moral teaching do matter. Liberals don’t acknowledge that truth, instead relying on government intervention, including through "education." The U.K. riots are the result.

Robert Taylor writes in American Spectator:

“Commentators, politicians, tweeters and pub conversationalists are asking the same question. Why did it happen? Right-wingers think it's a lack of discipline and personal responsibility. Left-wingers say it's the absence of opportunity and hope, made worse by cuts in public services.

These are interesting theories. But we're debating it all 40 years too late. As long ago as the 1970s, when I was a boy, I witnessed a riot at a soccer match in my home city of Birmingham. It made the regional news headlines, but no more. Soccer hooliganism was common currency by then, and had been for a decade.”

Psychology has a term called “Diffusion of Responsibility” This term refers to a social phenomenon which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when responsibility is not explicitly assigned. This phenomenon rarely occurs in small groups. In tests, when in groups of three or fewer, everyone in the group took action. This is as opposed to when in groups of over ten, where in almost every test no one took action. In essence when everyone is responsible no one is responsible.

Take as an example you driving along a deserted road and you see a traffic accident. The odd are 100 to 1 that you will dial 911 and stop to see if you can render some assistance. On the other hand you are on a crowded freeway and see the accident you will probably cruise on by thinking someone else is calling 911.

This is what is happening to our civilized society. We have a diffusion of responsibility towards our civilized society. It’s someone else’s problem. Let the police handle it. I don’t want to get involved. Let’s video it and post it on YouTube. These are all common phases used today.

In yet another piece written by Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor, in the City Journal about the degeneracy of British society:

“The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer—partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics. And so unskilled labor is performed in England by foreigners, while an indigenous class of permanently unemployed is subsidized.

The culture of the person in this situation is not such as to elevate his behavior. One in which the late Amy Winehouse—the vulgar, semi criminal drug addict and alcoholic singer of songs whose lyrics effectively celebrated the most degenerate kind of life imaginable—could be raised to the status of heroine is not one that is likely to protect against bad behavior.”

During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles the Korean shop owners in Korea Town manned their shops armed with guns ready to repel and rioters and looters. They were family, they were a community. They would not put up with the actions of the criminal rioters. This did was not the case in Britain. Britain today is a society immersed in the diffusion of responsibility They have become so enslaved to government policies and handouts that they cannot protect their own. They have no Second Amendment and gun ownership is frowned upon and in many cases forbidden.

The British riots, however, had no cause. A suspected drug-dealer was apparently shot by police in London, and cities all over the country have gone up in smoke. It is as if the country has been living on a ticking bomb that no one was aware existed.

Hal G.P. Colebatch writes in the American Spectator:

“Picking one's way through the often self-censored, politically correct reportage, there appears to have been a racial element in the riots. But many of the rioters filmed were white, and some at least appear to be ordinary middle-class people. Although there is obviously a class element, with some extreme leftists calling for open class warfare, the main sufferers have been, as always, small shopkeepers, householders, and workers whose employment has been destroyed. These riots have caused deep, life-damaging suffering. Nothing like this occurred in the gray, straitened, austere Britain of the immediate post-war period, when there was even greater economic hardship than today.

There have been riots in Britain before, but they generally had at least some kind of identifiable cause. Similarly, the riots in Europe (against the cutting of plainly unsustainable government benefits) were in pursuit of something. In the British riots thousands of people seem to have been caught up in a frenzy of indiscriminate destruction for its own sake. Even looting was secondary to destroying. And yet it is only a few weeks since the Royal Wedding appeared to bring the country together in a great outburst of patriotic pride and rejoicing.

It is obvious that generations of policies of self-destructive liberalism and a deep-seated social nihilism are coming home to roost.

It may be dawning on some political leaders that the education, family, immigration and criminal justice policies of successive, but principally Labour, governments have created an under-class not only lacking in the most basic skills necessary for employment but also lacking in the most basic values of human conduct. Discipline in many schools (except against expressions of political incorrectness) has largely been abandoned, with predictable results. The so-called "softly, softly" approach to policing, which has enthralled many liberalistic police chiefs, may also be consigned to the scrap-heap of bad ideas.”

Fox News has reported that the British Government is now looking to the United States for assistance in combating gang and street violence. Specifically the are looking for help from Bill Bratton, former police chief of New York City and Los Angeles. The Fox report stated:

“Britain said Thursday that it would seek U.S. law enforcement advice on fighting gang violence as the U.K. deals with riots that have gripped several of the country's cities.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who has summoned lawmakers back to Parliament because of the crisis, said he would act “decisively to restore order on our streets,” and he cited prominent U.S. police chief Bill Bratton as a potential source for advice.

Bratton, whose resume includes top cop jobs in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, said in a written statement that he would “be honored” to assist the British.

Since the riots first started, London's Metropolitan Police have been widely criticized for its slow and inadequate response. The situation has deteriorated to the point where citizens are forced to stand guard in front of their homes and businesses because of the lack of police presence.”

According to law enforcement experts in the U.S., the first few hours are pivotal.

Bill Gavin, the former head of the FBI in New York, told Fox News that there’s a philosophical difference between London police and its U.S. cousin departments. In particular, London failed to deploy an overwhelming force to halt the rioters.

“The time for reasoning is after you’ve controlled them,” Gavin said, adding that Bratton would serve as a suitable adviser.

While quick and forceful police response is necessary to quell riots it is not the total solution. There needs to be a change in the culture. Citizens must begin taking responsibility for their communities. Politicians must stop pandering to class warfare for their personal aggrandizement and power and the liberal media must stop promoting a society where the takers are more powerful than the makers.

Douglas Murray writes in the Wall Street Journal condemning the ongoing tactics of the progressive left as they try to gain political advantage from the riots:

“Within hours of the riots starting on Saturday, the left-wing former mayor of London Ken Livingstone claimed the unrest was "the fault of the government," citing a 9% cut in central government grants to Tottenham, where these crime sprees began. Labour's Shadow Health Minister Diane Abbott made sure to garnish her condemnation of the violence with the reminder that in her constituency, "Haringey Council has lost £41 million from its budget and has cut youth services by 75%." Whether her constituents ever raised this issue as they looted luxury-goods shops, Ms. Abbott did not say.

Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman behaved worst of all. Claiming on Tuesday that Labour leader Ed Miliband had been "well-received in Peckham," she compared this reception to the hostility that has greeted Britain's Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and London's Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson this week. She claimed that the difference was due to the Labour Party's opposition to tuition-fee rises. Stuck in an even less functional radical-left tape-loop, Labour Parliamentarian John McDonnell blames bankers.

So the Labour Party has decided to draw political conclusions from the hooliganism. They have decided that these supposed breadline-rioters—who seem utterly uninterested in bread—are the product of political decisions the Tories have made in the last 15 months. Fine.

This Alinskyite class warfare and striving for the fantasy of social and economic justice will change from taking plunder from the state to just plain plunder.