As is often the case when a shooting breaks into the national debate, we’ve seen lots of celebrities, media elites, and others lining up to talk down to conservatives about how heartless they are being for not passing more gun laws. To understand the apparent conservative intransigence on the topic and their unwillingness to give an inch on more gun control laws, you have to be aware of a few points:
1. Conservatives don’t have any power in most large cities. Kansas City, for example, has had only Democrat mayors since 1930, save for one exception who left office back in 1991, over a quarter century ago. Given that these cities have completely rejected them politically, conservatives don’t feel particularly responsible for their plight.
2. Much of Hollywood hates conservatives and makes that perfectly clear. As a consumer, being a conservative usually means making peace with the fact that most of the actors, artists and other famous people you enjoy following despise your beliefs. Not all, to be sure, but a large majority.
3. Conservative voters often aren’t particularly wealthy, with a number of rural towns struggling a lot in recent years. Drugs have become a major problem, as have deaths from despair more generally.
4. People who live in more conservative exurban and rural areas have watched in horror as more and more cities have increasingly let criminals walk with little or no consequences. They saw rioters go completely unpunished in 2020 because they were rioting for “the right reasons.”
5. People on the right side of the political spectrum increasingly don’t identify with the prevailing values of many large cities, which they see as, dysfunctional, immoral, and irresponsible.
6. They’ve always had guns, and lots of them. They grew up with them and are comfortable around them. Yes, there can be problems with guns, namely as a tool for suicide, but murders committed with with them are relatively rare. So… conservative areas have problems like poverty, drugs, resentment…and lots of guns. According to gun control orthodoxy, that should equate to a continuous bloodbath, right?
Wrong.
Take Missouri as an example. It had 629 gun-related homicides in 2022, a dismal number. But 474 of those were in just two major cities — St. Louis and Kansas City — and surrounding counties. Dozens of smaller counties in the state didn’t have a single homicide of any kind, gun-related or otherwise.
If Kansas City and St. Louis combined to form their own state with their 2.2 million total people, they’d have a gun-related homicide rate of 23.7 per 100,000 people. The rest of Missouri, with a remaining population of over four million people…just 3.7 per 100,000. About six times less.
But when something happens like the Kansas City Super Bowl parade shooting, popular culture, famous athletes, and major media outlets come demanding of these people that they have to curtail their rights, because poorly-run, broken, dysfunctional cities in which they have no say and no power can’t get their shit together. When the leaders of those cities constantly talk down to them and despise them, no less?
Why would anyone expect these conservative-leaning populations to listen to lectures form gun-banners? They’ve elected the same people and tried the same things over and over for decades despite constant failure. The resulting high violent crime is, to them, entirely predictable.
And thanks to some prominent examples, we’ve seen that it doesn’t have to be this way. Look at what Mayor Francis Suarez, one of the few Republican big city mayors, has accomplished in Miami.
Contrary to racist views that success in big cities is limited only to those who are white, Miami is a very diverse city where white people make up less than half the population. The city also had a horrifyingly violent past in relatively recent history (The Year of Dangerous Days by Nicholas Griffin is quite a good read on that topic). In 1980, homicides in there reached an astonishing 220 dead.
Last year, however, Miami had 31 homicides. That’s the lowest total in its history. In 1947, the first year they counted, it had 32 and the population back then was a fraction of what it is today. This in a state that enacted constitutional carry recently, despite all those who warned that it would be a disaster. That hasn’t happened.
So quit lecturing conservatives. Quit demanding that others compromise their rights. And quit voting for the same failed leadership pushing the same failed, trash ideologies of government dependence, tolerance for criminality, and failure.
The continued devastation seen in blue cities like Kansas City, Oakland, and Baltimore is the choice of its voters. And until they make a different one, they have only themselves to blame.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.
10 Responses
Without diversity, the US is as safe as the Cotswolds.
“Much of Hollywood hates conservatives and makes that perfectly clear.”
I have *zero* problem with this, for these reasons :
One, the Hollywood movies that rake in the biggest cash hauls world-wide have “Guns, lots of guns.” in them. Guns used by the evil and the good characters. Americans *love* their guns, and the international market has a strange fascination with nearly everything American, including their guns. Since many of them live in nations that don’t allow (or highly restrict) civilian gun ownership, the movies offer them an opportunity to live like an American for as long as the movie is playing.
Two, they control the computer gaming market, and first-person shooting games like ‘Call of Duty’ are often the biggest sellers out there. Young kids can play those games where they can pick their weapons, and once they get out of mom and dad’s house and out in the real world, can own the real thing. Start a shooter young, you have them a customer for life.
They are far too addicted to the money gun media makes for them to ever willingly give it up.
Hate Hollywood? *Snort*.
Hell’s bell’s, ‘Tinsel Town’ is one of the very best friends the 2A and POTG have, and don’t you forget it… 😉
Hey, Geoff………………….
Good points! To back you up, I’ve never heard of major Hollywood stars making large donations to anti- gun causes. They like to shoot of their mouths with anti-gun rhetoric, but they like to shoot guns on their production sets.
Just ask Alec.
“They like to shoot off their mouths …”
Heh. Would that they could.
Alec Baldwin?
Alec is a for-real ‘lady-killer’… 🙁
Geoff………………
A loud, emphatic “HA!!!”
23,000 anti-gun laws on the books nationwide and they haven’t solved the “gun violence” problem.
Gun control doesn’t work. Controlling criminals does.
The disproportionate majority of violent crimes are committed by young minority men who are often repeat criminal offenders. Taking them off the streets would go a long way to solve the problem.
I’m tired of being used as a whipping boy for anti-personal rights liberal extremist bigots. If they think they can take my rights away because of the actions of minority thugs they can F off.
Fun trivia fact: If, for the last 3 years to date, violence in democrat run cities is removed from the overall numbers for all categories, on a population basis, the murder AND suicide rates in the United States falls to 2 per 1,000,000 annually.
Fun trivia fact: Collectively, ~78% to ~90% (varies with time of year in that range) of the criminal-gang violence in the country happens in democrat controlled cities.
Fun trivia fact: Overall, 63% of murders and almost 80% of (overall, all) crimes in the country are committed by ‘members’ of a (collectively) non-white demographic that is only 6% of the U.S. population.
Trivia fact: Collectively, in 2023, nationwide in democrat controlled cities, more than 28,000 children under the age of 10 were subjected to horrors of the pseudo-science ‘sex change hormone therapy’ at the hands of (non-medical) members of the ‘trans’ community and 90% of these children have, to date in 2024, died due to ‘complication’ as a result and only 15% of these ‘murderers’ were actually charged and then only with ‘child endangerment’ charges and all had their charges dropped by a democrat DA.
Trivia fact for mass shooters: The majority of mass-shooters (which includes school shooters), over 90%, have no political affiliation or preference of either left or right wing. Yet, MSM and anti-gun interests and idiots (e.g. dacian) will tag them as ‘right wing extremists’ simply because a gun was involved.
Trivia fact for mass killers (using the definition of four or more victims injured or killed): These are ones that use something other than a gun (usually a knife or some other sharpened object) for their killing attempts. Over the last 30 years the majority (~80%) of these have been liberals whose political preference was left-wing. 8% of these have been right-wing, the rest had no political affiliation or preference of either left or right wing. None of these were were tagged as ‘extremists’ by MSM and anti-gun groups never mention them.
Kansas City Super Bowl Parade Shooting: Why Blue Cities Are The Problem, Not Red States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btuK-WfY7Nw
This is the issue that turned me away from the Democrats. Of course, the Republicans haven’t exactly made a winning long-term sales pitch to make me vote for them consistently, but the Dems have permanently lost me because of gun control.