Could the Anti-Gun Crowd be Experiencing a Change of Heart?
In Philly, it certainly looks like it.
Good afternoon friends, as many of you may know, certain cities across the country are devolving into crime-ridden pits of despair, rife with violence and chaos. Despite many of these places having exorbitant and ever-increasing police budgets, the problem has only gotten worse over time.
We just had the founder of Black Guns Matter, Maj Toure, on the podcast this week, who also happens to live in one of these cities — Philadelphia. Residents of Philly are fed up. The ruling class, who has been pushing to disarm them while simultaneously claiming to “protect” them, has failed. As a result, business owners in the city have taken matters into their own hands and hired private security…. and it is working.
The private sector, as we discussed on the podcast with Maj, has an unintended side effect on top of providing protection for the people. Because the private security employees do not have the benefits of qualified immunity, police union protection, and the thin blue line, these folks are held individually liable and therefore have the incentive to reduce violence and act responsibly. It’s almost like holding people accountable for their actions is a good thing. Imagine that.
To listen to that podcast, click here. Or, you can do that after reading my take on the Philly situation below.
When the facade of safety that the government claims to provide comes crashing down as it is in multiple cities across the country currently, the people quickly realize that the emperor has no clothes. Surrendering your right to self-defense in exchange for the promise of security is never a good idea and more and more people are starting to realize it. Perhaps there is hope after all.
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One of the most talked-about issues of the election cycle this year was crime, its massive increase, and what to do about it. Political blowhards on the right and the left jockeyed for your vote by telling you how they would fix the problem if you just vote them in. But in reality, Democrats and Republicans have long failed their constituencies with their role in creating one of the most oppressive, violent, expensive and outright ineffective security forces on the planet.
In the land of the free, recent research shows that 70% of robberies, 66% of rapes, 47% of aggravated assaults, and 38% of murders go unsolved each year. These numbers are showing no signs of decreasing either.
The majority of the "crimes" police stop in the act are victimless infractions like jaywalking, seatbelt violations, license plate lights, window tint, and other laws designed for the generation of revenue. It is extremely rare that a cop will stop an assault, robbery, murder or rape.
As we've learned recently, the rise in crime has nothing to do with how much money is spent on America's police force. In fact, we have the largest and most expensive police force in the world — despite the right claiming they were "defunded" — and some of the worst crime rates, proving that throwing money at cops does nothing to prevent crime.
In reality, America's law enforcement system actually creates an environment for criminal activity, fostering bad behavior and ensuring a perpetual cycle of violence and incarceration.
For decades there has been a perfect storm brewing in this country as minorities and poor people have their doors kicked in and are terrorized by cops during botched raids for substances deemed illegal by the state and watch helplessly as their family members die in video after video at the hands of cops. Now, we have record unemployment, cops murdering people on video and facing no immediate charges, and those in charge sit at the top, point fingers, and dole out more of your tax dollars.
Because the system will always refuse to accept responsibility for the situation it has forced onto the people, the blame game always comes next — and it is always misguided.
Naturally, this will never lead to any positive change. It will only prolong suffering, create more divide, and perpetuate a system of injustice for decades to come. However, those who want to incite peaceful change have been pushing these ideas out for a long time.
One facet of solving this debacle is removing the monopoly on policing and allowing competition in the market for private security forces.
American police officers can be corrupt, kill with impunity, and are rarely held accountable because Americans have no other choice. We are stuck with them. In any other job market on the planet, if they had a death toll of 1,000 Americans a year, they would be out of business overnight. However, because cops have a monopoly on law enforcement in America, the death toll keeps rising.
By allowing competition in law enforcement, the incentives for policing would drastically shift. Violent police departments would be fired and replaced with less violent ones. Cops would have an incentive to serve their communities by solving real crimes like rape and murder instead of kidnapping and caging people for victimless crimes.
If this sounds like a pipe dream to you, then you've probably never heard of Dale Brown.
Dale Brown of Detroit’s “threat management center” has shown that crime can be stopped and lives can be saved by independent people using nonlethal tactics.
In areas of Detroit where police don’t answer 911 calls, Dale Brown took matters into his own hands and started taking those calls himself, and because Dale was not “above the law” as police officers claim to be, he had to solve these crimes without hurting people, because he would actually be held accountable for his actions.
Yes, businesses pay for these services. However, as a side effect of providing businesses with security, Dale has also been able to provide service in poor neighborhoods for free, by financing his business through providing security for high-income areas.
Instead of policing from a place of fear, self-preservation, and extortion, Brown policies through love. He offers some timeless advice that we could all use right now. "The cornerstone for protection is love, not violence, not guns, not laws, you cannot truly protect anything that you do not love."
While Dale Brown has long practiced this method, successfully, in Detroit, the residents of Philadelphia, Penn. are watching a similar situation unfold.
In Philly in 2019, the murder rate was 22.47 per 100,000 residents according to FBI data, with 331 homicides that year. Fast forward three years, and there have been 480 murders year-to-date.
As ZH reports:
According to city statistics released in September, overall shootings have increased by 3% over last year, while violent crime is up 7%. Robberies involving guns are up 60%, while rapes are down more than 25%. Property crimes are up over 30%. Businesses getting hit particularly hard - with commercial burglaries up a staggering 50%, according to Axios Philadelphia. What's more, the city's drug crisis is spiraling further out of control with a new drug called "Tranq" - an anesthetic and pain reliever used to treat horses and cattle, and which turns people into zombies.
Crime is so out of control that the Philadelphia City Council recently approved a 10 p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of 18 - making a temporary summertime law permanent.
It is a bona fide Wild West — in the East — and all the money in the country isn't stopping it. Philly is the fourth largest police department in the country with a constantly-increasing budget approaching $1 billion annually. Yet people can't pump gas without fear of being carjacked or robbed.
As a result of one of the nation's largest and most expensive police departments failing miserably at their jobs, private business owners are taking matters into their own hands.
"They are forcing us to hire the security, high-level security, state level," said Karco gas station owner, Neil Patel, who has recruited Kevlar-clad S.I.T.E. agents packing AR-15s and shotguns. "We are tired of this nonsense; robbery, drug trafficking, hanging around, gangs," Fox5 reports.
FOX 5 conducted a poll and a whopping 93% of residents feel better having private security protecting them because they aren't being robbed or carjacked while pumping gas. Imagine that.
Sure, the idea of private police sounds radical but continuing to pour money into a mandatory service that has failed its mission to the point of increasing its budget as crime skyrockets, is far more illogical. The state has proven time and again that it cannot solve these problems. It's time the rest of the country realizes this and makes moves before they are forced to do so like Philly.
In Thailand, the banks all have private security that is armed. The gold shops have armed merchants and one just recently used a shotgun to end an armed heist. You see, when the bad guys get shot, they quickly change their ways.