BUCK: Let’s start with this, and actually we can turn to our friends at OutKick.com for the CDC data here. There’s a Chief of Mortality Statistics branch that pulled this together, and this is what they told us: There were 21,750 murders in 2020 as opposed to 16,425 in 2019. This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. The CDC is also looking at the data.
They find, Clay, it’s the highest ever in U.S. history since we really were keeping numbers, since about 1904, 1905 period. And the only reason you can point to… I want to say this this: It is not only BLM as a movement that undermine police.
It is the progressive left and the decision that they made to unlearn so much of what the country went through in the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, to deal effectively with the crime problem — bring violent crimes specifically — bring it down nationally and almost magically in New York City. That’s what we see. People need to be held accountable for this.
CLAY: I agree. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around here. Activists, politicians, athletes, celebrities, all of these people told you in the wake of the George Floyd incident that the police were evil. And I keep hammering this home. They pulled COPS off of television. Buck, there were some people saying that the PAW Patrol — for people out there who have kids, the PAW Patrol police officer-inspired puppy — was offensive.
They created a situation which we knew was going to be the result, ’cause we already saw what happened in Ferguson in 2016 where police were demonized, where if you said anything positive about the police, you were shouted down. And, as a result, there are over 5,000 people who are likely dead today that would not have been dead otherwise. And most of those people are young, minority men, right?
The cities that they were the most active in in terms of protesting had the largest increases in murders, so I do think it’s connected to BLM. Black Lives Matter led to the largest single increase in murders of mostly black men in the history of our country.
And the thing is, Buck, almost no one in media is gonna cover this or talk about it in a significant way. Our listeners are hearing about it. I bet you don’t see it hardly talked about on CNN, on MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post. And if they do cover this in any kind of way, do you know what they’ll blame it on? The pandemic.
BUCK: Of course.
CLAY: They’ll say covid caused this.
BUCK: Even though if you look at the data the period of the pandemic started in, what, February-March of 2020.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: The spike in violence really got go ahead in June of that year.
CLAY: As the protests began.
BUCK: So we know the protest played a huge role in it but the protests were really a symptom of a larger narrative. BLM is in essence what that narrative is when it’s taken to the streets and there’s riots, or “mostly peaceful protests,” which are protests with a riot attached to it. That’s what a mostly peaceful protest is.
And by that definition as we said the January 6th was a mostly peaceful protest, comma, that had a riot attached to it as well. They obviously hate that formulation and never stop and think, “Well, hold on a second. Maybe that’s not the way you should be reporting on night after night of destruction in American cities across the country,” either.
And, Clay, it’s beyond though just the people that took to the streets and the effect that that had, the so-called Ferguson Effect — which Heather Mac Donald, the researcher at the Manhattan Institute coined as a phrase where you have police who won’t do their jobs as much.
The whole Democrat/progressive system has embraced the lie that the primary challenge in America is racist cops against young black men. That is the foundational lie of BLM. It is a foundational lie that the Democrat Party embraces– irrespective of the numbers — ’cause people find out; they say, “Wait, hold on.” What is it, 12 in the most recent year or 15 —
CLAY: Unarmed —
BUCK: — unarmed black men who were killed by law enforcement. As we know, “unarmed” doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat in that incident. Depends on the specifics. Was the person tackling a cop to the ground, punching him in the face, reaching for his gun? But, Clay, there’s this story, one out of Chicago. I feel like this encapsulates —
CLAY: Where we are.
BUCK: — the whole reality of crime here. There was a gunfight in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago just a few days ago ago, and you had over 70 shell casings found. Two people were shot, multiple assailants, multiple people in broad daylight. They said it was like a Wild West shoot-out. That was the quote from the scene.
CLAY: Seventy shells is a lot of firing going on.
BUCK: That’s what they found. So it’s probably over a hundred rounds exchanged, multiple shooters, the shooters who were inside a house looks like a Drive-By at a house. People came out of the house; they were shooting. SWAT arrived. Police were there for part of the shoot-out. Some of this was captured on video. People were hit.
How many people were arrested and charged — does anyone wanna guess — from this obvious gang incident with multiple people hit and shot in brought daylight and endangering everybody in the neighborhood? Zero, folks! Zero. Welcome to Democrat policing in Chicago in America today.
CLAY: And this ties in, Buck, we were talking about how the Democrats are gonna blame covid for why this murder rate has gone up because they don’t want to acknowledge that from they’re defund the police rhetoric, they have blood on their hands, which is a hundred percent the case. And honestly if Republicans, I believe, were being intelligent here, they would run — even in 2022 — on the chaos of defund the police and what Democrats have caused.
Over 300 kids have been shot in Chicago. That’s more than the number of kids that have died with covid in the entire country. That is an eye-opening, unbelievable “Are you kidding me?” stat. And it reflects, again, a fundamental inability to assess danger but also a complete and total failure inside of the city of Chicago to protect the most vulnerable people.
BUCK: Just so everyone knows — ’cause I wanted to close the loop on this story, and a hat tip to the Chicago Sun-Times for the reporting on it — on the shooting in Chicago over the weekend, Clay. I just saw this part at the bottom. I thought everybody… I had forgotten to mention this. The district attorney’s office that’s looking at this issue and that brought no charges? People shot, shooting guns.
I wonder, how many of these handguns do we think are legally registered in the city of Chicago? Let’s just start there for a second, not that I believe you should have to register your hand, but that is the law. How many…? Okay, and gangbangers are usually the people you want to use illegal firearm laws against.
Which is what we’re talking about here. People who are in gangs. And it was Kim Foxx. She of “Jussie Smollett should not be charged” fame. And do you know what the explanation was for why no one yet in this large-scale shoot-out in broad daylight? Do you know what the justification was, Clay?
CLAY: I don’t know, but I’m thinking that maybe the answer is gonna be they’re not sure whether somebody was defense —
BUCK: “Mutual combat. What can you do? We don’t know who started it so he can’t charge anybody.” This is what they’re saying. Really?
CLAY: I’m not stunned because of the stupidity that we already know that prosecutor has, but I read the article. I didn’t read the analysis, but legally I was saying I bet that they’re trying to figure out… Some people are claiming defense. I’m sure both sides are claiming defense and they can’t figure out who fired first.
BUCK: So gang members in broad daylight can have a straight up gunfight!
CLAY: Potentially with illegal guns.
BUCK: I’m sure… I didn’t read that. Even sure the guns were illegal. Okay, Chicago is basically a gun-free zone that’s about as strict as NYC.
CLAY: It’s highly unlikely that these were correctly, illegally procured guns.
BUCK: I don’t think they just finished their concealed-carry course. Maybe. Maybe. But these are known gang members so I’m just gonna say that there’s unlikely probably go through the whole course. Yeah. No charges, though. They’re not even going to bring charges against these individuals. My friends, we all see what’s going on here.
You have prosecutors — in many cases, who are George Soros organization backed in Philadelphia with Klausner, Boudin in San Francisco, now Kim Foxx in Chicago stepping in on this list here — who decide that criminals should be treated gently because society is really responsible. The individuals that are doing this stuff…? We have a carceral system, Clay.
“There’s a need to address social justice here. So what if bullets are flying through a neighborhood. We need to get to root causes. People aren’t paying their fair share — and have you heard about what the climate is doing recently? We have much bigger issues to handle!” That’s what the Democrats actually think about this stuff.
CLAY: Well, and being concerned with all of those things is a luxury that a low crime rate provides, right? This is just so cyclical, it’s crazy. We need to talk about this, because it’s so cyclical, right? You saw it. Eventually people get fed up with the level of crime.
And they’re not concerned about all of the larger societal injustice issues ’cause they saying, “I just want my kids to be able to go walk down the street and be safe,” and all of these things are being spun. I think we’re seeing a spin back in the big direction of, “Hey, maybe we need to have cops as good guys.”
BUCK: It’s totally true. I saw… I lived through this as a junior high kid in New York City. We had over 2,200 murders when I was in junior high in New York City.
CLAY: New York was an incredibly dangerous place.
BUCK: There was a lot of bad stuff going on here, so we could talk more about what it was like. But that mentality did change in this city, and that’s what broad about the Rudy Giuliani crime miracle.
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