Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Destroying Political Class Myths, Part 2: Voter ID Laws Help MInorities, Guess Where Racism Pervades, and Gun Control Is Good For Violent Crimes

We are having a little fun today and yesterday at our politicians’ expense, exploring the many myths that the politicians of this country would like us to believe. You see, if we believe the myths that they create than we are more likely to vote for them to resolve the unreal issues and problems associated with these myths. 

But what if what they tell is not the true reality? What if we are getting all worked up and headed in the wrong direction for a mythical problem that does not exist or for a mythical solution that resolves nothing? All it does is send us chasing our tails while the same inept politicians get reelected over and over based on nothing more than their own greed, their rigging of the election processes, and the myths that they feed us and control us with.

So starting yesterday, we are going to look behind the myth curtail and reveal what is the true reality. With that truth we may finally start resolving some of the major issues of our times. Lord knows the political class has failed miserably over the past fifty years in eradicating poverty, winning the lost war on drugs, fixing our failing public schools, securing our borders, etc. 

Maybe it is because we have allowed them to work on myths that they created and not the true problems of our age. Keep in mind the following wise words of Groucho Marx over the next few posts: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Sounds like myth building to me.

1) Yesterday, we learned that what Eric Holder, the Justice Department, and President Obama tell us about voter id laws are truly a myth, at least in Georgia. In that state, there is now definitive proof that five years after a state voter id law was put in place, minority voting rates have skyrocketed, showing no ill effects of the myth that voter id laws are inherently racist and meant to depress minority voting activity. 

Well, guess what? The same myth recently got destroyed in Texas where analysis of the real world also showed that reasonable voter id laws do not inhibit minority voting rights or activity.

Highlights of recent Texas voting activity reveals the following realities, as reported in a recent NewsMax article: 
  • Voter turnout nearly doubled in Texas after a new voter ID law was put in place.
  • This happened despite the fact that recent voting and elections were not major or national in scope, a fact that could account for increased voting activity.
  • There were nine proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution in the latest round of elections and voting.
  • The number of votes tallied was nearly double the number of people who voted in 2011 in a similar type of election. 
  • All nine measures were approved by this election, and dealt primarily with taxes and state budgets, not normally high interest topics for voters.
  • According to political experts of all bends and positions, a doubling of the voting crowd was a far from expected result.
  • The increased voting volumes were not all white voters by any stretch of the imagination. 
  • For example, Hidalgo County with a substantial Hispanic population, with over 90% self identifying as Latino, the number of county voters quadrupled from 2011. 
  • During that last round of Texas constitutional amendment voting, approximately 4,000 Hidalgo individuals voted in the election whereas that number exceeded 16,000 in the most recent similar election. 
So now we have destroyed the voter id voter suppression myth in another state with actual, real life data that shows if anything, voter id laws are at least not detrimental to the voting patterns and rates of minorities and may actually increase them.

2) Northeast liberals like to tell the rest of the country how tolerant and advanced they are culturally, racially, and socially. But at least in the area of school segregation, none of those attributes are true, they are a definite myth, according to a recent report and analysis from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

The Project found that public school students in New York continue to be severely segregated by race and are increasingly isolated by race and class as the proportion of minority and poor students continues to grow. The Civil Rights Project looked at trends in school enrolment and segregation from 1989 to 2010 at the total state level and regional levels.

Consider some of their findings specific to New York City:
  • A majority (19 out of 32) of the city’s Community School Districts (CSDs) had 10% or less white students in 2010. 
  • 73% of charters across New York City were designated “apartheid schools” (less than 1% white enrollment) and 90% percent were intensely segregated (less than 10% white enrollment) schools in 2010. 
  • Only 8% of charter schools were multiracial with over a 14.5% white enrollment. 
  • While magnet schools across New York City had the highest proportion of multiracial schools (47%) and the lowest proportion of segregated schools (56%) in 2010, 17% of magnets had less than 1% white enrollment and 7% had greater than 50% white enrollment, with PS 100 Coney Island having a white proportion of 81%.
So much for the myth that liberal northeast being so much more racially advanced than the rest of the country from a myth perspective: “In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New York State has consistently been one of the most segregated states in the nation--no Southern state comes close to New York,” commented CRP Co-Director Gary Orfield. “Decades of reforms ignoring this issue produced strategies that have not succeeded in making segregated schools equal. It is time to adopt creative school choice strategies to give more New York children an opportunity to prepare to live and work effectively.”

So much for the perceived rednecks and racists down south, at least relative to the state and city of New York. 

3) Obama has been almost fanatical in his desire to shred the Second Amendment and greatly restrict the ability of stable Americans to own guns. He and others like him in the liberal camp of politics seem to believe two very simplistic myths:

1) Myth 1: If the political class and the government it operates made it unlawful to own guns, there would be no guns in either law abiding citizens possession or in the hands of criminals.

2) Myth 2: If we reduced the overall number of guns in the country, violent crime would miraculously go down and go down dramatically. The converse of this myth is that the more guns there are in the country, the higher the crime rate will go.

From Myth 1 perspective, over the years the political class has made it illegal to possess booze, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, or other drugs and also made it illegal to be a prostitute, a pimp, or to have an abortion. Despite the declaration that these actions were illegal, citizens and criminals continued to possess booze, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and to engage in prostitution, pimping, and having abortions. 

How does anyone believe that applying the same restrictions to gun possession will have a different result than these actions? Insanity and purely illogical to think otherwise. Myth destroyed by simple logic.

The second myth of crime rates can be destroyed by a few simple charts of reality:
































Two takeaways from these two charts:
  • Despite the Second Amendment, the violent crime rate has been reduced by almost half over the past twenty years or so.
  • As more and more people have gained access to the ability to carry a concealed weapon, the nation’s violent crime rate has gone down, not up as the myth makers would like us to believe.
As a finally myth killer, consider the city of Chicago which has both one of the most restrictive gun possession laws in the country and also one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. Less guns = more violent crime, more guns = less violent crime. Myths destroyed. 

For an update on this myth destruction in action, consider the following recent news report from Chicago, home of the really, really strict gun control laws and where seven people were killed and 28 wounded by gun fire in just one weekend:

So what political class myths did we destroy today:
  1. In Texas, like in Georgia yesterday, voter id laws have had little or no negative impacts on minority voter rates and may have actually had a positive impact.
  2. The Deep South is not nearly as racist and segregated as the great liberal state and city of New York at least when it comes to schools.
  3. Gun possession reduces violent crime, it does not increase violent crime.
That is why we must always deeply and suspiciously examine what politicians tell us. They are in the myth selling business rather than the problem resolution business. Perpetrating their myths helps them sow confusion and hate without working at their jobs, ensuring their perpetual reelection and self enrichment.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w




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