RUTHFULLY YOURS

Perhaps we’re nearing a rapprochement with our friends on the left about what is now the No. 1 concern among the key voting group of Latinos. Yes, Democrats twist themselves into knots when the subject is crime, violent crime, or criminals. But the Dems are finally coming around to the idea that there is at least a problem with “gun violence.”

That’s the spirit. Darn those guns! They should all be locked up and given hefty prison sentences.

But this is progress. True, I think most Americans understand guns to be built into the equation when it comes to violent crime. People don’t greatly fear being attacked with slingshots or blow darts. Still, if it will make Democrats happy to frame our very disturbing crime problem as “gun violence,” I will go along. Ordinarily, Democrats have as much difficulty saying the word “criminal” as Fonzie had when he tried and failed to admit he was wrong. We’ll be happy to reframe criminals as “people involved with the perpetration of gun violence” if Democrats will agree to put such people in prison for appropriate periods of time. The interest they show in doing this is limited.

Democrats who say they’re concerned about gun violence show very little interest in reducing it. Nearly nine in ten voters think crime is going to be a major issue in the midterms, and it’s obvious which party stands for going easy on criminals.

If Democrats would like to prove that they actually abhor gun violence, they can stop nattering about adding time and paperwork to the process of becoming a licensed gun owner, since licensed gun owners are not the problem.

They could even go one step further and stop gun crimes before they happen by keeping dangerous felons locked up instead of letting them wreak havoc. Prosecuting low-level felonies might lead to people being taken off the streets before they commit high-level felonies. Yet Democrats are going the other way on this.

It’s always a little unfair when voters blame the party in power in Washington for local crimes. The president is not the national sheriff. But it wasn’t always the case that high-ranking D.C. Democrats simply shrugged at criminal mayhem. It’s now clear that, wherever the heart of the Democratic Party is, that’s where you’ll find Joe Biden. All supposed principles and standards are disposable, depending on which way Democratic winds blow. Which is why today’s President Biden sounds very different from 1990s Biden. Can anyone picture Biden speaking the way he did in 1994, when he bragged that a crime bill he guided through the Senate had led to “60 new death penalties,” “70 enhanced penalties,” “100,000 cops,” and “125,000 new state prison cells”?

Biden exaggerated the power of his 1994 law to reduce crime or to lock people up, but at least he was rhetorically correct, and when he boasted to police that he was on their side, they believed him. At one point he claimed he was for laws that would “do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”

Now that Biden is president, even though it would be in his interest to do so, he fails to put any pressure whatsoever on progressive district attorneys who are defying the law by simply refusing to prosecute many types of crime, or to let criminals back on the streets with little or no bail. He fails to use whatever powers the bully pulpit brings to show that he even cares about what’s happening. Instead, he blathers about cracking down on gun dealers, as if they’re the ones spraying gunfire all over the streets of New York and Chicago.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the 2020s version of Biden to whole-heartedly back the police. In the first year of his administration, deaths of cops in the line of duty hit their highest mark since 1995, and police morale is a real problem. Biden shrugs. His official policy is that “too many people are incarcerated in the United States.” This is blatant, transparent criminal coddling in the name of “equity.”

The voters vehemently disagree. Biden and the rest of his party shake their heads and make disapproving noises about gun violence, but they have turned their back on law and order. Their unwillingness to get serious about the crime surge is going to cost them dearly at every level of government.