“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —Article Two of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

The numbers are in — and they are indisputable.

There was an unprecedented spike in murders and other violent crimes nationwide in 2020, which spilled over into the years which followed, especially in Demo-controlled urban centers.

What happened?

The record surge in violence after the election of Joe Biden, is irrevocably linked to the fact that, in 2020, Democrats at the national, state, and local levels willfully provoked and promoted mass lawlessness, their “Summer of Rage” riots, all staked on the death of a black Minneapolis thug in police custody, now canonized as a celebrity. They simultaneously demoted and defunded law enforcement capability, exacerbating the lawlessness.

For the record, Kamala Harris led the 2020 Demo Defund Police chorus, insisting, “For far too long, the status quo thinking has been to believe that by putting more police on the street, you’re going to have more safety – and that’s just wrong.” Put fewer cops on the street, what could go wrong?

They empowered their Marxist Black Lives Matter constituents and their anarchist antifa legions to riotous violence in the name of “social justice” in response to what they errantly claimed was “systemic racism.”

In effect, despite the fact they pretended to oppose the violence, they sent the message that their constituents are entitled to be violent, and that sense of entitlement continues unabated.

By the end of 2020, Demos had simultaneous cut almost $900 million from law enforcement budgets in major urban centers. The combination of fomenting mass violence while restricting police response and cutting law enforcement budgets resulted in a one-two sucker punch against victims of violence and those charged with protecting them.

The violence which continues today is the direct result of Demos empowering leftist mobs in the name of “social justice.” It will take years to restore real justice – rule of law – but leftists politicians are not going to do that when they can label the violent cultural devolution they have fomented, a “gun problem.”

As a backdrop, after the high-profile attacks in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, by sociopathic assailants — attacks that are very rare despite the ubiquitous media coverage — Joe Biden and his leftist politicos paused their advocacy for the killing of the most innocent among us — about 2,200 children before birth every day — and did what they always do. They used the blood of innocents as political fodder in their relentless assault on the Second Amendment, the citizens’ assurance of the First Civil Right required to defend all others.

Last week, Biden intruded on bipartisan Senate deliberations on “gun safety measures” to address the nation with his 2A infringement list — a list certain to derail the Senate negotiations. Even the Senate’s most ardent gun confiscator, Chris Murphy (D-CT), insisted Biden’s intrusion was a non-starter: “The Senate needs to handle these negotiations. … We’re not going to put a piece of legislation on the table that will ban assault weapons.” Of course, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has sailed Biden’s measures through the House on largely party lines, with a few swing-district Demos objecting.

What Biden and his ilk don’t want to talk about is the harsh reality that the violence, which claimed the lives of more than 21,000 other Americans in 2020 and about 20,000 in 2021, is primarily the result of generationally failed Democrat Party policies, resulting in cultural devolution over the last 50 years. The increase in violence, particularly mass assaults and active shooter incidents which were almost non-existent 40 years ago, is also irrevocably linked to those failed social policies which have now spawned a generation of sociopaths.

We see this violence most acutely on Democrat-controlled urban poverty plantations where the Demos’ systemic poverty is chronic — but it spills over into small towns like Uvalde.

By comparison with last year’s 20,000 murders, according to the latest FBI data on “active shooter incidents” — which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” — in a nation of 330 million people, there were 61 incidents resulting in 103 deaths in 2021. That is up from 40 incidents and 38 deaths in 2020.

Every one of those deaths is tragic — both those committed one at a time and those resulting in multiple deaths — but none of them are the result of a “gun problem,” despite Demo protestations and those of celebrity hypocrites who built their fame and fortune on violent “entertainment.”

While the definition of “active shooter” is outlined above, it is often used interchangeably by the mainstream media with “mass shooter.”

The distinction between “active shooter” and “mass shooter” is that the latter has no official definition, but is often considered to be “four or more shot (injured or killed) in a single incident, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.” (It is disgraceful for any media outlet to include an assailant among the numbered dead, but they often do.)

The Buffalo and Uvalde attacks would be included in both of those categories, as would the Sacramento gangsters who killed six and wounded 12 others in April.

However, incidents like the black supremacist who murdered six people and injured 62 others with his SUV at a Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade — an incident largely ignored by Biden and his mainstream media because it did not fit their racial narrative — would not be included in either database.

Likewise, the data on thousands of victims who were killed by assailants using other weapons is not in those databases. Notably, there are far more people bludgeoned to death annually than killed with rifles or shotguns of any type, and the use of an AR-15 in the commission of a crime is very rare.

By the generally understood definition of “mass shooting,” there have been more than 200 such incidents this year, including 11 this past weekend.

There were almost 692 such attacks last year. So, fortunately, year to date, there have been fewer, but those numbers go up when thugs amass on the streets in the summer.

What is abundantly clear is that these incidents are almost exclusively committed by sociopathic thug, drug and gang-bangers battling on city streets. Furthermore, it is also clear that 96% of all mass shootings since records were first maintained in 1950, occurred in so-called “gun-free zones.” In other words, people were killed in places where the victims were most likely unable to defend themselves. And 90% of those firearms were obtained illegally.

Sidebar: Anyone who asserts the public or private space they manage is safe by posting signs and/or establishing regulations prohibiting (gun-free zones), should thus be liable for any assault that occurs in that public or private space, because in effect they advertised it was safe from any firearm assault – and advertised to criminals that the space is full of people who are unable to defend them selves.

Recall that in 1990, then-Sen. Joe Biden was a primary backer of the Gun-Free School Zones Act. In 2020, Demo Sens. Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (MA) and Ilhan Omar (MN), introduced legislation to get cops out of schools. According to Murphy: “Police shouldn’t be in schools. … If we are going to tackle racial inequities in our education system, getting police out of schools is a necessary first step.”

This was the same leftist “equity” logic that inspired the California Senate vote last week to protect school assailants from being reported to police. Apparently, California logic dictates that cops are bad and thugs are the victims of systemic racism.

Notably, there is little data on how many mass shootings at schools and other public venues have been prevented due to successful identification of threatening sociopaths, but clearly, after every high-profile mass attack, a majority of Americans want solutions.

So, how are Democrats responsible for surging violence, both murders in general and mass assaults, in the last two years?

According to the FBI data on “active shooters,” there were 333 incidents between 2000 and 2019. But there was a dramatic shift in late 2020, as noted above, with 40 attacks that year, and a 50% increase to 61 attacks in 2021.

Likewise, when reviewing data on all “mass shootings,” the increase in such assaults follows the same timeline as the increase in “active shooters.” In 2019, there were about 400 mass attacks. By late 2020, that number increased by 50% to 611 incidents and, as noted above, to almost 700 in 2021.

Alternatively, an overlapping mass shooting database of assaults that resulted in four or more victims killed by the attacker, a more narrow definition than including both the number of those both killed and/or wounded, indicates only two such attacks in 2020, lower than most years, but that increased to six attacks in 2021 and four thus far this year. Those are the high profile attacks.

Again, that increase in mass violence, including the overall murder rate, is irrevocably linked to the fact that, in 2020, Democrats at the national, state, and local levels willfully provoked and promoted mass lawlessness while they simultaneously demoted law enforcement capability. GOP House Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy posted a strong video account of the effluent of that provocation and promotion.

The Demos let the dogs out when they empowered their thug constituencies, and the ripple effect from promoting lawlessness is record violence — which, predictably, they call a “gun problem.”

The surge in violence is not the result of feuds between the Amish and Mennonites.

We all know the demographics of violence and, moreover, why that demographic is prone to violence.

Biden and his cadre are not about to mention the fact that black people commit 90% of interracial felonies — black on white, Hispanic, or Asian — despite representing just 13% of our population, and despite the age group of the assailant profile representing just 3% of the population. That would include the commission of 21% of hate crimes, as defined by the Department of Justice.

Nor will they mention the tragic fact that 88% of the suspects who murdered black people are also black. Almost half of those murdered last year were black and almost all of them were killed by other black people — that is the real “epidemic of violence.”

To that end, as author and crime researcher Heather Mac Donald has thoroughly documented: “Biden and others peddle an entirely false charge: that whites are the biggest source of hate crime and interracial violence in the U.S. … In the U.S., blacks commit the vast share of the interracial violence between blacks and whites that is not classified as a hate crime: 88 percent.”

On the dramatic rise in crime associated with the lawlessness promoted by Democrats in 2020, Mac Donald notes: “The results are in and they are unequivocal — thousands of black lives lost in cities to predation and anarchy. After the riots in 2020, homicides rose 29% — the largest annual increase in history. Youth homicide rose an astounding 47%, the victims were overwhelmingly black. … If Biden really cared about black lives, he would call for law and order and stop demonizing cops.”

Then Mac Donald notes an inconvenient truth no Democrat wants you to know – the correlation between race and violence: “Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic murder victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Blacks between the ages of ten and twenty-four are muderef at twenty-five times the rate of whites between those same ages. Their assailants are not the police, not other whites, but other blacks.”

Additionally, as noted crime researcher John Lott makes clear, “[Biden’s] ‘guns first’ approach ignores a basic fact — over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.”

As political analyst Larry Elder has documented, the “inconvenient fact about mass killings” is that “Black and Asian males, as to their percentage of the male population, are overrepresented.” Grossly overrepresented, despite the fact that Biden finally found his lone white supremacist in Buffalo.

The rare instance of white supremacist violence is a Demo/MSM dog whistle diversion from the real disparity in interracial violence and the cultural reality of black-on-black violence, the Demos’ “Black Death” Plague.

Additionally, the vilification of police by leftist politicians, which the Biden administration continues to fuel, resulted in a 59% increase in law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 2021. Biden’s new executive order on policing to placate his thug constituency is merely the latest example of that vilification.

Guns are not the problem.

Thirty-five years ago, when Biden had reasonable cognitive processing capability, he declared: “I have never believed that additional gun control or federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control. [Gun control] would be impossible to carry out and may not result in reductions in crime.”

Demonstrably, such measures do not result in crime reduction.

One way to reduce violence, much of which is committed by repeat felony offenders, is to keep them locked up. But Demos are busy emptying prisons and giving felons the right to vote again. They want to defund the police at the same time they want to disarm the people. That’ll fix it!

In the timeless words of Ronald Reagan: “You won’t get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. … There’s only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and the criminals, lock them up, and if you don’t actually throw away the key, at least lose it for a long time.” He declared after the assassination attempt against him: “It’s a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience.”

Of course, only law-abiding citizens abide by laws, and making lawful citizens helpless clearly does not make outlaws harmless. Remember: The vast majority of mass assaults occur in “gun-free zones.”

It’s great being lectured on laws to control who can have a firearm by the guy who left hundreds of thousands of our best weapons for the Taliban terrorists when he surrendered and retreated from Afghanistan. And, Biden wants more gun laws? Start by enforcing current gun laws, and prosecute Hunter Biden for his weapons violation.

What we are witnessing is the bitter fruit of systemic cultural devolution, a cultural crisis many years in the making and exacerbated by the Demos’ deadly promotion of violence in 2020. The result is a new generation of lawless sociopathic thugs who are empowered to kill without hesitation every day.

But the tide may slowly be turning on the Demos’ “soft on crime” policies in the name of “racial equity.”

Even in Pelosi’s ultra-leftist San Francisco district, her woke district attorney was just resoundingly recalled, as should be LA’s leftist DA George Gascon, who is also backed by billionaire socialist George Soros. Gascon waived gun charges and released a gang thug who just murdered two cops.

And the movement to can leftist DA’s is spreading. Former NYPD top cop Bernie Kerik, an Army vet who was Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner on 9/11, is calling for removal of New York’s DA Alvin Brag: “Mayor [Eric Adams] must repeal bail reform – so many on gun charges are immediately released back into the community, it’s horrible. Lose that prosecutor. Bag Bragg. He should never be in office. Worst DA ever. He’s emboldening bad guys. Harming citizens plus law enforcement doing their jobs. Adams must hire more cops. I had so many more under my command. Crime’s up yet it’s thousands less cops. Protection’s down and crime’s up. This mayor must do it.”

As for the high murder rate in the U.S., it helps to put those numbers into perspective.

Consider that 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, primarily fentanyl, and almost all of those drugs, and the criminal thugs muling and selling them, crossed Biden’s open southern border, the latter now ubiquitously referred to as a “border crisis” when in fact, that open border is Biden’s policy. And he’s inviting thousands more every day.

The point is that the U.S. murder rate is around one-fifth of the overdose rate.

Sidebar: The crime data I want to see the FBI collect annually, if Republicans win majorities in the midterms and demand such data, is a national record on violent crimes committed by illegal aliens — so there can be some accountability for Biden’s open border policy…

For further consideration, there are more than 10,000 drunk-driver deaths annually, but that rate is at its lowest since 1982 because DUI laws are actually enforced — as Nancy Pelosi’s husband found out recently. But nobody is calling for a car ban — well, unless your car uses petroleum, in which case Biden would like to ban all of them.

Here is a stat that Demos don’t mention.

Beyond their boilerplate anti-2A rhetoric, as we have documented consistently, if you don’t have a violent criminal record, and are not associated with the violent sociopathic thug, drug, or gang subcultures that commit the vast majority of crimes in America, your chances of being shot or killed by an assailant are extraordinarily low — as low as in most Western European nations, where gun ownership is outlawed. Oh, and in Switzerland, which has a higher concentration of “assault weapons” per capita than any nation in the world, the murder rate is one of the lowest in the world.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen, your statistical probability of being killed by a drunk driver is much higher than being murdered by an assailant with a firearm. (Oddly, no one is organizing marches to ban automobiles or ask for a federal background check before purchasing a beer.)

Finally, when debating the Second Amendment, there are three points that are often neglected.

First, possession of firearms is a deterrent against countless millions of crimes, as made clear in studies of convicted felons, who tell researchers that they choose victims who are least likely to be able to defend themselves.

Second, there are more than a million crimes thwarted every year by those who defend themselves with a firearm.

And third, as I have oft noted, handguns are for personal and home defense. But semi-automatic rifles, mislabeled by leftists as “assault rifles,” are for protection of those who would infringe on the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If you find that notion unsettling, then you need to learn more about history and the constant assault on Liberty by statist tyrants.

For the record, despite claims to the contrary, banning the sale of those guns has had dubious results in terms of reducing the rare but sensational use of rifles by mass murderers.

American gun owners don’t keep and bear arms to overthrow the government, as the Left often implies.

But notably, the Second Amendment is not, first and foremost, about “self protection.” Possessing a strong and competent self-defense capability is rooted in a spirit of self-reliance and a love of American Liberty that has its origin in the American Revolution and has been passed down for generations since. What leftists are really trying to break is that spirit, our devotion to Liberty. It is antithetical to the statist power and control they seek. The Second Amendment is not negotiable, period. The Left’s perennial claims of “common sense” infringements, ostensibly for “public safety,” are a smokescreen to ensure its statist agenda is unabated.

The bottom line regarding the epidemic of violence: Democrats institutionalized lawlessness in the name of “social justice,” beginning with their “Summer of Rage” riots in 2020, when they intentionally provoked and promoted violence. They simultaneously villainized law enforcement and cut police budgets. The result was, and continues to be, a one-two sucker punch against victims of violence and those charged with protecting them.

Surging violence today is the direct result of empowering leftist mobs in the name of “social justice,” in effect sending the message that Democrat constituents are entitled to be violent – and that sense of entitlement continues unabated. The implications, given the rising generation of sociopaths, is dire. It will take years to restore real justice – rule of law – but leftists politicians are not going to do that when they can label the violent cultural devolution they have fomented a “gun problem,” and avoid the inconvenient truth about race and violence.

Update: The day before publishing this analysis, DHS issued a warning about the potential for more violence by extremists, a report timed to coincide with the Left’s gun control agenda. No small irony that the day I published this analysis, a violent extremist on the Left was arrested before he could execute Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The leftist SPLC just produced a report which noted: “According to a recently released poll, nearly half of male Democrats under the age of 50 (44 %) say it’s acceptable to assassinate a politician ‘who is harming the country or our democracy,’ the highest percentage of any age/gender/party demographic.” While they would imply this is white extremists, in fact what they are exposing is haters within their own ranks.

Update 2: Guess who AOC blames for the surge in violence nationwide? That’s right, she blames Republicans.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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NOTE: The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

All defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate and refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists. See these updated Footnotes for key points of rebuttal: Firearm Fiction v. Facts.

Only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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