Shame on liberal hypocrites!

By exploiting a 6-year-old's tragic murder, liberals reveal the moral idiocy of their ideology.

Published March 6, 2000 5:00PM (EST)

A 6-year-old African-American boy shoots and kills a 6-year-old white girl in Michigan. The 6-year-old shooter has been suspended before for stabbing another child with a pencil. Police discover that he lives in a crack house with his uncle, a criminal with outstanding arrest warrants. The boy's father is in jail. His mother is a drug addict. The president of the United States responds to this tragedy by summoning leaders of Congress to the White House to tell them to pass a new law, requiring trigger locks on guns.

If ever there was case revealing the moral idiocy of liberalism, this is it. Of course, Clinton and Democratic leaders are calling for trigger locks on guns because they are planning to make this a major issue in this year's political campaigns. But that only makes the moral point stronger. So far not a single liberal has publicly dissented from the idea that gun control is the lesson to be drawn from this tragedy, let alone questioned the Democrats' sick exploitation of it for political ends.

Since the point is evidently not obvious to liberals, let me make it clear: Clinton might as well call a conference to develop a voodoo spell to stop incidents like the Michigan tragedy as to propose a new gun law. Why would a family of criminals, like the one responsible for the murder of Kayla Rolland, observe a trigger-lock law if it were passed? The inhabitants of this crack house do not observe laws. They live to break laws.

Child abuse is against the law. The emotionally disturbed 6-year-old who committed the murder was abused by his mother, his criminal father, his criminal uncle and every adult that entered that crack house. All of that is against the law. Calling for a new law to require parents who stash their kids in crack houses to put trigger locks on the stolen guns lying around is a sick joke.

Democrats' use of the interracial killing of a 6-year-old to attack lawful gun owners and to beat up on the National Rifle Association is obscene. But more than that, it is an exercise in the very denial that provides liberalism with a reason to exist. The purpose of the cry for gun control is to allow liberals once again to close their eyes (and the nation's) to the serious moral problems in the inner city that create these tragedies, and to avoid holding the individuals who commit these crimes accountable for their actions. We don't want to blame the "victims," do we?

If there are important lessons in the Michigan killing that need to be looked at they are these: 1) Why were authorities unable to rescue the 6-year-old murderer from his abusive environment, particularly since he had already shown himself to be a severely disturbed child? 2) Why were the felons in the crack house able to have guns at all, including a shotgun that was stolen? 3) Why did it take the press most of the week to reveal that the shooter was black and his victim white?

This last question applies with a slight twist to the shooting that occurred a few days later in Wilkinsburg, Penn., where a black racist named Ronald Taylor went on a rampage that took the lives of three people. After three days of investigation, the FBI finally charged the racist killer with a "hate crime." What took so long? Why did the media, which normally promotes not only the idea of "hate crimes," but of hate-crime legislation, have to wait for the FBI to make this designation? Why is the White House silent about this racial outrage? Why has no black leader denounced this hate crime? Where are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and their racially sensitive friends Bill Bradley and Al Gore?

The answer is they're too busy calling for a new gun law to add to the 20,000 already on the books, which the Justice Department refuses to enforce. They're too busy making political hay out of a Confederate flag that may be offensive to some, but which isn't used as a murder weapon. Sharpton is too busy persuading black Americans that a New York jury, whose foreman was black, administered "no justice" in the trial of four police officers acquitted of all counts of criminal misconduct in the case of Amadou Diallo. If any individual in America could be reasonably held responsible for the distrust and hatred of whites manifested in the Wilkinsburg rampage it is Sharpton. But it will be a long time before any "liberal" in the media or in the Justice Department says that.

Instead, Justice Department officials in charge of racial issues are meeting with delegations of black leaders and deliberating among themselves as to whether they should invoke the civil rights laws to retry the acquitted New York policemen. Why is the Justice Department even looking at this case? Is there a shred of evidence that the acquitted policemen were racist? Is there the slightest indication that a jury, which included four African-Americans, was prejudiced? How unbelievably insulting it is to those four jurors that the Justice Department (backed by the president) should even consider this case.

What the Justice Department is, in effect, saying to those four African-American jurors is that "the United States government thinks you may be too stupid, too brainwashed, too weak to stand up for your race. Even if you believed that four white cops murdered a black man in cold blood, you would not have the brains, the balls or the racial self-esteem to say so." Think about that for a moment. This, my friends, is the only really rampant racism in America. It is what liberalism has come to.

That said, the decision of the FBI to declare the killing in Wilkinsburg a black-on-white hate crime is a courageous act. The decision of the press to report the race of the 6-year-old killer in Michigan, however belated, is a step in the right direction. The honesty of the jury in the Diallo case is to be applauded.

Perhaps the tide has begun to turn. The next step would be for Jackson to step forward and publicly denounce the racism of blacks like Taylor. Perhaps a day will come when academic leftists will no longer teach that "blacks can't be racist." Perhaps Harvard will disassociate itself from the evil doctrines like this one that are being taught in its classrooms.

But don't hold your breath. This battle has barely begun.


By David Horowitz

David Horowitz is a conservative writer and activist.

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