Urbes Delenda Est
Like so many people, I was absolutely horrified by the shooting in Memphis a couple of weeks ago. All shootings are atrocities, of course; but this one was particularly horrific because of both its nature and the suspect. The shooter not only chose his targets completely at random, he actually live-streamed at least one of them. If that wasn’t enough, there is a photo of him grinning ear to ear as he is being arrested, and he is also smiling with demoniac self-satisfaction in his mugshot.
First and foremost, this shooting makes abundantly clear that demons are real and continue to prowl about the world. If the first shooting wasn’t enough, two more individuals live-streamed themselves driving around Memphis a week later, ravening with equally hellish intent about how they wanted to murder a “white old lady with her grandkids in the car.”
(I will not share any of the aforesaid images, for obvious reasons.)
But we should have even more clarity about the fact that this shooting is another completely preventable horror that occurred under completely predictable circumstances. We all know why this shooting happened, and we know why shootings like this one are happening all over the country: our criminal justice system has been hijacked. Progressive “reform” prosecutors have been installed in our major metropoleis, financed by George Soros and his many monetary tentacles, and empowered by Black Lives Matter and the “Defund the Police” movement. The “reforms” they pursue when they take office are just leniency and keeping criminals out of jail based in some nonsensical platitudes about “overcrowded prisons” and “rehabilitative justice.”
The Memphis shooter was a beneficiary of policies like this; he was sentenced to three years for attempted murder, and was released after 11 months in March of this year. I am not going to pin the blame on the current Memphis DA. Details about the suspect’s release are sparse, and the DA was not in office at the time. However, his campaign website makes clear that the circumstances which allowed the shooting spree to occur will not be remedied.
But the Memphis shooting is also just one example (a horrific one, to be sure) in a worsening trend in our cities. A few days after the Memphis shooting, a man got into a fight with at least three men at a McDonald’s (noted for criminal activity, according to Twitter commenters) in the Lower East Side of Manhattan before he pulled out a hatchet and intimidated his assailants with it (the hatchet man may or may not have been the bad guy necessarily, but the point still stands). The same week, a video went viral showing a group of in-da-club-Americans brawling at da club in Providence. And this week, a Wawa in Northeast Philadelphia was ransacked by a mob of rap-music-American youths. Just in the Philadelphia area alone, violent incidents like the Wawa flash mob have spread out from neighborhoods in the North and West to the nicer neighborhoods of the Northeast and even into the suburbs.
Which brings to me to my point. In all states, but especially in red states, the major cities are a blight, disproportionately altering crime statistics and in many cases nowadays, bleeding from the inner cities out into the suburbs, threatening to destroy otherwise stable and functioning communities. The conversation around abolishing Washington DC home rule has been rumbling now and then. It’s time for the several states to have a similar conversation.
The right to alter or abolish governments that become destructive to our rights, safety and happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. And it is without question that local prosecutors, in refusing to seek justice for crimes committed, and local legislators, in passing local laws and ordinances that slacken policing and criminal sentencing, have become destructive of these ends (whether voters agree or not). It’s time for states to do what our Founders recognized as an inalienable right.
State governments should assert those rights and legislate or amend their constitutions, so that unless and until local governments meet their basic duty to enforce the law and remove lawbreakers from society, the state can subsume or outright dissolve them and take policing and prosecutorial matters into their own hands.
The simple truth is that our city governments can’t be trusted to deal with their own problems. It’s time for states to take initiative and protect their citizens until, if ever, they can.