Tag Archives: murder

It’s Murder, Not the 2d Amendment

Interestingly named Whitestown is one of several bedroom communities around Indianapolis, in central Indiana. It is 93% White. It is also the site of a recent murder–and I use that term intentionally.

The facts–at least, the readily ascertainable ones– have been widely reported. Members of a cleaning crew went to the wrong house in what has been described as a “cookie cutter” neighborhood. Two of them–a Hispanic couple–knocked on the door of that incorrect address, and in response, someone shot the woman through the door, killing her.

As of a week later, no charges had been filed by the county prosecutor, although the Indianapolis Star reports that the homeowner had hired a “Second-Amendment lawyer.” (Update: since I wrote this, the prosecutor has brought charges against the homeowner.)

The owners of the Whitestown home where a 32-year-old woman was shot and killed have hired one of Indiana’s most prominent constitutional lawyers.

Guy Relford, also known for his weekly “Gun Guy” show on WIBC, has practiced law for more than four decades. He specializes in the Second Amendment.

As the Star also reported,

The shooter — who has not been identified by law enforcement — could face criminal charges in connection with Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez’s death, pending the outcome of an ongoing review by the Boone County Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities have not confirmed whether the homeowner was the shooter.

Other than identifying the person who actually fired that gun, I cannot imagine what an “ongoing review” could uncover–and I certainly can’t imagine what defense “gun guy” will be able to offer. (Perhaps the shooter’s mental illness??)

I write these blog posts a few days ahead, so perhaps we’ll know more by the time this is published, but as I write this, it seems pretty clear that what we’ve seen in Whitestown is the merging of America’s racism and gun culture. The person inside that home saw two Hispanic people, and evidently equated “Hispanic” with “home invasion,” although I rather doubt that many home invaders knock on a home’s front door.

As the Star reported, Indiana has a Castle Doctrine law–one of those “stand your ground” statutes that give people the right to use deadly force to prevent unlawful entry into their homes. But even under those laws, the shooter’s belief of imminent danger must be “reasonable.” I find it extremely difficult to label shooting a woman knocking on one’s front door as “reasonable”–even if that woman’s skin color means she doesn’t look like a resident of Whitestown.

Of course, if far too many Americans weren’t in possession of firearms, incidents like this would be less likely. Having a gun in the house rather obviously increases the likelihood that that gun will be used–and in many cases, used inappropriately. Studies have found that 58% of gun deaths are the result of suicide, and the CDC has reported that nearly two out of every 10 non-lethal firearm injuries are unintentional–the result of accidents. (The CDC also reports that people who survive a firearm-related injury typically experience long-term problems with memory, thinking and PTSD, even if they don’t have permanent physical disabilities or paralysis.)

Maria Perez was a 32-year-old house cleaner, and the mother of four. An immigrant from Guatemala, she died in the arms of her husband when they arrived at what was definitely the wrong house–a house occupied by someone who was armed and evidently terrified of or hostile to people who looked “different.”

So here we are.

Four children no longer have a mother. A husband is left with memories of holding his dying wife in his arms. I’m sorry, but no “Castle Doctrine” can justify this; no “gun guy” can find a defense even in a Second Amendment that has been reinterpreted from its initial meaning in order to protect the gun industry and America’s gun fetishists.

There is no excuse.

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Law And Order

According to Fox News and other Republican sources, America is experiencing a crime wave. Actually, we aren’t. What we are experiencing is a rise in homicides–almost entirely as a result of gun violence.

As a recent Guardian article explained: homicides were up across the US in 2020 and appeared to be primarily driven by rising gun violence. Other crimes, however, fell.

A preliminary government estimate shows a 25% single-year increase in killings in 2020. In some larger cities, the number of homicides has remained higher than usual through the early months of 2021.

While official national crime data will not be released for months, some trends are clear. The 2020 homicide increase happened across cities and towns of all sizes, from those with fewer than 10,000 residents to those with more than a million, according to preliminary FBI data.

The rise in homicides likely translated into an additional 4,000 to 5,000 people killed across the country compared with the year before, according to early estimates.

The increase in murder comes as robberies declined more than 10%, and rapes declined 14%. Overall, violent crime increased 3%. The obvious question is: why? Why is murder up while overall crime is down? And how worried should we be?

Some context is helpful: even with the rising homicide rates, Americans are safer than we have been historically.

And yet, even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides, Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.

New York City saw more than 2,200 killings in a single year in 1990, compared with 468 last year, according to city data. In the bigger picture, that’s a nearly 80% decrease.

Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 homicides a year in the early 1990s, compared with fewer than 350 last year.

Furthermore, the article quotes one scholar of crime for the observation that the increases in homicide are taking place in neighborhoods where homicides have traditionally been concentrated. The incidence is not spreading out.

The pandemic has clearly contributed.

There is some evidence that national factors, including the many stresses and disruptions of the pandemic, may have played a role in the 2020 homicide increase. The uptick was “widespread,” Rosenfeld said. In an analysis of big city crime trends for the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice, “We found very few cities that did not experience pretty significant rises in homicide during 2020,” he said.

Whatever researchers ultimately determine, it is impossible to ignore the effect of America’s gun culture and the sheer number of weapons owned by our citizens.

A preprint study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that a spike in gun purchases during the early months of the pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in gun violence from March through May, or 776 additional fatal and nonfatal shooting injuries nationwide. The researchers found that states that had lower levels of violent crime pre-Covid saw a stronger connection between additional gun purchases and more gun violence.

There has been a predictable effort to attribute the rise in homicides to criticisms of police, or to unrest blamed on Black Lives Matter, but the data simply doesn’t support those accusations.

Some police officials and their allies have asserted that last summer’s big, volatile protests against police violence diverted police resources and attention away from their normal patrols, and have suggested that demoralized, angry police officers might be less proactive or effective in dealing with violent crime.

But Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who writes extensively about homicide trends, examined 60 cities and found no correlation between the number of Black Lives Matter protests, and the size of a city’s homicide increase.

Rosenfeld cautioned that any policing-focused explanation for the homicide increase needed to explain why the change would have only affected serious and deadly violence.

“Most crime is down, including most felony, serious crime,” he said. “If the de-policing argument is correct, why did it only affect an uptick in violence and not other street crime?”

At this point, the stresses of the pandemic, especially on low-income neighborhoods, appear to be a significant cause of hostility and despair and “acting out.” But the easy availability of guns clearly was–and continues to be–an enormous factor.

I’ll believe Americans seriously want to reduce violence and homicides when we get serious about gun control. But I’m not holding my breath…

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Scalia’s Morality

As has been widely reported, Justice Antonin Scalia made a controversial–albeit illuminating–remark on Monday, during a speech at Princeton. In response to a student who asked him about previous anti-gay writings in which he had compared laws criminalizing homosexuality to those banning bestiality and murder, Scalia defended the comparison, saying that–while he wasn’t equating homosexuality with murder–it illustrated his belief that legislative bodies should be able to enact laws against “immoral” behaviors.

I am deathly tired of legislators and judges who define “morality” exclusively by what happens below the waist, and who confuse “tradition” with a moral compass.

Throughout his career, Scalia has devoted his undeniable brilliance not to an exploration of the human condition, the nature of morality or even the role of law in society, but rather to the creation of an elaborate intellectual defense of his prejudices.

Anyone who would equate sexual orientation–an identity–with murder–a behavior–fails Classification 101. It can never be immoral simply to be something: gay, female, black, whatever. Morality by definition is right behavior. And most moral philosophers begin that examination by asking a fairly simple question: does this behavior harm another?

Now, I know there are endless (legitimate) arguments about the nature of “harm,” but–Micah Clark and Eric Miller to the contrary–the mere fact that gay people exist and may be granted equal civil rights cannot be rationally considered harmful.

How moral we are depends upon how we treat each other. Sexual molestation is wrong whether the molester is gay or straight. Theft is wrong irrespective of the color, religion or sexual orientation of the thief.

And as many others have noted, tradition is hardly a reliable guide to moral behavior. Quite the opposite, really. War has been a human tradition. Slavery was traditional for generations. The submission of women lasted eons. The loss of these “traditions” is hardly a victory for immorality–although for old white guys like Scalia, I’m sure the loss of privileged status is cause for regret.

The job of legislatures is to pass measures needed by governing bodies–rules for civic order, taxation, service delivery, and the myriad other matters that may properly be decided communally. Allowing legislators to decide whose lives are moral is not only improper, not only an abuse of power, it is itself immoral.

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