Authorities STILL Won’t Identify the Kansas City Shooters, as Biden Takes Aim at GUNS

By Selwyn Duke

When discussing shootings’ causes, conservatives will say it’s the people, not the guns; liberals will focus on the guns, not the people. And does it not accord with the latter theory when, in the Kansas City shooting’s wake, authorities are withholding the identities of the “people” responsible and are fixating on guns?

Why, a cynical person might almost think it’s contrived — a strategy.

For sure, say many, it’s odd that a full day after the mayhem at the Wednesday parade celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl LVIII victory, authorities still (as of this writing) haven’t revealed anything about the shooters’ identities or background. It’s even odder given that two good Samaritans tackled one of the suspects — knocking his gun from his hands and enabling police to take him into custody. Authorities surely know the individual’s identity.

Of course, critics would aver that were the shooters white, and especially if they were “white supremacists” (those elusive creatures observed with the frequency of unicorns), we’d have known their identities almost immediately.

And keeping the perps off the radar screen has allowed firearms to be put front and center. Sure enough, too, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their media minions wasted no time using the event to push for more anti-gun laws. As Fox News writes, “Biden issued a statement specifically recommending that lawmakers ban assault weapons among other gun control laws….”

Interestingly, Assault Weapons™ (a propaganda term for some semiautomatic rifles) were not used in the KC shooting; handguns apparently were. This isn’t surprising since, being concealable, they’re criminals’ favored weapons and are used in approximately 60 percent of all gun homicides. (Rifles, of any kind, are used in only three percent.) Apparently, though, the facts don’t matter in this debate any more than the KC shooters’ identities do.

As for the shooting, reports now hold that it resulted from a dispute among several individuals, which makes sense. When 23 people are shot and only one (thankfully) is killed, it indicates they were not the targets, but “collateral damage.” Also know that KC has the U.S.’s sixth highest murder rate and that, just as was the case at the parade, arguments are the most common cause of shootings there.

So the story here isn’t “assault weapons”; they had nothing to do with Wednesday’s incident.

The story here isn’t even guns in general, as there’s actually no positive correlation between firearm-ownership level and murder rates (e.g., New Hampshire’s gun-ownership rate is more than 10 times as high as Britain’s, but its murder rate is lower). In fact, there may be a negative correlation between these two phenomena. The story is this:

Kansas City recorded its deadliest year in history in 2023, with 185 homicides; its non-fatal shootings’ rate has been rising as well, with the figure being 537 in 2022. Again, too, disputes most commonly drive these crimes.

In other words, the Wednesday shooting was just another day in KC — the only difference is that with approximately one million parade attendees, it was assured that a high number of innocent bystanders would be struck.

Yet there’s more to the story, too — a deeper reason why KC’s violent crime rate is so high. As commentator Stu Tarlowe writes:

The climate of crime and murder in Kansas City, Missouri, has been fostered by the city’s so-called leaders, who for years have pandered to and even celebrated the “gangsta rap” mentality that violence and gunplay are viable ways of dealing with conflict.

Nothing points this out better than how the city has fêted a particular gangsta rapper, “KC’s own” Tech N9ne. This so-called “artist,” whom I wrote about in 2013, named himself after the submachinegun-style handgun that “gangstas” think is just too cool (even if they can obtain only the semi-automatic version). In that article, I took then-mayor Sly James to task for presenting Tech N9ne as a role model for the city’s youth; my article included some of the vile lyrics that have made Tech N9ne rich and famous.

Tarlowe then presented the following expurgated version of those lyrics:

“Gunz Will Bust”

[Verse 1]

I know you know this is Kansas City

Where n*gga life don’t mean sh*t

So step to and immediately get yo dome split

I pack heat for days run street wit K’s and hollow’s

On a concrete crusade you made the pill now swallow

You never thought tomorrow

You see me beam up all strapped down wit a pump

Searchin’ for the n*ggas on a hunt

Jerkin’ on the trigga when I dump

It’s not a game dude my killaz will mangle

Anything in my range fool

When hatin’ get framed moved

We play the same rules…

[Chorus]

Rough n*ggas in the street will bust 4 the bread

And meat deuce 57th Street and 7 deuce be packin’ heat punks

Get the f*ck away from we, for we buckin’ these mutha f*ckin’ G.U.N.Z.

Shakespeare it’s not. And what effect does it have on KC’s black boys — who already often come from broken homes with no father figure present — when the world’s Tech N9nes are held up as role models?

Note here that Tarlowe provides numerous examples of how Tech N9ne has been fêted by city officials. In fact, he was a “celebrity guest” at the Super Bowl parade.

The even deeper issue is that, as Professor Thomas Sowell has pointed out (videos below), this “black” gangsta culture actually derives from redneck culture, which once plagued many poor whites and blacks in the South. But while most whites dispensed with it and embraced mainstream American norms, it was retained in black ghettos.

Tragically, instead of stigmatizing this “redneck” culture and discouraging it among blacks (as happened with whites), it’s glamorized and portrayed as “authentic black culture,” which ensures many blacks will embrace it as part of their identity. So, ironically, if you wanted to handicap blacks and encourage their failure, promoting this gangsta culture — as the Left does — is precisely what you’d do.

As for the KC shooters, odds are that their identities will be released — as soon as the story fades from the front pages.

               This article was originally published at The New American.

Comments

[tj]

"...as Professor Thomas Sowell has pointed out (videos below), this “black” gangsta culture actually derives from redneck culture..."

Did southern blacks really start the gangsta rap shooting epidemic? I think maybe Sowell was trying to blame whites for black dysfunction and was out of his ken speculating on such matters. "Gangsta" is the operative word here and that was largely a Yankee immigrant contagion. Chicago of the Gang Land game and Detroit are the bases for black gun violence, not Birmingham, Biloxi or Jacksonville. They're also the locales where the epidemic is most intractable.

[Selwyn Duke]

Dear TJ,

Thanks for responding. Sowell is a very matter-of-fact man, and, to be precise, he correctly tied the cultures of poor white and black southerners together citing speaking style and other factors. He points out that the so-called "black" style of speech actually dates back 500 years to certain low-class areas of the British Isles, and that even back then the people in question were called rednecks and crackers.

This should be no surprise. Our whole culture is a Western (white) one, and this includes it's many good and few bad elements.

As for blaming people, the only ones I blame are the black race hustlers and white liberals who glamorize and thus perpetuate this dysfunctional, low-life culture in the black community.

God bless,

Selwyn Duke

[tj]

Dear Selwyn,
That southern white culture greatly overlaps with southern black culture is generally recognized. My quibble is with you and Sowell attributing the current spate of black gun violence to this shared culture. My observations indicate that the mass shootings started in places like Illinois and Michigan then made their way down south. I'd even bet on a twenty year lag in southern blacks adopting the gangsta rap lifestyle. It's not just the number of decades since whites were relatively lawless, the gun violence being of the mass homicide variety makes it qualitatively different. I posit that the tendency to settle scores with gun violence didn't go latent then reemerge hundreds of miles north of where it supposedly started. This is northern and not southern cultural influence. A certain segment of the northern black population has adopted the immigrant gang/mafia lifestyle which has gradually made its way into southern black culture via rap music.

Food for thought.