Monday, January 15, 2007

MLK-Day Special!

Maybe I should call it a ".38 special"? How the forces of political correctness, acting in Dr. King's name, are directly involved in the killing of blacks...from today's Newark Star-Ledger, which of course could never see the irony:

Weapons seizures plummet on Turnpike
Uproar on racial profiling spurred State Police shift


Cops and politicians call Interstate 95 the "Iron Pipeline" because it is a popular route for criminals smuggling firearms from the South into Newark and other Northeastern cities where gun violence abounds.
A big link in that pipeline is the New Jersey Turnpike, where the State Police used to seize scores of guns every year.


But they don't anymore.

Gun arrests and gun seizures have plummeted on the Turnpike in the last decade, according to data provided by the State Police in response to a request under the Open Public Records Act. Since 1995, the number of gun-related arrests by troopers on the Turnpike dropped 91 percent, to 17 last year, and the number of seized guns fell 87 percent, to 15.

The decline comes at a time when homicides and shootings are on the rise in Newark, the state's largest city, where cops are taking record numbers of firearms off the streets. When those illegal guns are traced to their original sale, the most common source states turn out to be along the I-95 corridor in the South ...

"Any time we can interdict guns coming into the city, whether it's us or another law enforcement agency, it's going to prevent violence here," Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy said.

For many years, troopers made a priority of pulling over Turnpike motorists and searching their cars in hopes of catching drug traffickers and gun runners. That effort was abandoned in 1999, after a state investigation found troopers were stopping drivers based on their skin color, a civil rights abuse known as racial profiling.
Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, the State Police were put under the oversight of federal monitors and forced to change its patrol tactics....


So the forces of political correctness are appeased, and the folks in Newark grieve - over the bodies of their dead, killed by guns run up the I-95 pipeline, killed for sneakers, bling, petty grievances, or just because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wonder where Dr. King would stand?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

8 gun killings in Newark so far this year,and it's only January 15th.
It is indeed sad.