Law-and-order Hillary
On its second night, the Democratic National Convention focused on the true law-and-order presidential candidate — and it surely wasn’t self-declared sheriff Donald Trump. The U.S. has experienced a four-decade-long decline in crime, although some cities are now suffering spikes in violence and police forces are struggling to come to grips with the use of deadly force, particularly against African-Americans.
Guns are a common factor in the two trends, as well as mass shootings. Widely available, they drive up bloodshed — again often among AfricanAmericans — and can put police at trip-wire readiness to open fire.
The next American President must have the bandwidth both to attack gun violence and to sensitively address unnecessary force and racial bias in policing.
By featuring at the convention the seven socalled Mothers of the Movement, Hillary Clinton synthesizes the critical thrusts of the law-and-order equation.
The group includes the mothers of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, who were killed by police, as well as the mother of Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot dead at 15 by Chicago gang members.
In his nomination acceptance speech last week, Trump painted a portrait of crime that would frighten Edvard Munch. Violence is out of control all across America, he said, ignoring crime rates that are near generational lows.
Having created a crisis where none exists, Trump offered himself as the magician who could fix the problem with the wave of a gold-plated wand: “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on Jan. 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”
Worse than his cynical promise, Trump rules out federal gun laws aimed at keeping weapons out of the hands of dangerous or disturbed people or suspected terrorists. Same deal for an assaultweapons ban he once supported.
Instead, he blares about ever more deadly guns in ever more hands, the better, he says, for civilians to fire back at ISIS in the event of a horrific attack.
Then, too, Trump waded emptily into criminal-justice reform, telling the New York Times that the U.S. cannot lecture other nations about human rights abuses because “we can’t see straight in our own country. We have tremendous problems when you have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have Ferguson. When you have Baltimore.”
We’ll leave you to figure out what Trump means, especially coming from a candidate who in May called “places like Oakland” or “Ferguson” “among the most dangerous places in the world,” a blatant falsehood.
Clinton and the Democrats — who, with a federal crime bill, helped turn the tide in the early 1990s, the last time crime actually was exploding — recognize that, even in a safer America, bullets take more than 30,000 American lives annually.
Like 90% of Americans, Clinton aims to require universal background checks on firearm sales, including on utterly unregulated private sales via the internet.
She wants to ban sales of military-grade assault weapons that are the killing machine of choice for mass killers and terrorists, and to bar suspected terrorists from buying weapons.
The guns-everywhere-for-everyone nation, like the one Trump envisions, would be a nation in which everyone, cops included, will be increasingly on edge.
Mature answers or manufactured hysteria: the choice for America this fall is starkly clear.