In a recent commentary, former Lewis County sheriff John McCroskey claimed that Democratic policies emanating from Olympia have made him feel less safe.
I find it very surprising that he feels less safe. According to the metrics for safety used by right wing conservatives, America should be the world's safest country.
They say guns make us safe and more guns will make us safer. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Blah, blah, blah. We have 393 million guns in the country, vastly more than any other nation on Earth. We have roughly three times as many guns per American citizen than we had in 1950, a time I'm sure conservatives look back on fondly as much more safe. How many more guns will it take to reach the magic number of true safety? A billion? The gun manufacturers would surely say two billion. Why not make it three or four billion?
They say if we locked more people up we would be safer, but only El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and Cuba incarcerate more of their citizens per 100,000 population than the United States. With less than one-fourth their total population, the second place U.S. trails first place China (not counting the Uighers) in total incarcerated citizens, 1,675,400 to 1,690,000.
Studies of history show for a simple fact that when wealth becomes heavily concentrated in the hands of 1% or less of the population, societies have always become riddled with crime.
Since 2015, more than 30 people have been killed in high speed police chases in Washington, roughly half of them innocent bystanders or passengers. Recent innovations for police work include a hand-held GPS dart gun and a car mounted GPS dart gun. Both fire a dart which "tags" the fleeing car and allows for police to follow them, but at a normal speed. The hope is that when word spreads that police cars are equipped with the GPS darts, there will be an understanding that fleeing is futile. The cost to equip each police car with the GPS dart system is about $6,000.
Brainpower and innovation is the right approach to the crime problem, but right wing conservatives are proposing more guns, locking more people up and if the past is prologue — and it is — more steep tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. And, oh yes, pay for those tax cuts by stripping down Social Security and Medicare and any other government program that helps post-agrarian Americans get through life.
Do conservatives have any more brilliant solutions for the crime problem? No, seriously?
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
