I usually go to lengths to avoid wasting my time and energy listening to anything that attention seeking right wing nut case Ann Coulter has to say. However, I just came across a report of her antics on Fox News last night courtesy of The New Civil Rights Movement. It really nails something that I have been aware of for a long time but seldom see mentioned in the media. Much of the motivation for white suburban dwellers stocking up on guns when they live in communities with low crime rates is a paranoid fear that the coloreds are coming to get them.
Here are a few of the pearls of analytic insight from Annie Get Your Gun.
“If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium,” Coulter , who says concealed carry laws reduce gun deaths, told Hannity. “So perhaps it’s not a gun problem, it is a demographic problem, which liberals are the ones pushing, pushing, pushing.”
“Let’s get more Colin Fergusons and whoever the guy was who shot up Fort Hood. Why are they coming in to begin with?”
Beyond reading about the shock and horror of the Sandy Hook mass murder, I was very interested in the information about Newton, CT. On the surface it sounds like the ideal American community, spacious houses on large grassy lots. Household incomes are well above average and high educational levels. This is not the inercity ghetto that is supposed to be the center of crime and violence. There was a good bit of investigation about guns and gun ownership in Newton. What emerged was that Nancy Lanza with her gun collection was not some isolated crank.
In Town at Ease With Its Firearms, Tightening Gun Rules Was Resisted
But in the last couple of years, residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places. Near a trailer park. By a boat launch. Next to well-appointed houses. At 2:20 p.m. on one Wednesday last spring, multiple shots were reported in a wooded area on Cold Spring Road near South Main Street, right across the road from an elementary school.
Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts, and a modest tolerance for bearing arms competing with the staunch views of a gun industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which has made Newtown its home.
The efforts of the NRA have actively blocked research and media coverage of this phenomenon that has been spreading across the country for many years. They would have us believe that any rational and sensible American would of course want to own a gun. According to these
Statistics only 36% of Americans find it desirable to own a gun for any reason. This really is not the nation of gun owners that they try to portray it as being. However, if you look down at the section on race you will see that it is close to being a nation of white gun owners with 44% of whites owning them and only 27% ( less than the average) of non-whites owning them.
I am not enough of a follower of Ann Coulter's career to really know how accurate it is to consider her a spokesperson for the right wing. However, she never seems to have difficulty in getting a platform in those parts. I think this is an instance in which she has put her finger on the reality of what is going on.