The fear of crime is far more dangerous than crime itself

It is tough to watch the evening news, read the papers, browse virtually any news-related web site or listen to career politicians these days and come away with any other impression than crime is on the increase. The more consistent the story, the more likely the people are to believe it.

And naturally, when people fear crime, they are more apt to submit to government-mandated controls over the liberties and freedoms of the American people to combat the presumed violence. It is true, the majority of people today believe that crime is on the increase. According to a Gallop poll, 68% of those questioned believe that crime is worse today than a year ago.

It is not. In fact, crime has steadily decreased since the mid 1990s.

It is not secret data. The FBI routinely publishes crime numbers, and crime throughout the country is on the decrease. In 2010, the FBI announced that crime nationally had dipped to a 40-year low. In fact, not only has violent crime in general fallen, but violent crime in schools has decreased as well. According to the government’s own numbers, crime has fallen a whopping 65% since 1993.

But, the wall-to-wall coverage of crime from our nation’s media and career politicians would certainly have you believe otherwise. Gun control is hot, and politicians are taking advantage of highly publicized crimes to build the necessary fear among the population to encourage people to swallow increasing breaches of freedom. If kids are afraid to go to school or walk the streets, government must do something. Violence must stop, and according to President Obama, the government needs to act now.

But according to its own numbers, it doesn’t.

“The fear of crime is ever-present, even when crime isn’t,” wrote Radley Balko in a Huffington Post report published last year. ”I’m sure the cable news obsession with sensational crime stories and the emergence of tragedy vultures like Nancy Grace have a lot to do with it. Long-developing trends like the crime drop by definition aren’t daily news. Crime is, even when it’s down.”

People’s fear of crime is a threat to their own liberty – nay, to all of our liberties as American citizens. When people willingly give up freedoms under the guise of security, we quickly begin to tip the scales of freedom in favor of the state. Public perception is a powerful tool and, when used carefully by authorities, can produce seriously threatening results for freedom-lovers of our great nation.

Staying vigilant and questioning the “official story” is the key to resisting the state’s clever ploy to remove more and more freedom from the American people. The numbers are public. The facts are known. All the people have to do is look. Stop believing everything that you are told.

The government and media know that emotions are what drive people, not their minds. Bad news sells, and they know it. Watch 10 minutes of the Sandy Hook massacre and your heart sinks straight out of your chest. Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Gabriel Giffords shooting – all of these incidents are tragic. Americans naturally get effected by them. Any sane person would.

The problem is our political class is well aware of this, and these images are being used to pull once again at the emotions of the American people, and those same powerful emotions quickly subsume the human psyche. It is the perfect mechanism to influence public opinion. History clearly shows this, and unfortunately for freedom-loving people, when governments toy with the emotions of the people, rarely do the people benefit. The government, instead, benefits.

They always do.

Arkansas residents fight back over martial law threat

Posted by Steve Adcock

Citing concerns over an increase in violence, Mike Gaskill, the mayor of Paragould Arkansas, told residents to expect police armed with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles to stop everyone they see on the streets to demand identification. Guilty until proven innocent, Gaskill implied it is the job of the residents to prove they are doing nothing wrong.

“I’ve got statistical reasons that say I’ve got a lot of crime right now, which gives me probable cause to ask what you’re doing out,” Gaskill told a group of residents at a town hall meeting to announce the plan. ”Then when I add that people are scared…then that gives us even more [reason] to ask why are you here and what are you doing in this area.”

“They may not be doing anything but walking their dog,” he said. “But they’re going to have to prove it.”

Following the frightening proclamation from the town’s mayor, two subsequent town hall meetings have been canceled due to “public safety concerns”, and to this point, no AR-15-armed police officers have been sighted on the streets harassing the town’s people.

Obama: Now is the time for immigration reform

Posted by Steve Adcock

After spending nearly $2 million of taxpayer money on a trip out to Las Vegas yesterday where he delivered a 25-minute speech, President Obama told a crowd of supporters that now is the time to reform our immigration system, outlining many of the same goals uttered 4 years ago.

Why is it now, almost 1500 days into his presidency, would so-called “common sense” immigration reform suddenly become an immediate concern? After riding into office on the backs of immigrants and accomplishing virtually nothing in his first term, “now is the time”, he said. ”This time, action must follow”.

The president will not be up for re-election again. Now certainly is the time.

Among the more controversial portions of the Obama immigration plan includes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants currently in the country – although the president cleverly calls it a pathway to “earned” citizenship. Although details are sketchy, Obama’s plan supposedly includes new punishments for businesses who knowingly hire illegal labor and “tighter security at the border”, whatever that means.

While the government gets bogged down with details unrelated to a true solution, actual immigration reform needs to include the elimination of laws, not the enactment of more. Our nation has enough laws, more than most Americans know what to do with. More rules and regulations are not the solution.

As author Daniel Griswold so aptly wrote, “When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem.” Our government has a choice: it can either reform immigration law by observing how immigrants live in our country, or it can spend months debating the merits of politically-charged provisions of proposed new laws that do nothing to address the true problem of immigration.

It will likely choose the latter.

Improper controls cause hundreds of millions in payments

Posted by Steve Adcock

According to public numbers, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid paid more than $125 million for treatment of thousands of our nation’s prison inmates and illegal aliens between the years 2009 and 2011, a cost that could have been prevented if proper controls were in place.

“The federal government is generally prohibited from providing Medicare services to incarcerated individuals or aliens who are unlawfully present in the country under the Social Security Act,” reported the Washington Free Beacon. ”But CMS’s screening methods were not able to detect and recoup payments that violated the Act.”

Had the controls been in place, much of the improper payments could have been prevented. Instead, government bureaucracy fails again, costing the American taxpayer millions.

According to the Free Beacon report, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid launched a nearly $80 million plan to improve their computer systems. The center claims the new system saved over $100 million in 2012 alone.

List of things to ban: cars, trucks, hammers and religion

Posted by Steve Adcock

While our government has wrapped itself around the axle with gun control and banning those things that supposedly “kill”, why don’t we take our new found sensitivity to dangerous items found in our society and extend the ban to anything that might harm us.

For example, cars and trucks kill and injure far more people on a daily basis than guns do, so let’s ban them. Perhaps the American people can rest assured, as they bicycle to work every morning, that they will no longer have to hear reports of fatal accidents on the roadways any longer.

But let’s not stop there. Religion and government are responsible for some of the most brutal atrocities that our world has ever seen (Islam, Nazis, Jews vs. Palestines, Sikh genocide and countless others). So, let’s ban religion and government too. No more religion. No more government. There, atrocities magically stop.

But wait? Hammers actually kill more people per year than guns do, so we better throw those into the mix, too. No more hammers. Try pounding in your next nail with the butt end of a screw driver instead, or perhaps an old shoe, or computer hard drive that will no longer spin.

How about cell phones? Texting and talking while driving contributes to more and more of the accidents that we see and hear about on the roadways. But with cars and trucks already banned, this’ll be more of an issue with riding your bicycle while distracted talking on your cell phone. Thus, off with the cell phones! No more. Find one of those large rectangular boxes with something that resembles an “old school” telephone next time you need to talk to someone while on the go.

And let’s not forget all those violent movies and video games. No more movies with blood. No more video games where the object of the game is to destroy monsters, zombies or other enemy armies. Car racing games are out, too, because – well, cars are banned, and it sends a bad message to glorify something that is banned.

Bees kill – especially killer bees, so let’s ban bees too. Snakes are harmful, so add them to the list. What about Black Widow spiders, scorpions, lions, tigers? Let’s just have one big genocide of animals. Feel safer?

But by all means, let’s keep around all those mind-altering drugs and continue our practice of loading our kids up with them. There, that should keep us safe from…ourselves, right?