by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides.<\/p>\n No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law \u2014 barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips \u2014 that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for selling lethal semi-automatic weapons to drug cartels. But so far, the only identifiable purveyor of illegal weaponry is the president\u2019s own attorney general, whose subordinates in the Fast and Furious operation sold hundreds of guns illegally to Mexican drug lords.<\/p>\n Suggestions to encourage greater incarceration of the mentally unstable, to jawbone Hollywood about its profitable (and gratuitous) gun violence, to regulate extremely violent \u2014 and extremely well-selling \u2014 video games usually fall on deaf liberal ears. In short, the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can\u2019t or won\u2019t address the causes of the latter, we go after the former. He is not the unhinged sort that\u00a0shoots a Gabby Giffords<\/a>\u00a0[1]<\/sup>\u00a0or innocents in an Aurora, Colorado, theater; but somehow is the supposed red-neck yokel that a journalist\u00a0like ABC\u2019s Brian Ross<\/a>\u00a0[2]<\/sup>\u00a0assumes does.<\/p>\n If the Department of Homeland Security, as is rumored, really did wish to stockpile hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, then why did it begin such repository buying right in the middle of a hysterical national debate about limiting access to various rifles and semi-automatic weapons? Was it not to create a climate of fear and panic buying that has emptied America\u2019s shelves of the most popular types of ammunition? If the homicide rate in Philadelphia and Chicago is any indication, murderers still have plenty of access to bullets. Those who want to target practice or shoot a varmint on their property do not.<\/p>\n The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both. In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone\u2019s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9\/11 terrorist plots. The NSA is the electronic version of the TSA, which feels it is noble and liberal to stop an octogenarian in a wheel chair for special frisking as proper compensation for every focused look at a West Bank resident or Pakistani visitor on his way into the United States.<\/p>\n The words \u201cTea Party\u201d and \u201cpatriot\u201d in a non-profit\u2019s name would more likely earn a negative appraisal from the IRS than would \u201cIslam\u201d or \u201cMuslim.\u201d\u00a0One wonders<\/a>[3]<\/sup>\u00a0how Lois Lerner\u2019s IRS division would treat a hypothetical \u201cSarah Palin Foundation\u201d versus \u201cThe Dr. Zawahiri Charity.\u201d<\/p>\n The IRS is not worried at all about 47% of the nation who pay no federal income taxes. The vast majority of those whom it focuses on are instead the 10% who pay over 70% of all taxes. These are the would-be proverbial \u201cfat cats\u201d who did not build their own businesses. They are reluctant to spread their wealth. They certainly did not know either when to stop making money or when the age of profit altogether had passed. Sometime around 2009 success was deemed failure, and failure success \u2014 at least if we collate the president fat-cat rhetoric with the vast expansion in the disability, food-stamp, and unemployment-insurance rolls.<\/p>\n Note that the IRS is not interested in leaking to Democrat senators or former administration official rumors about George Soros\u2019s income or the details of the tax returns of Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates. Instead, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate\u00a0bragged that he knew<\/a>\u00a0[4]<\/sup>\u00a0(falsely as it turned out) that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes. And former high administration official\u00a0Austan Goolsbee claimed<\/a>\u00a0[5]<\/sup>\u00a0(also falsely as it turned out) that he too knew that the Koch brothers were shorting the IRS.<\/p>\n Note that only liberal groups like ProPublica leak information about the confidential donor lists of conservative activists, apparently given their familiar arrangement with the IRS. So far IRS chiefs are not looking at prominent Democrat politicians for tax violations, although for a time \u2014 cf. Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Hilda Solis \u2014 that might have been a fruitful profile for inquiry. (One encouraging side note: if you are a suspect white, mature, well-off, conservative, heterosexual, Christian male, you can still obtain exemption from federal suspicion by loudly announcing that you also are enthralled by Barack Obama.)<\/p>\n We know who was not an administration suspect in the killing of four Americans in Benghazi \u2014 hard-core, al Qaeda-related Islamic terrorists. Instead a \u00a0supposedly right-wing unhinged video-maker was the object of vitriol from the secretary of state, the UN ambassador, and the president of the United States. He currently sits in jail. The known perpetrators of the murders walk free. \u00a0In contrast, Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, just got a fat inside job from Apple, despite creating not just a fictitious name (e.g., \u201cRichard Windsor\u201d) to avoid scrutiny when she communicated official business, but also an entirely made-up alter ego: \u201cRichard Windsor\u201d became an ideal employee lauded by the unethical EPA for his supposedly \u201cethical behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n We also know\u00a0who in the media is not a target<\/a>\u00a0[6]<\/sup>. Not the CBS or ABC News presidents who have siblings working in the White House. Not ABC\u2019s\u00a0Good Morning America,<\/i>\u00a0given that one of its stalwarts\u00a0is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney<\/a>\u00a0[7]<\/sup>. Instead, there are two sorts of suspicious\u00a0reporters<\/a>\u00a0[8]<\/sup>\u00a0that are consideredhostile<\/a>\u00a0[9]<\/sup>\u00a0to the administration and worthy of having their communications monitored.\u00a0One group are those journalists who leak information that the administrationwished to preempt and leak first<\/a>\u00a0[10]<\/sup>\u00a0or who refuse to only leak favorable classified information \u2014 the bin Laden trove, the cyber war against Iran, the drone targeting protocol \u2014 that makes the president look as if he were a competent commander in chief.<\/p>\n The other target, of course,\u00a0is Fox News<\/a>\u00a0[11]<\/sup>, whose staff, in a variety of ways and on a number of occasions, the Obama administration has previously attacked as in some way illegitimate.<\/p>\n Again, who fits these profiles that our current, vastly expanding big government does not like? If you are an operator of a coal plant that creates needed energy at a profit, then beware that\u00a0the EPA is after you<\/a>\u00a0[12]<\/sup>. If you are a shady insider who wants tens of millions of government dollars to subsidize a money-losing wind and solar plant, you hit the jackpot. Ditto the suspect people\u00a0who build guitars<\/a>\u00a0[13]<\/sup>, loan money to Chrysler, or wish to locate a jet airliner plant in South Carolina. Profits create suspicion;\u00a0failures earn subsidies<\/a>\u00a0[14]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n Then there are the clingers, whom the president long ago blasted as religious zealots and gun-toting xenophobes. These are the sorts whom the attorney general calls \u201ccowards\u201d \u00a0(not \u201cmy people\u201d) \u2014 the \u201cenemies\u201d whom the president advises Latino activists to \u201cpunish\u201d at the polls, the sorts that the president apologizes for abroad as guilty of sundry sorts of past class, race, and gender oppression.<\/p>\n In contrast, who is not so worried about government surveillance or audit? The New Black Panthers who turned up at a polling station in Philadelphia to intimidate voters; the \u201cfarmers\u201d who,\u00a0according to the\u00a0New York Times<\/i><\/a>\u00a0[15]<\/sup>,<\/i>\u00a0filed bogus claims to cash in on the government\u2019s ill-advised and poorly administered Pigford settlement; the Secret Service agents who routinely visited prostitutes while on duty protecting high government officials abroad; and the assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who used her office to enhance her private consulting business.<\/p>\n Americans wonder whom would the immigration services more likely wish to deport: the German Romeike family that was \u201cguilty\u201d of\u00a0homeschooling their children<\/a>[16]<\/sup>; Obama\u2019s aunt Zeituni, who lied about her immigration status to illegally obtain state and federal subsidies; or Onyango Obama, who likewise is here illegally (for 21 years) and was recently charged with ramming a police car while driving intoxicated? Is the U.S. so short of DUI offenders and frauds that we must deport homeschoolers\u00a0to make room for them<\/a>\u00a0[17]<\/sup>?<\/p>\n There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs. \u00a0But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment \u2014 and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt.<\/p>\n Ask who now is sitting in prison \u2014 a shyster video-maker who had nothing to do with the deaths of four Americans, or their five known terrorist killers lounging about in North Africa? Apparently,\u00a0Nakoula Basseley Nakoula<\/a>\u00a0[18]<\/sup>, like EPA director Lisa Jackson, was guilty of creating a fake persona. Like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he had a lien on his business. Like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he had some unpaid taxes. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been visited by government investigators. Like Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he lied to federal authorities \u2014 although they were not quite as high as those in the U.S. Congress. And unlike all of the above, he was therefore jailed.<\/p>\n Of all the legacies of Barack Obama, the most pernicious will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and\u00a0terrified half the population<\/a>\u00a0[19]<\/sup>\u00a0\u2014 and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand.<\/p>\n URLs in this post:<\/strong><\/p>\n [1] shoots a Gabby Giffords:\u00a0http:\/\/spectator.org\/archives\/2011\/01\/17\/jared-loughners-zeitgeist-obse<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [2] like ABC\u2019s Brian Ross:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2012\/07\/24\/brian-ross-of-abc-messed-up-so-badly-even-jon-stewart-noticed\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [3] One wonders:\u00a0http:\/\/newsbusters.org\/blogs\/ken-shepherd\/2013\/05\/15\/want-approval-irs-your-501c3-liberal-sounding-name-helps-conservative-<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [4] bragged that he knew:\u00a0http:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2013\/05\/16\/did-the-irs-give-romneys-tax-returns-to-harry-reid\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [5] Austan Goolsbee claimed:\u00a0http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives\/2013\/05\/obamas-abuse-of-the-irs-this-isnt-the-first-time.php<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [6] who in the media is not a target:\u00a0http:\/\/freebeacon.com\/all-in-the-family-3\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [7] is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney:\u00a0http:\/\/newsbusters.org\/blogs\/scott-whitlock\/2011\/01\/27\/claire-shipmans-husband-named-new-obama-press-secretary-conflict-int<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [8] reporters:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2013\/06\/14\/cbs-news-someone-was-pulling-data-from-sharyl-attkissons-computer\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [9] hostile:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2013\/05\/20\/wapo-justice-spied-on-fox-reporter-in-2010\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [10] wished to preempt and leak first:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2013\/05\/16\/wapo-cia-asked-ap-not-to-publish-yemen-terror-story-until-white-house-had-chance-to-announce-it-publicly\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [11] is Fox News:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2009\/10\/23\/obamas-a-tough-guy-at-least-with-fox-news\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [12] the EPA is after you:\u00a0http:\/\/newsbusters.org\/blogs\/p-j-gladnick\/2008\/11\/02\/hidden-audio-obama-tells-sf-chronicle-he-will-bankrupt-coal-industry<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [13] who build guitars:\u00a0http:\/\/news.investors.com\/ibd-editorials\/052313-657569-gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation.htm?p=full<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [14] failures earn subsidies:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2011\/09\/29\/venture-socialism-the-logical-endpoint-of-obamanomics\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [15] according to the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2013\/04\/26\/nyt-breitbart-was-right-about-pigford\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [16] homeschooling their children:\u00a0http:\/\/reason.com\/reasontv\/2013\/03\/11\/home-schooling-is-it-a-right<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [17] to make room for them:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/tatler\/2013\/06\/14\/democrats-for-illegal-alien-drunk-driving\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [18] Nakoula Basseley Nakoula:\u00a0http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2013\/05\/the-benghazi-patsy-91101.html<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n