Another WALLbanger

The people who have represented me in the House have been whackoes. Duke Cunningham, Federal inmate; Earl Hutto, star of a local children’s TV show; Joe Scarborough, star of a children’s TV show for adults; Jefferson Beauregard Miller, real estate agent from Chumuckla; and now Matthew Gaetz of 16 speeding tickets in 16 years, a DUI that went away [not related, of course, to his father being the President of the Florida Senate at the time]. Congresscritter Gaetz (NRA FL-1) a nominal member of the GOP, has spent all of his time in Congress sucking up to Trump.

A member of the House Judiciary Committee, he spent his time at a hearing on gun violence pimping Trump’s Wall:

When Rep. Matt Gaetz began to speak, he started pounding on undocumented immigrants, claiming that everything that H.R. 8 proposes to solve could simply be done by building Trump’s wall on the southern border.

“I hope we do not forget the pain, and anguish, and sense of loss felt by those all over the country who have been the victims of violence at the hands of illegal aliens,” Gaetz said. “[H.R. 8] would not have stopped many of the circumstances I raised, but a wall, a barrier on the Southern border may have, and that’s what we’re fighting for.”

Hearing observers Fred Guttenberg and Manuel Oliver were not having it, protesting loudly, rules or no rules. No wall would change the fact that Nikolas Cruz was an American citizen with a gun and a grudge, after all.

Guttenberg and Oliver are parents of students killed at Parkland. The killer at the Pulse night club in Orlando was an American with guns, as was killer of the 5 women at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring. Mr. NRA-A+ doesn’t want to hear that guns are a problem.

Juanita Jean writes about how mad El Paso officials are about Trump’s lies about their city. If you believe that the crime rate is linked to Wall, then the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report statistics are bad news. The UCR shows crime in El Paso going up after Wall was approved and built. I personally don’t think Wall has much of any effect on violent crime in border cities. The barriers at border crossings are more for traffic control than “crime fighting”.

Crimes are overwhelmingly committed by males between 15 and 45. The leading edge of the ‘Baby Boom’ hit the upper limit in the early 1990’s and the crime rate went down everywhere. The most efficient predictor of crime in any jurisdiction are the number of males between 15 and 45 years of age.