The other evening, my wife and I went out to dinner at a local brewery and restaurant. (I say local, but it was actually about a 50-minute drive from our house.) We sat on their deck, enjoying the sunshine and cool evening air while waited for our food. There was a view of mountains in two directions. Below us, families ate outdoors at tables under blue umbrellas, a kid played with his plastic truck along the sidewalk, and a bunch of young guys drank beer and played cornhole.
The last time I ate outside in a large city, we were bothered by panhandlers who practice urban extortion and won’t leave you alone until you pay them off. There was none of that here. We have plenty of poor people in the Appalachians, but I have yet to see a pan handler or a homeless person camped out on the corner or sleeping on a bench.
Unlike dining out in the last city we lived in, we didn’t have to wait for a table or book reservations weeks ahead of time.
We didn’t see any protestors. There were no drive-by shootings. No one got harassed for the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. No cars in the parking lot were broken into, and their tires were not slashed for displaying a Trump bumper sticker.
When we were leaving, I held the door open for a woman and she politely thanked me. Civility ruled.
This is why we moved.
The Cities Become Crime Magnets
Meanwhile, in New York City, once dubbed the safest big city in the country, the number of shootings is up 64 percent so far in 2021. Shootings are up 40 percent in Atlanta. In Portland, shootings are up 126 percent and the police department’s riot squad resigned en mass.
In Chicago, there were 54 shootings this weekend with seven people killed. Others were stabbed and beaten. Another seven were killed on Monday. 54 people shot over the weekend. In one city. That’s a pretty grim statistic.
Mayors Claim they Are Helpless
According to this article in the Washington Post, big-city mayors claim they are helpless without state and federal aid. Then they blame guns and ask for gun control, even though Chicago and New York already have the strictest gun control in the country. Gee, if gun control stopped criminals from getting guns, shouldn’t those cities be the safest around?
Too Many Criminals are not in Jail
The problem is not a proliferation of guns; it’s the proliferation of criminals. Cities and states emptied jails to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks, an action that may have resulted in more innocent deaths than criminals saved. Making matters worse, some cities recently enacted laws that allow many criminals out of jail with no bail. Some of them go right on committing crimes instead of sitting in a jail cell hoping someone can raise bail money. The foolishness doesn’t end there. Because of “criminal justice reform,” district attorneys are often pleading out cases or simply dropping charges to clear out their backlog. Whatever happened to the victim’s rights?
New York and other cities pulled back on policing last year after the George Floyd killing and eliminated plain clothes officers who used to get guns of the street. They flirted with, and sometimes implemented, plans to defund the police, resulting in large-scale retirements. Today, polices forces in many cities are under-manned and unable to do their jobs. In some places, they have had to stop responding to 911 calls about “minor” crimes because of a lack of manpower.
Yet the Democrats wonder why gun sale are up.
The folks in the Washington Post article who say things like, “We’re not going to arrest our way out of the problem,” are really saying, “I lack the stones to start arresting murders and locking them a way in jails where they cannot pray on innocent people. Plus, doing so would hurt my chances at re-election.”
How long will it be before U.S. inner cities resemble Juarez, Mexico?
Good Riddance
I once worked on the 49th floor of a huge office tower that took up an entire city block. It was quiet and peaceful up there. We didn’t worry about crime. People who could afford the outrageous parking fees would drive into the garage and take an elevator to the lobby. They could actually go to work and back home without setting foot on a city sidewalk. I took mass transit, but other than getting your foot stepped on by some other strap hanger, it never felt unsafe.
Today, in that city there are drug addled and mentally ill homeless people living in that neighborhood and they push people onto the subway tracks. They poop in the streets, and they piss on the buildings. They shelter in stations, and you have to step over them to get to the train.
Thanks, but I’ll take the mountain views. In fact, we’re pretty happy out here.
I recommend you get out of the city while you still can.
Prepper News Update
Less than 24 hours after I wrote this, “I expect Americans will protest when recharging all those subsidized electric cars puts an even greater strain on the electric grid and results in more blackouts, especially in places like California,” the lead story on ZeroHedge said: “With its Power Grid On the Verge of Failure, California Begs Residents to Change their EV Charging Routines.” If California, the state most in favor of electric vehicles, is already seeing problems, how bad will things get when they have double the number of electric vehicles on the road?
