The subsidization of single motherhood (which began with LBJ’s Great Society) is the single biggest factor for there being single mothers. The psychology is a little strange, and difficult to understand, but that’s it. And it happens in far greater numbers in black communities than anywhere else. “When you subsidize something, you get more of it”. A general rule about government involvement and economics.
Children need both parents, not just one. They need a dad, for boys so they can learn how to be a man. And for girls, so they what to look for in a man. When either child grows up without a dad, the cycle repeats itself. This is not difficult to understand.
Also, since 1973, about 30% of all abortions have been black babies. So yes, thanks to Planned Parenthood, abortion does tie into this.
Also, regularly increasing the minimum wage. Raising taxes and regulations on businesses. These are factors that hurt poor people the worst. Which political party supports most or all of what I just mentioned? If you are willing to admit that, maybe you can admit how to solve these problems.
Also, I’m not voting in any national (federal) election this year. So I really don’t care what argument you put forth in favor of your favorite left wing policy. Go ahead and pass more useless laws. I won’t try and stop you.
Actually, it's worse than subsidizing single mothers. I was a typist working at a social services office in the 70s. I typed up case reports.
The rules of AFDC required that there be no man in the house. Your family could be starving, but unless that father left the house, no "Aid to Families with Dependent Children" for you or your children. You could only get AFDC if there was no man supporting you or your children. If you were getting any child support, you had to sign it over to the state and it would be "repaid" to you within the AFDC payment. So, why should you care about getting child support anyway and why should your child's father care about paying it?
When social workers visited the home, they regularly checked to make sure there were no signs of a man living there.
Black families used to be the strongest families. They had to be, with so much arrayed against them. But I believe AFDC was one of the largest factors that killed black families when it created a program that actively broke poor families up.
Also, it discouraged work. If you got a job, your AFDC was reduced. So, why work? You could get AFDC if you were a student. So, why not quit your job and go to school? Your financial aid didn't count against your AFDC.
When the minimum wage was instituted in 1964, it was $1.25, or five quarters.
The US quarter at that time was 90% silver.
Five silver quarters today are ~$44.00
We don't have a minimum wage problem, we have a money problem. The constant debasement of the US dollar steals from anyone that doesn't have assets that keep pace with inflation.
This is vitally important to understand, and is at the base of all the problems in the USA.
The minimum wage has destroyed entry level jobs in this country desperately needed to teach young people how to work and develop skills. An absolute travesty supported by demagogues and people deluded by the promise of unearned free stuff. Note what just happened in CA.
There’s also the overhead added to the cost of labor by payroll taxes and the associated bookkeeping. It hits the low end hardest, because the margin of profitability is thinner.
There is also the tiny problem with having all the increase in wealth from increased productivity to the wealthy with wages not keeping up with inflation. This started around 1972. Then add all the factories being shipped to China and Mexico with educated workers from India replacing tech workers and people from south of the border brought in to replace Americans and bust unions.
All this has been happening for over forty years. We can all argue about what kind of monetary system we should have as well as the vices of the American workers of all races, but all those people from the middle class on down have been increasingly robbed of the ability to just make enough to survive. Forget about being successful. Maybe if we made it possible to make a good living if you worked and maybe went to a trade school or college, which are all too expensive to go to anyways, instead of working yourself to an early death on the streets, then we could chastised our fellow Americans. However, the banks are making bank aren’t they?
"There is also the tiny problem with having all the increase in wealth from increased productivity to the wealthy with wages not keeping up with inflation. This started around 1972."
What you fail to understand, regarding the impossible position for the black race,is your fucking policies caused this. So yeah you dumb fuck, it was the lefties. How can you not get that? Regardless what Coleman is referring to regarding guns, lbj got this fucking ball rolling, and it’s been sped up by you dummies. Read what Mary Jo wrote right here. That’s you,dude. All on you.
Im not wishing you to be a retardant, but your points are all coming straight out of left field. What is one supposed to think? We gonna play the semantics game now?
I thought I'd be mad too but instead I laughed. There is something you forget to mention, a gun is the greatest equaliser to a woman against a dangerous man especially if she knows how to handle it. 😋
That's the problem.. we are supposed to be equal.. the balance... yet the prototypes with outdoor plumbing wanted power and the world has been going downhill ever since...
Just look at industrialization, religion, politics ... none of it is really working because nature is balance.
Arrogantly enslaving and downgrading women, the environment and now we are selling children ...
ego- maniacs and psychpaths are running the show...
Those tend to be the ones drawn to power. Like a magnetic lure so one can somewhat understand why history always play out as it does. Human nature is what it is unfortunately.
I believe it to be mental illness .... and we need to not allow it. In "the family" and in "a Nation"... lets hope we learn to come together and make betted choices.
I didn’t have a gun when I was attacked with a gun, although at the time I owned several firearms. I certainly did not want to get into a gun battle with my ex-husband. We would have both lost. As it stands we are both alive and happily living our lives… apart of course. I’m a woman.
Great piece. I’ve geeked out on the statistics around gun deaths in the US and basically come to the same conclusions. If we can figure out how to stop middle-aged white guys from killing themselves, and young black guys from killing each other, we’d be Norway.
Not going to pretend there’s any kind of law you can pass to make those things happen though.
I grew up in gun country, southern Oregon farming, ranching and hunting locale, Air Force military base on the outskirts of town. I grew up seeing shotguns in racks in the back windows of pickup trucks. I do not recall hearing about rampant disarray with people "going off" with a firearm. That seems to have accelerated in last few decades . The more culture comes apart, the more this intensifies. Coleman, you have a point of view that is raw and blunt and comes from harsh realities. Our nation is in deep trouble. Your searing insights are warrior all the way. You are needed and appreciated here.
Guns and Abortion. Problems without solutions. Best you can do in my opinion, is live the proper way for your local. If you live in Baltimore, you absolutely need a gun. If you live on a farm, you absolutely need a gun. If you live in suburbia there’s a chance you don’t, but maybe you will.
Since you mentioned Australia... people here make a big deal about the decline in mass shooting events since we brought the laws in, and decline in homicides overall. Unfortunately it's not that simple.
Homicides were already declining before then, and ones involving firearms were already a small fraction of them. The big drops happened a bit after 2000. But that was three things. Coleman will know better than most, but some of the readership it mightn't be clear to, but: most violent crime is carried out by dumb young blokes.
A bit after 2000, we got involved in a couple of pointless losing foreign conflicts. This gave a lot of dumb young blokes something to do.
We also had a mining boom, and needed a lot of workers to go somewhere remote, fly in, earn lots of money, fly back out, gamble, drink and whore it away, then fly back in again. This gave a lot of dumb young blokes something to do.
Lastly, our birth rate dropped, so there were fewer native-born dumb young blokes. We could have imported some, but being a country with no land borders with anyone else, we were able to focus on immigration on skilled and business migrants - not that young, and not usually dumb.
So the firearms laws were neither here nor there on the changes in homicides here in Australia.
However, what did see a big change was male suicides. While females have higher rates of attempted suicide, males have higher rates of actual suicide - because they tend to use more violent means. If you take a bunch of pills someone might find you and pump your stomach before you perish, if you eat a bullet there's not much anyone can do for you. And of course, while pills, hanging and other methods take some planning and are less certain, a firearm allows some spontaneity and certainty in the event.
Nobody's that interested in male suicide rates, though, so they tend not to talk about that as a benefit of tight firearms laws.
I don't think the law changes we had in the 1990s in Australia were bad, overall. But like Coleman I don't think they'd be practical in Australia. And even if they were, I wouldn't expect them to have a dramatic effect on violent crime - but they might have an effect on male suicide.
Demographically, the US has proportionally more young blokes than most Western countries, and more dumb ones. And it keeps importing more. So you'd need to do things like improve education (omg libruls!) and close the borders (omg kunsuhrvatifs!), which seems unlikely to happen.
If you're out of the pen, you should be legally allowed to arm yourself with whatever arms you choose to use for the defense of your life, liberty, property, and anyone you might think is worth defending.
I do believe our 'bandaid' addicted culture is engineered to war over the talking points of every frickin issue as a way to divide us and spin us in circles, rather than to ever effect real change. I, like you, don't waste my time in the "duality trap". Life's too short. I have things to create and people to love. :)
Society IS people. The health and quality of society (pie) is determined by the health of the individuals (ingredients) that comprise it. We can only control ourselves, so it's up to each one of us to mature and evolve into healthy & functioning members of a society. The attempts at controlling how other people operate is an old paradigm that needs to die. It's time to do the heavy-lifting of adopting personal responsibility.
Absolutely. I believe we've been raised to be dependent on centralized institutions seeking power, exploiting us for our energy as 'Human Resources". For generations, we've been infantilized and stunted. Those days are over. I'm taking back the reins! ;)
Well said! They are treating the symptom and not the cause. I think that's the expression. Virtue signaling on both sides. Thank you for that very enlightening post! Sabrinalabow.substack.com
I totally agree with your assessment of the problem, well done! Also thanks for admitting you don’t have the answer. I don’t either. Honestly, I’m center left, if you want to categorize me, and I want to buy a couple of guns and learn to shoot just to have a chance to defend myself and family if things go south when all the angry MFs who already have all the guns you mentioned lose their minds. Problem is all the shootings ranges around here have huge Trump displays and I just want learn how to shoot not deal with that shit. Again, thanks for your perspective.
What particular shit is it that you can’t abide, to learn to shoot? I guess you will probably find is that the left leaning progressives aren’t going to own gun ranges. I know,crazy, right? So in order to learn, you might lose your confirmation bias, and maybe learn from some folks that are comfortable and used to firearms,regardless their “ shit” . And you might find ( I know this part is scary) that those people you assume are not your kind, ,might not be as whacked as you’ve been trained to think. Just sayin.
The subsidization of single motherhood (which began with LBJ’s Great Society) is the single biggest factor for there being single mothers. The psychology is a little strange, and difficult to understand, but that’s it. And it happens in far greater numbers in black communities than anywhere else. “When you subsidize something, you get more of it”. A general rule about government involvement and economics.
Children need both parents, not just one. They need a dad, for boys so they can learn how to be a man. And for girls, so they what to look for in a man. When either child grows up without a dad, the cycle repeats itself. This is not difficult to understand.
Also, since 1973, about 30% of all abortions have been black babies. So yes, thanks to Planned Parenthood, abortion does tie into this.
Also, regularly increasing the minimum wage. Raising taxes and regulations on businesses. These are factors that hurt poor people the worst. Which political party supports most or all of what I just mentioned? If you are willing to admit that, maybe you can admit how to solve these problems.
Also, I’m not voting in any national (federal) election this year. So I really don’t care what argument you put forth in favor of your favorite left wing policy. Go ahead and pass more useless laws. I won’t try and stop you.
Actually, it's worse than subsidizing single mothers. I was a typist working at a social services office in the 70s. I typed up case reports.
The rules of AFDC required that there be no man in the house. Your family could be starving, but unless that father left the house, no "Aid to Families with Dependent Children" for you or your children. You could only get AFDC if there was no man supporting you or your children. If you were getting any child support, you had to sign it over to the state and it would be "repaid" to you within the AFDC payment. So, why should you care about getting child support anyway and why should your child's father care about paying it?
When social workers visited the home, they regularly checked to make sure there were no signs of a man living there.
Black families used to be the strongest families. They had to be, with so much arrayed against them. But I believe AFDC was one of the largest factors that killed black families when it created a program that actively broke poor families up.
Also, it discouraged work. If you got a job, your AFDC was reduced. So, why work? You could get AFDC if you were a student. So, why not quit your job and go to school? Your financial aid didn't count against your AFDC.
"We" created this.
Not to mention this taught your sins and daughters that fatherhood was disconnected from being a sperm donor.
This affected white families as well, but black families had the most to lose.
White people are both black folk greatest enemy and their greatest friend.
🤩 with 😴
Guilt and savior complex, all in one post!
Strive as I might, I shall never reach this level of crapulence. I am humbled.
I’m not feeling guilty, or savior-ious.
Just having some fun with words ;-)
Those who voted to ratify the Civil Rights Amendment. Mostly the same people who vote against gun control, abortion, and tax hikes.
I'm wondering about the friend part.
Again–as the author so wisely said: laws only address symptoms, not the causes. No one really wants to put in the work to solve the latter.
With you on all of this except the minimum wage.
When the minimum wage was instituted in 1964, it was $1.25, or five quarters.
The US quarter at that time was 90% silver.
Five silver quarters today are ~$44.00
We don't have a minimum wage problem, we have a money problem. The constant debasement of the US dollar steals from anyone that doesn't have assets that keep pace with inflation.
This is vitally important to understand, and is at the base of all the problems in the USA.
The minimum wage has destroyed entry level jobs in this country desperately needed to teach young people how to work and develop skills. An absolute travesty supported by demagogues and people deluded by the promise of unearned free stuff. Note what just happened in CA.
There’s also the overhead added to the cost of labor by payroll taxes and the associated bookkeeping. It hits the low end hardest, because the margin of profitability is thinner.
If you tax something, people use less of it.
I agree. But those advocating for raising the minimum wage need to realize what the real problem is, fiat currency.
End that, and you take away the ability of those destroying the country to pay for it.
There is also the tiny problem with having all the increase in wealth from increased productivity to the wealthy with wages not keeping up with inflation. This started around 1972. Then add all the factories being shipped to China and Mexico with educated workers from India replacing tech workers and people from south of the border brought in to replace Americans and bust unions.
All this has been happening for over forty years. We can all argue about what kind of monetary system we should have as well as the vices of the American workers of all races, but all those people from the middle class on down have been increasingly robbed of the ability to just make enough to survive. Forget about being successful. Maybe if we made it possible to make a good living if you worked and maybe went to a trade school or college, which are all too expensive to go to anyways, instead of working yourself to an early death on the streets, then we could chastised our fellow Americans. However, the banks are making bank aren’t they?
"There is also the tiny problem with having all the increase in wealth from increased productivity to the wealthy with wages not keeping up with inflation. This started around 1972."
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It's the money.
Had a a quick look through the link you posted just now. Do you have any links regarding reading material you could recommend on the topic? Please?
Here we go, again. Point completely missed.
“It wuz da lefties!”
Ok, Einstein. Let’s not try and stop the violence.
No, let it roll.
What you fail to understand, regarding the impossible position for the black race,is your fucking policies caused this. So yeah you dumb fuck, it was the lefties. How can you not get that? Regardless what Coleman is referring to regarding guns, lbj got this fucking ball rolling, and it’s been sped up by you dummies. Read what Mary Jo wrote right here. That’s you,dude. All on you.
I accept that there are people who feel this way. But, using your logic, other things that are “made up”
Racism.
Homophobia
Trans orientation
Trans phobia
The concept of hate speech
I don’t let people like you upset me anymore. Others might. You can goad them.
If only I were the Leftie you imagine me to be!
Im not wishing you to be a retardant, but your points are all coming straight out of left field. What is one supposed to think? We gonna play the semantics game now?
To a man with hammering, everything looks like a nail.
I thought I'd be mad too but instead I laughed. There is something you forget to mention, a gun is the greatest equaliser to a woman against a dangerous man especially if she knows how to handle it. 😋
Who told women about guns?!?!
I figured it out seeing the effect it did around people 😋
Um. That would be me. Oops.
Initially, some of the same people who told them they can vote.
That’s crazier
That’s crazy!
God made man. God made woman. Samuel Colt made them equal.
God made man and rested.
God made woman and no ones rested since 🤣
God made man, looked at it and said: i can do better than that!!! 😂
That's the problem.. we are supposed to be equal.. the balance... yet the prototypes with outdoor plumbing wanted power and the world has been going downhill ever since...
Just look at industrialization, religion, politics ... none of it is really working because nature is balance.
Arrogantly enslaving and downgrading women, the environment and now we are selling children ...
ego- maniacs and psychpaths are running the show...
Those tend to be the ones drawn to power. Like a magnetic lure so one can somewhat understand why history always play out as it does. Human nature is what it is unfortunately.
Yes. Same types.. everytime.
I believe it to be mental illness .... and we need to not allow it. In "the family" and in "a Nation"... lets hope we learn to come together and make betted choices.
That will perhaps take longer than we can live.
I didn’t have a gun when I was attacked with a gun, although at the time I owned several firearms. I certainly did not want to get into a gun battle with my ex-husband. We would have both lost. As it stands we are both alive and happily living our lives… apart of course. I’m a woman.
I hope to not get into such with mine. Though he isn't the trigger happy kind being more rational than I am
Let’s pray and hope you don’t either. A miracle saved me. Literally ✨
That's good.
I don't think, hopefully, it will happen.
But thank you for your concern.
I was a police officer for 30 years, and a soldier for 23. You’re absolutely correct in your assessment.
Great piece. I’ve geeked out on the statistics around gun deaths in the US and basically come to the same conclusions. If we can figure out how to stop middle-aged white guys from killing themselves, and young black guys from killing each other, we’d be Norway.
Not going to pretend there’s any kind of law you can pass to make those things happen though.
Wellll, if the USA expelled everyone who isn't Norwegian, we'd be Norway. Somewhat impractical, but this is the internet.
I grew up in gun country, southern Oregon farming, ranching and hunting locale, Air Force military base on the outskirts of town. I grew up seeing shotguns in racks in the back windows of pickup trucks. I do not recall hearing about rampant disarray with people "going off" with a firearm. That seems to have accelerated in last few decades . The more culture comes apart, the more this intensifies. Coleman, you have a point of view that is raw and blunt and comes from harsh realities. Our nation is in deep trouble. Your searing insights are warrior all the way. You are needed and appreciated here.
Guns and Abortion. Problems without solutions. Best you can do in my opinion, is live the proper way for your local. If you live in Baltimore, you absolutely need a gun. If you live on a farm, you absolutely need a gun. If you live in suburbia there’s a chance you don’t, but maybe you will.
I err on the side of Freedom.
“You don’t care about people. You care about you.” 👌
Since you mentioned Australia... people here make a big deal about the decline in mass shooting events since we brought the laws in, and decline in homicides overall. Unfortunately it's not that simple.
Homicides were already declining before then, and ones involving firearms were already a small fraction of them. The big drops happened a bit after 2000. But that was three things. Coleman will know better than most, but some of the readership it mightn't be clear to, but: most violent crime is carried out by dumb young blokes.
A bit after 2000, we got involved in a couple of pointless losing foreign conflicts. This gave a lot of dumb young blokes something to do.
We also had a mining boom, and needed a lot of workers to go somewhere remote, fly in, earn lots of money, fly back out, gamble, drink and whore it away, then fly back in again. This gave a lot of dumb young blokes something to do.
Lastly, our birth rate dropped, so there were fewer native-born dumb young blokes. We could have imported some, but being a country with no land borders with anyone else, we were able to focus on immigration on skilled and business migrants - not that young, and not usually dumb.
So the firearms laws were neither here nor there on the changes in homicides here in Australia.
However, what did see a big change was male suicides. While females have higher rates of attempted suicide, males have higher rates of actual suicide - because they tend to use more violent means. If you take a bunch of pills someone might find you and pump your stomach before you perish, if you eat a bullet there's not much anyone can do for you. And of course, while pills, hanging and other methods take some planning and are less certain, a firearm allows some spontaneity and certainty in the event.
Nobody's that interested in male suicide rates, though, so they tend not to talk about that as a benefit of tight firearms laws.
I don't think the law changes we had in the 1990s in Australia were bad, overall. But like Coleman I don't think they'd be practical in Australia. And even if they were, I wouldn't expect them to have a dramatic effect on violent crime - but they might have an effect on male suicide.
Demographically, the US has proportionally more young blokes than most Western countries, and more dumb ones. And it keeps importing more. So you'd need to do things like improve education (omg libruls!) and close the borders (omg kunsuhrvatifs!), which seems unlikely to happen.
THAT should be turned into an article.
People are more interested in the fight than a solution
It would be helpful for the statistics types to parse out suicide by gun from homicide by gun in telling the story of gun violence in the US.
Check out Handwaving Freakoutery on Substack. Loads of data.
Point made and taken!
Solutions, mean prevention, which means actually paying attention.
Why,
That is the actual question.
How is known, where is known,
Why is the question no one wants to address.
Follow the money.
Who profits from the status quo?
Why is it tolerated?
What is the cause?
It is not just poverty.
It is not just availability.
Maybe the problem starts with us.
We won't address the issue so long as we won't ask the questions honestly.
It's easier to blame, and pretend it's the "bad guy" than it is to get involved and figure it out.
If you're out of the pen, you should be legally allowed to arm yourself with whatever arms you choose to use for the defense of your life, liberty, property, and anyone you might think is worth defending.
Yep in Florida anyhow.
In this universe.
I've thought for a long time that a gun, like a cell phone, or a hammer, or a toothbrush is simply a tool.
HOW it's used depends on the mental/emotional health & intentions of the person holding it.
Hence why we look at the motivations rather than the means
100%. It's where the cause and the cure live.
I do believe our 'bandaid' addicted culture is engineered to war over the talking points of every frickin issue as a way to divide us and spin us in circles, rather than to ever effect real change. I, like you, don't waste my time in the "duality trap". Life's too short. I have things to create and people to love. :)
“Mr. Burton?”
“Listen, those guys were still alive when I left.”
“We’re not here to arrest you.”
Speaking of toothbrushes.
Movie reference?
People been killing people with whatever is at hand for a very long time. You can't solve a people problem by regulating things.
We've been tricked into thinking more regulation fixes everything!
Fixing ourselves is the only answer that supports our birthright of and access to sovereignty, agency, prosperity, and well-being.
But a healthy society can regulate people. Warranty not included, your outcome may differ.
Society IS people. The health and quality of society (pie) is determined by the health of the individuals (ingredients) that comprise it. We can only control ourselves, so it's up to each one of us to mature and evolve into healthy & functioning members of a society. The attempts at controlling how other people operate is an old paradigm that needs to die. It's time to do the heavy-lifting of adopting personal responsibility.
In a healthy society, people regulate themselves. That is the foundation of self government.
Absolutely. I believe we've been raised to be dependent on centralized institutions seeking power, exploiting us for our energy as 'Human Resources". For generations, we've been infantilized and stunted. Those days are over. I'm taking back the reins! ;)
Well said! They are treating the symptom and not the cause. I think that's the expression. Virtue signaling on both sides. Thank you for that very enlightening post! Sabrinalabow.substack.com
I totally agree with your assessment of the problem, well done! Also thanks for admitting you don’t have the answer. I don’t either. Honestly, I’m center left, if you want to categorize me, and I want to buy a couple of guns and learn to shoot just to have a chance to defend myself and family if things go south when all the angry MFs who already have all the guns you mentioned lose their minds. Problem is all the shootings ranges around here have huge Trump displays and I just want learn how to shoot not deal with that shit. Again, thanks for your perspective.
What particular shit is it that you can’t abide, to learn to shoot? I guess you will probably find is that the left leaning progressives aren’t going to own gun ranges. I know,crazy, right? So in order to learn, you might lose your confirmation bias, and maybe learn from some folks that are comfortable and used to firearms,regardless their “ shit” . And you might find ( I know this part is scary) that those people you assume are not your kind, ,might not be as whacked as you’ve been trained to think. Just sayin.
Go to range
Get recruited
That’s how we roll
If you can't find a serious range offering lessons, you aren't looking very hard. Don't be a snowflake, get it done.
Very wise.
Pretty true. Not angry!
WIDELY shared and much appreciated, friend. An epic takedown of the "both sides" bullshit we're spoon fed on the daily.
Exactly right.