When New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton came out swinging against New Orleans gun violence in the wake of defensive end Will Smith’s death, he was unwittingly criticizing the outgrowth of Democratic rule in the city.
But he did not call out Democrats by name for the gun violence that flourishes in cities they control — cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, and of course, New Orleans. Rather, he blamed the gun, an inanimate object that is readily accessible on the streets of the aforementioned cities because of the approach to law enforcement that goes hand-in-hand with Democratic oversight.
Think about it — Chicago has been run by Democrats for decades and the death toll is through the roof. Between January 1 and February 22, 2015, there were 47 murders in Chicago, but between January 1 and February 22, 2016, that figure rose over 100 percent. The Chicago Tribune reported “at least 95” persons had been murdered in the city by February 22 of this year.
More recently, in March, there was a 24-hour time frame in which 21 were shot, one was stabbed, and one was killed. And this is all happening in a city where Democrats have implemented a “violence tax” that raises the price of every gun and bullet sold at retail, have limited the number of gun stores and the locations of those stores, and have instituted what the New York Times describes as handgun restrictions that are so tight they allow city leaders to “get as close as they could get legally to a ban without a ban.”
And Chicago also has an “assault weapons” ban.
We see similar results in Baltimore, where similar gun controls rules exist, as well as in New York City and other Democrat-run cities.
Yet for all the failure of gun control — and in spite of all the empirical evidence that gun control empowers the criminal rather than the law-abiding citizen — New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton reacts to the shooting death of Will Smith by describing the push to own a gun for self-defense as “madness.” He went so far as to say, “I hate guns,” and that he hoped Smith’s death will lead to more laws on guns — which is the same approach Democrat-run cities have taken every time a crisis has presented an opportunity to further clamp down on the Second Amendment.
According to USA Today, Payton also criticized the lack of law enforcement in New Orleans, which he attributed to an outgrowth of the New Orleans Police Department being “overhauled” and “weakened significantly by reductions in staff and funding.” This is an observation that could be made in many Democrat-run cities, although Chicago, where the police department is in turmoil, and Baltimore, where city officials kept police at bay during the Freddie Gray riots, most quickly come to mind.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com
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