High Gas Prices Cause Parents To Murder Children

Murderous impulses abound these days. In Houston, children seem to be particularly vulnerable to their parent's frustration. It's a new phenomenon, really, child abuse, and the local government officials are grasping for reasons what has so recently gone horribly wrong. The Houston Chronicle's Dane Schiller reports:

With word Saturday that yet another parent was implicated in an attack on his children — police say he led them to the partially burned bodies — there was a feeling that something is horribly wrong with some families in the Greater Houston metropolitan area.

"Whether it is high gas prices or people not happy with their jobs or whatever, we have got a lot of anger and violence in our society, way too much, particularly family violence," Houston Councilman Peter Brown said.

Later, another expert gives his explanation:

Still, Klineberg said, they speak to growing stress for families, including the challenge of making ends meet.

"It is tough out there. People snap," he said. "And when you have 6 million people, one or two are going to snap in a bad way."

A few years ago, Andrea Yates drowned her kids in a bathtub. The gas prices were a moderate sub $2.00/gallon. Houston didn't want for violence in 2005 and gas prices were fantastic.

Houston's unemployment rate was higher in 2006 than it is now, so murders should be lower now. And maybe they are. You won't find this out from the local press, though, because it doesn't fit the narrative. And what is the narrative? The economy is horrible. Life is horrible. Gas prices are high, oil companies are bad and that's horrible.

Oh wait, when looking at the numbers, though, murders were up in 2006, but it wasn't unemployment, it was the fine folks from New Orleans. As those yahoos got put in the clink, the murder rate declined in 2007. And looky here:

HPD officials say that the City of Houston has recorded the fewest numbers of murders for the first quarter of this year since 2005.

The unofficial numbers show 78 murders were recorded through the first three months of this year.nThere were 88 murders for the same period in 2007. That’s an 11.3 percent decrease.

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the decline shows that the department’s targeted crime initiatives and overtime programs throughout the city are paying off. “While murders are nearly impossible crimes to predict and prevent, we do feel our overtime programs in place, including those officers assigned to our Crime Reduction Unit, can impact crimes that could escalate to murder,” said Chief Hurtt.

Wow, those are dramatic numbers and not at all the impression one gets from reading something like Dan Schiller put together. The notion that there are always going to be nutso crazies killing their kids doesn't occur to these people. What occurs to them is that it's politically expedient to exploit a child's horrific death at the hands of a parent and blame......the latest trend.

Whether it be Twinkies (really depression) or oil or the economy or global warming or fill-in-the-blank excuse, according to Leftists no one is responsible for his murderous impulses and it's always worse Right Now! because it fits the latest trendy, alarmist call to action. It's stupid. I hope no one is paying attention to them.

Oh wait, they're not.

H/T Rorschach

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Mean Streets of Cleveland

Marines as targets.....in America.

Guns Save Lives II

It's the same old story being replayed: Disaffected youth takes revenge on helpless strangers.. The only guy armed is the bad-guy in "gun-free zones". I haven't posted about this current incident, not because I'm desensitized to the trauma these events cause, but because I'm sick of them.

Let people defend themselves.

People need to stop living this pie-in-the-sky notion that the guns are the problem. Last week a psychologist got hacked to death with a machete. Shall we ban knives? Broken bottles? Shards of glass? Box cutters? Nail files? Or, if you saw Natural Born Killers, a lipstick case.

The solution is to meet brute force with brute force. Anything less means the deaths of innocents. This has to stop.

More thoughts here and here.

USA Today Editorial: Be Helpless

You know why I like Blogs more than Newspapers? Because everyone signs their name. A person has to own their opinion stupid or not. That point was driven home again today when the Editorial board of the USA Today wrote this:

Gun control laws have had a limited impact, and the pet proposal of the gun lobby — letting people carry concealed weapons — is a nonsensical answer. Even with more people packing heat, the likelihood of such a person being at the scene of a spree shooting is exceedingly low. (The woman who ended the incident at the Colorado Springs church was a congregant and former cop who volunteered as part of the church's security program.)

With more and more people carrying weapons in public, no matter how well-intentioned, the risk of accidental shootings and additional violence rises. Security on campuses, shopping malls, airports, churches and other public places is best left to professionals.

The best way forward is to keep at the imperfect but important fixes that can eventually make these shootings less murderous and more rare: Ensuring that people with a history of mental illness aren't able to buy guns; taking disturbed young people seriously and getting them counseling; and reinstating the lapsed ban on assault weapons, despite the opposition of the gun lobby.

A few thoughts:

1. No data to support any opinion
2. No name to attach the stupid opinion

So, counseling and assault weapons ban will stop these attacks. Really? And people carrying concealed hand guns won't be able to be there at the crime. Really?

Support your opinion Editorial Board. It's call facts. If you can find data to support your stupid opinion, maybe readers can take the opinion seriously.

Murder In The Least--Update

Has the rash of random violence overwhelmed a rational person's ability to integrate the evil? Aaron Hanscom writes an excellent commentary detailing examples of young people refusing to use condemning language for everything from Nazism to the Virginia Tech murderer (his name shall not be written) who killed 32 people in one day. Glenn Reynold's asks, "Is murder a victimless crime?" Even young people who should clearly know better get it wrong:

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

There are whose answer to the world's evil is to simply pretend it doesn't involve them. It is a supremely selfish perspective and an unthinking one. Some other acquaintances cannot or will not concede that evil exists.

How convenient! If evil doesn't exist, then there is no reason to fight injustice or wrong. It's really a perfect world view. It requires nothing of the believer and offers absolution for cowardice.

Changing the terms, defining down makes a society where no heinous action is condemned and may even be extolled:

Apparently murder isn’t even enough to retire the usage of the diminutive form of the murderer’s name. In fact, the reporter also referred to Hawkins as “Robby” when asking the friend questions like “What are you thinking about now that you know that Robby was involved in this shooting?” (The word “commit” can’t be used by the nonjudgmental.) It’s hard to disagree with talk show host Dennis Prager when he makes the case that such rhetoric is symbolic of society’s inability to make moral condemnations. But aren’t some crimes so horrific that everyone should abhor them?

The answer to the last question is "no". To abhor would be to judge and that would be wrong. The murderer simply acted the way he did because it made sense to him at the time. Our job is to understand his motivation so we can help little future murderers choose more helpful behavior.

Just when I think America is more cohesive than the media would have us believe, an article like this comes out. The divide in America may indeed be moral. Will every one of these relativistic people have to have a friend or family member raped, killed or dismembered to know evil exists? Or will they stay in the soft comfort of amorality even then?

Update: It occurs to me that the reason people deny evil exists is based in narcissism. These people don't want anyone telling them that what they're doing is morally repugnant or wrong, so they refuse to condemn any behavior no matter how heinous. The guiltless murder is all about them. This short-circuits empathy. It short-circuits the impulse for justice.

This doesn't bode well for the future. Wars started to end justice or for self-preservation will be forgone in favor of comfort food, entertainment and whatever self-centered pursuit is trendy.

The future won't be good men doing nothing. The future will be filled with amoral men doing nothing. There will just be a sliding scale of bad.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." [Edmund Burke]

We need a more than a few good men.

The Death Penalty: Data Backs Common Sense

You know how everyone intuitively understands that the death penalty stops some (not all) criminals? Among friends, I've had discussions where people wonder why anyone would commit a murder in Texas. Criminals seem absolutely terrified of being extradited to Texas for good reason. In Texas, they get killed, good and dead.

You know how all the pointy heads said that the death penalty isn't a deterrent it's just society's blood-thirsty need for vengeance? And you know how you thought to yourself, whatever, that scum-sucking psycho murderer rapist has zero chance of hurting anyone else and maybe some other scum will think twice.

Turns out, conventional wisdom was right.

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”

I know. Shocking. But still, it's nice to have data back up common sense.

Madeleine McCann the New Jon Benet?

The Kate McCann mother of missing British girl Madeleine McCann was named a suspect. McCann's husband Gerry vigorously denies this, as do their friends. Is this another example of a highly intelligent mother who made a mistake and now covers it up, ala Patsy Ramsey? Time will tell. Or maybe it won't.

And Some Parents Are Horrible

And they always say things like this:

Joy Miller says the two young women are NOT bandits. In her words, "They're little girls that made a bad choice."

And this:

CNN reported this morning that the mother of the two young children, Shattoria Russell, was sleeping in the next room with a toothache. While she expressed disapproval of what the two men did, she said she didn’t think they should have to do hard time.

However, Bruce Ure, director of public safety for the city of Watauga, Texas, said the tape clearly showed that this wasn’t the first time the boys had smoked marijuana.

Mr. McCoy’s grandmother, Shirley Russell, told The A.P. “I’m very upset about it. I didn’t raise them like that, and they know I didn’t raise them like that,” she said.

And, no, they're never, ever raised this way. It's always a mystery how these things happen.

Iran: What the Heck is Happening?

Gateway Pundit reports weird explosions, torture (the real kind) of innocents and hangings in Iran. Say it isn't so! Iran is so progressive and whatnot. And forget "engagement" with these killers, Condi's "got her groove back" so no more Ms. Nice Gal. Bah!

And in other news, he contrasts and compares Murder Rates between Iraqi and U.S. cities. New Orleans remnant residents, as usual, are managing to kill the last few dimwits willing to live in that below-sea level cesspool.

Baby Killer, Jessica Coleman, Lauded

I didn't see this anywhere. Gina Cobb posted on it before going on her vacation. Never had heard of this girl. She stabbed her baby en utero, then when she birthed the baby she stabbed it again and "dropped it", it died and she gave the dead body to her boyfriend to dispose.

The delightful Ms. Coleman was on Oprah. Ahhh, that's why I didn't know about her. Don't watch TV and haven't seen Oprah in years. Gina says that, "Coleman is now being portrayed as a likeable figure with lessons to teach other young girls. "

Nice.

And partial birth abortion comes to the SCOTUS. Just think, this girl could have done it all legally.

Personal responsibility, such a quaint, old-fashioned notion.

America: Home of the Depraved

Can we concede one point to the Jihadists? Can we at least acknowledge that that the reason the notion that America is a moral cesspool plays around the world is because America, has become, in fact, a moral cesspool?

The news yesterday horrified me. Horror wouldn't seem possible after the past few years. Society has seemed to be in a determined death spiral while technology has taken the world to almost inconceivable heights at the very same time. What strange times we live in.

Yesterday these are just a few of the things that happened:

• An angry man executed girls for being girls and then killed himself.
• A nurse admitted to killing ten patients. A woman serial killer.
• A United States Senator admitted to lewd letters to children, preying on them, and finally, to being gay.... or is he a pedophile? Congress is an utterly despicable place.
• Lawyers for whacko John Mark Karr are trying to get child porn charges dropped.
• Each day in the United States 4,000 babies are aborted. 95% are as result of failure of birth control or failure to use birth control. And now women are proud, proud of their selfish decision.
  

One day, so much pain, suffering, grief and misery at the hands of the evil and hopeless. To be honest, I'm sick of psychoanalyzing the cause of all these societal ills. Obviously, some need was not met in these people's lives, they travelled to a place where their disgusting behavior became justified and "made sense" to them.

For every one person who choses the easy way, who gives in to his or her base desires and acts upon them, there are hundreds who have the urge and fight it and choose do the right thing--or at least not the harmful thing.

Name it. It is time to name it.

America has become a haven for evil. When a Jihadist wants to justify his own murderous, depraved, impotent rage, all he has to do is turn on the TV. Am I saying that one evil turn deserves another? No. I'm just saying that it would be easier to take the moral high ground if we actually occupied moral ground.

Is this the freedom we have our soldiers fighting for? Freedom to see pornography, to be a pedophile, to have an abortion as the side effect to selfish sex? Noble, that.

That a whole chunk of America ennobles these things speaks volumes as to how far we have fallen as a society. It is laughable that the Constitutional founders fought for these "rights". Please.

And I'm tired of hearing about the "gun problem". How about the penis problem? How about the vagina problem? Do those innanimate objects need to be cut out because they lead their owners to impossibly stupid acts? People are making these decisions. The killer of the girls could have easily achieved his ends with a sharp steak knife. The gun was just more efficient.

There is only one solution to this systemic illness and it is spiritual, not psychotherapeutic. By the way, I'm all for the reflection and desire to unwind the tied up knots. Therapy can help with that. Therapy cannot give a person the moral foundation and belief framework where certain things are out of bounds.

What we see in America is not too much God (and yes, there are those that believe this), but a lack of God. Repentence, facing yourself and asking forgiveness for sin (sin!) and changing, choosing different and most of all, believing that you are still loved by God in spite of the fact that you think and act in horrible ways will change America one person at a time.

In that hopeless space where forgiveness is impossible truly horrible things happen. When people submit to the hopeless, discouraged, devient voice within, they do it because they believe there is no power greater to stop so awful an urge. They believe that their immediate need being met supercedes the deprivation of the horrible act in deference to a more pressing need--a need to be filled up with the True Source, with Love, with a Love that comes only from God.

The story of redemption is powerful. Our cynical secular culture scoffs at such ideas. We don't want to believe that something so simple as submitting our tortured soul to God and to turn away from the old way and toward the Light can truly make a difference. Only unredeemed people scoff.

When people know their Bible, when they read of the murderers of innocents, the theives, the prostitutes who changed who turn from a hopeless, selfish life to a life filled with hope and love, they believe maybe there is a chance for me, too. God loved them. Maybe God loves me.

Albert Einstein said that the absence of light is darkness. The cure for the absence of good is God. We must fill our souls with God and give no place for the Devil.

The Devil has too much room these days.

Update: Cal Thomas says, "What scandal?" He further notes:

Right? Normal? Detestable? People who mock such notions ask, “According to whom?” Public schools, popular culture and editorialists at major newspapers have hammered into us this aversion to trans-generational morality. They proclaim that one person’s concept and definition of “right” is as valid as another person’s and to assert that there is only one right, one normal and one course is to be “judgmental” or “bigoted,” attitudes modernity considers a worse “sin” than the behavior that used to be called sinful.

Our sophisticated age demands we not recoil at aberrant behavior, or call it abhorrent. The anti-moral wrecking ball has caused enough damage to our foundations that what remains of a structure is no longer recognizable. NBC edits positive references to God before broadcasting “Veggie Tales,” but refuses to edit Madonna’s blasphemous depiction of herself on a cross. These decisions are made by the network’s “standards and practices” office, which mocks the words because clearly there remain few standards to which practices may be conformed.

Murtha considering taking a bribe....

John Hawkins examines mainstream Liberal thought. Please consider this talk occurring even twenty years ago. Society has changed....

Colorado Killer Molested Girls

What makes a person snap and molest and murder? Why are men more likely than women to sexually assault as a means of violence?

This man somehow managed to justify his actions. He had planned this event and executed it to frightening perfection. Dr. Helen posits that more boys and then men, need more emotional support to head off these types of problems.

My experience has been that boys, especially young boys, are particularily fragile. With less vocabulary and a narrower emotional range, if traumas or difficulties aren't adequately supported--mostly by a loving, patient mother (we're talking before three here)--and helped to interpret these traumas, they are like a rudderless boat at sea. If, as the boy grows, he doesn't have a firm, loving father guiding him through the physically and hormonally rocky time of adolescence into adulthood, the boy is at even higher risk.

Boys seem to be more fragile emotionally and more prone to lethal long-term damage if left untended. That is not to excuse this nutjob or blame his mother and father. For every one mismanaged boy, ten end up okay. But those ten usually have someone intervene along the way.

There was debate at Dr. Helen's about it "taking a village". Group dynamics tend to dilute responsibility. There is already an undeclared war between parents and teachers, as it is, with each accussing the other of malfeasence.

One thing I notice, is that with the labelling that is so prevalent now, with teachers encouraging parents to medicate boys who don't adequately mold and with parents relieved to externalize their troubled chld's problem, challenging children are ironically, getting less support. Rather than being taught self-management skills, rather than having someone help them burn the anger and energy physically some boys are on a slow burn.

All this is not to say that girls don't have their own issues these days--not the least of which is the ever-present fear of being victimized by one of these hostile, women-hating men. The problem for women is that while a few men prepetrate these crimes, all women fear the few men. A woman is most likely to be victimized at home, by someone she knows, but high profile cases like this remind women that supposedly safe places like a High School aren't safe sometimes. When are those times? How does a girl defend herself against a crime when the problem is that she was picked because she has blonde hair and blue eyes?

It ends up being a vicious circle, doesn't it? A messed up boy grows up and commits murder and mayhem. The hand that rocked the cradle rules this world, to an extent. And then, the boy takes out his rage on other women. Possible solution? Support mothers while they mothering their young kids (don't throw them money--give in-home parenting support, if necessary) and intervene with boys once they are schooled. Social skills training would help all children and help their education, too.

I know. I know. The nanny state rears it's ugly head. Would things be better if all welfare was pulled, so women would be forced to marry the doofus they have sex with? Would any of this prevent psychos like the Colorado murderer? Or must women just learn to live with the possibility of being a victim?