My apologies to Mr. Pollack. I confused him for the other Parkland father Fred Guttenberg. Forgive my imperfect memory. I shot from the hip and hit the wrong target.
This should be an open letter to Mr. Guttenberg and every person like him who simultaneously calls for gun control, bail reform, closing the “school to prison pipeline,” and supports all other forms of Progressive justice reform.
I have not deleted or significantly rewritten this post because I was warned by Miguel against the appearance of memory holing posts.
I also stand by the principle of everything I said, only in a flash of anger confused two individuals and directed this at the wrong one.
This isn’t the first mistake I’ve made on this blog and it won’t be the last. This is a blog not a book, I don’t have layers of editors to catch my mistakes. I have you faithful readers calling me out in the comments. I do my best but I’m human and I err. I will apologize and take my lumps when I’m wrong.
My sincerest apologies to Mr. Pollack. Truly. Honestly. I’m sorry I got him mixed up with Fred Guttenberg. But other than who this letter was originally addressed to, I meant ever word of what I said.
A Twitter account that I follow re-Tweeted one of your Tweets.
This is heartbreaking.
I am a father, I have a son and a daughter. I know the feeling of worrying myself sick about them, I cannot begin to imagine the pain of losing one of them.
In your grief, you have turned to pushing gun control.
One of the attacks you, and people like you, levy against gun-rights advocates like myself is that we lack empathy.
You could not be more wrong. I have nothing but empathy for you and the parents like you who have lost children. The difference between you and me is how we apply our empathy.
We are both Jews. I go on Twitter and I see people attacking Jews in the streets. In Florida, the state I was born and raised in, a Jewish family was attacked and that attack was stopped by a good man with a gun. Own guns for sport and competition, but mostly for self-defense. There are millions of law-abiding citizens like myself who own literally hundreds of millions of guns and tens of millions of assault weapons* and never commit crimes with them. Nor will we ever commit crimes with them.
*I’m not going to haggle over a name, they want to call them assault weapons, I don’t care. A rose by any other name doesn’t change their Constitutionality.
But like you, I don’t want to see another innocent life lost.
So what do we do?
Well, the scumbag who killed your daughter was contacted more than 50 times by the feckless, useless, dickless Broward County Sheriff’s Office and didn’t do a damn thing.
Across America’s major cities, we are seeing a massive increase in violent crime and homicides. LA is up 73% in shootings. In New York City shootings are up 166% and homicides 73%. Portland is hitting record numbers of homicides. Chicago is at record shootings and near record-breaking homicides.
This has been blamed on the pandemic and lockdowns, but that’s not the case.
The single unifying cause of this crime wave is the same as the cause of your daughter’s death. Lax policing and prosecutions.
In every city showing an increase in violent crime, the police have reduced their presence. Sometimes it is caused by budget cuts, in other cases, it is police holding back out of fear of punishment for getting into violent confrontations with criminals. It is also a problem of prosecutors dropping or minimizing charges against violent criminals.
Cruz should have been in prison in an orange jumpsuit the day he shot your daughter but was sent into a diversionary PROMISE Program instead.
We have become a nation that is overly empathetic to violent, recidivist criminals.
Evil exists in this world. Bad people exist. They do bad things. In general, they start small and get incrementally worse.
The more society fails to hold them to account for the small crimes, the more their worsening ends with a stack of bodies.
My well of empathy for criminals has run dry and all that is coming up is the silt of rancor at the bottom.
I have reached a point where I want capital punishment to be cumulative, the way we had three-strikes laws. A person commits a violent crime, goes to jail, gets out, does it again, we come to the conclusion that said person is irredeemably evil and we end his cycle of recidivism with a gram of Fentanyl*.
* Fentanyl OD seems to be the perfect tool for lethal injection. It’s painless, the victim loses consciousness and stops breathing. We don’t have to worry about pharmaceutical companies not wanting to sell it to prisons because we’ve seized enough to OD hundreds of millions of people of high-purity Chinese made Fentanyl in drug stings. We could use seized Fentanyl in lethal injection and not give a penny to pharmaceutical companies.
It’s not the guns that are the problem, nor is it a lack of empathy of gun owners. It is an excess of empathy for evil criminals and a lack of enforcement of the law.
If you executed every recidivist violent criminal in the country, you could literally give guys like me machine guns and rocket launchers and the homicide rate would drop to zero. Really. The murder rate at Knob Creek continues to be nil.
If you really want to prevent what happened to your daughter from happening to another innocent child, stop going after the guns and demand that that school to prison pipeline be opened all the way and violent youthful offenders like Nikolas Cruz be thrown into a deep, dark pit for all eternity instead of being put into worthless diversionary programs.
Sincerely,
J. Kb.
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