The Oklahoma Story
Ben Stein
No, Piers, it’s not about guns.
Tuesday
So, this will be very short. Not at all sweet.
A couple of days ago, a white college baseball star from Australia, Christopher Lane, was running for exercise along a rural road in Oklahoma, my wife’s home state. He was attending college there. As he passed by three black teenagers, they decided it would be fun to kill him. They drove up behind him, shot him three times and he was dead.
They apparently laughed about it and one of them posted an online comment about their exploit — shooting an unarmed man in the back and killing him — and how cool that was.
They were quickly arrested and two are now charged with murder, the third as an accessory to murder. They will be tried as adults but because their ages are 16, 17, and 18, they cannot get the death penalty in Oklahoma.
My Internet in box is burning up with furious e-mails about this horrible crime. It’s all over the cable news. I just saw Piers Morgan, the world’s most predictable person, interview several people about the murder.
The comments by Piers Morgan and his guests are — again, predictably — about how this is a story about too many guns in the USA. But, of course, as everyone who is not in the MSM knows, this is not about guns. It’s about race. It’s about the appalling level of gun violence perpetrated by black young men. The people who make the U.S. homicide rate the worst in the world are not hunters and target shooters in Idaho or Minnesota. They are totally confused, absolutely immoral black kids who have grown up with the complete absence of a sense of right and wrong.
This is a part of the breakdown of the black youth in America. It has zero to do with the Second Amendment. It is pitiful that the MSM is so cowardly that they refuse to tell the truth about gun death in the U.S.: it is a problem of race, overwhelmingly. No one dare say it, but it’s true.
Now, will Mr. Obama get on TV and say that Chris Lane could have been his son or anyone’s son, that the real race problem in this country is not racism against blacks, but an astounding epidemic of violence among blacks, especially black youth? Will the media superstars start talking about the sickening worship of violence in the rap culture? Will anyone ever tell the truth again? Or is the fear of even a hint of an accusation of racism going to make us keep our blinders on?
There are virtually no murders of blacks by whites (not none — just very few). There are thousands of murders of blacks by blacks each year, far more in one year than the Ku Klux Klan ever did. Will anyone ever tell the truth again? Yes, Pat Buchanan will. But anyone else?
And can a society which lies to itself about its most basic problems survive? This is a crisis. Absent parents. The gang control of thought. The scourge of drugs. These have created a catastrophe for the black community. That is an immense part of the youth of this nation. Occasionally the flood jumps its bounds, goes over the river banks, and kills a white person — and then it’s new — but we blame it on guns. Our media and our leaders just cannot tell the truth.
We really are doomed in so many ways it’s blood curdling. I think I’ll just stay here in North Idaho.