Another murder in Minneapolis:
In a burst of violence in a busy area of downtown Minneapolis, a gunman fired into a crowd late Friday night and killed Alan D. Reitter, 31, of Minnetonka, who had been out with a group of friends, authorities said. Police and community leaders said the shooting of Reitter near the Block E entertainment complex was a senseless act, and the death raised questions about safety downtown and led to calls for renewed efforts to stop gun violence in the city….
The Block E scene was especially crowded, with dozens of people on the street Friday night, according to workers and visitors. Many people, including a large number of teens and young adults, were there to see an opening night show of “ATL,” a coming-of-age movie about four teenagers in working-class Atlanta, said Ron Edwards, a member of the Police Community Relations Council (PCRC) and a longtime activist.
He went to a 5 p.m. showing of the movie. “It wasn’t the movie” that led to the night’s violence, Edwards said, noting that the movie had a positive message about resisting the temptations of the streets.
I always enjoy how the media is careful to let you know the race of the parties involved without informing you directly. A movie about the ATL, I wonder what color the teenagers interested in that could possibly be?
I’ve been out and about in downtown Minneapolis exactly once in the last four years. (I’m not counting when you drive to the Hilton, park in the parking ramp, have dinner at Manny’s and then go home.) That was last July, when Spacebunny, The Perfect Aryan Male and I hit one of the posh We Wish We Were in New York restaurants that was so desperate to convince you it was somewhere that wasn’t Minneapolis that all of the windows were covered.
After dinner, we walked outside and saw that apparently the restaurateurs had gotten their wish and Block E had been magically transported to Atlanta. Now, keep in mind that I spent many an evening in downtown Minneapolis and the Warehouse District, in fact, that’s where I first met Spacebunny. The difference was striking, as a downtown crowd that had once been 98 percent white was now 60 percent black.
I gave TPAM a commiserating pat on the shoulder – he owns a downtown condo – and hoped that he would enjoy his declining property values. I also asked him if they’d seen a big jump in crime yet, he shook his head, but as we walked past the skinny, exuberant would-be thugz and overfed, underdressed would-be hoz, he admitted that he didn’t think it would be long before the inevitable crime wave got rolling. We stopped in for a drink at the place where Spacebunny and I met, it caters to twenty and thirty-something professionals and needless to say, it was all but empty.
And while neither the summer nor the expected crime wave is yet upon us, it wouldn’t surprise me if we soon began to see a revival of the Murderopolis headlines that featured so prominently in the Star & Sickle back in the mid-eighties. The DFL can embrace diversity all it likes, but if it wants to fight suburban sprawl and urban decay, turning the downtown entertainment district into an Atlanta ghetto strikes me as a particularly backwards way of going about it.
As economist Stephen Levitt shows in Freakonomics, aborting black children has proven to be the best defense against crime. I am, as every reader knows, opposed to all abortion for any reason, (except, of course, the termination of half-human demon babies of the sort seen in the Belgariad), but it serves no one, least of all the black community, to pretend that the fatherlessness and other social pathologies of that community do not exist or affect anyone else. Blacks themselves know it very well; the first thing the black upper middle class does is attempt to disassociate itself geographically from their socially dysfunctional relatives.
The right to free association, in other words, discriminate on the basis of color or anything else you may happen to choose, is guaranteed in the Constitution. Congress has no power to dicatate who you will hire, fire or live next to, regardless of what illegitimate chest-beating in which it may engage. Until Americans reclaim that right, diversity will be used as a wedge to divide and conquer them.
I don’t have an answer, except to maximize individual freedom with the goal of keeping ghetto pathologies in the ghetto. Money is no solution, as forty-plus years of the failed Great Society has proved. Public education is a bad joke. Open carry laws are good, but there’s no defense against a social sickness that isn’t seeking anything except a buzz from random violence. Since segregation is preferred in every human culture, merely removing the structures of forced desegregation may suffice to bring about a more harmonious and peaceful co-existence.