Guns don't kill people; blacks do

I could almost agree with today's Wente: random murders happen, and they tend to set off moral panics way out of proportion to the actual loss of life.

But suppose Kimveer Gill had been black or Muslim. Does anyone believe Wente would have written a just-stay-calm column like today's?

Compare today's piece with Wente's reaction to the Boxing Day shooting, where the shooters were black. She waxed eloquent on Jamaica's "violent culture", claimed flatly that "80-percent or more of the city's gun crime is Jamaica-related" and went on to blame that old punching bag, gangsta rap music.

Margaret Wente's grand sociological theory: gangsta rap causes crime! Somehow blaming actual weapons for crime is a "moral panic", but blaming CD players and radios is not. Do the new iPods fire bullets too?

Millions of people listen to rap, and they don't start shooting people, but in a December 2005 column, Wente had an answer for that too. It's okay for whites to listen to rap, she allows; they're civilized at heart and just listen to violent lyrics to blow off steam. But black people are different; apparently their culture is so dysfunctional that merely listening to 50 Cent music turns them into murderers. Wente quoted two American black conservatives in support of this point, but that doesn't make it any less offensive. Or any less nonsensical.

(Wente has a particular animus for 50 Cent; she once freaked out merely because he sang about oral sex.)

The bottom line: moral panics are perfectly fine with Wente as long as they target darker-skinned people, but let the panickers move to the ideological left, and she gets on her high horse and preaches about "logic".

Hypocrite.