Wente Watch

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

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.

14 Comments:

  • Last time I checked in Toronto, about 100% of gun crimes were commited by Blacks so get in touch with reality.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 19, 2006 4:12 p.m.  

  • I agree with the comment above. The facts speak for themselves.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 20, 2006 10:15 a.m.  

  • you're a doorknob.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 20, 2006 10:41 a.m.  

  • As a subscriber to the Globe and Mail, I usually head directly to the last page of section A to read what Simpson, Martin etc have to say. I skim over what Wente has to say as her columns hold very little interest for me personally. I am just not interested in what she has to say on any topic.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 20, 2006 2:33 p.m.  

  • "you're a doorknob."

    September 20, 2006 10:41 AM

    Oh, well argued. Guess you're right, Black people don't commit any gun crime in Toronto.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 20, 2006 4:54 p.m.  

  • Your blog is SUCH a great read.

    What part of Toronto was anonymous number one doing their fact checking from? Holy falsehoods batman.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 22, 2006 1:53 p.m.  

  • The whole city actually. I saw the cover of the Toronto SUN with all the murder victims of last year, they were all Black except the Creba girl and a few others, it wasn't White guys that shot them.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 23, 2006 2:02 p.m.  

  • Actually, it's Black people with guns that kill people......

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 24, 2006 2:37 p.m.  

  • Yeah, I agree - Guns and Black people alone aren't to blame, it's Black people WITH guns that do all the killing.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 24, 2006 10:48 p.m.  

  • The world according to the cover of the Toronto Sun and it's obtuse readers - heaven help us

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 25, 2006 12:59 p.m.  

  • Yeah, the Toronto Sun is full of lies. Blacks don't shoot anyone in Toronto.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 25, 2006 2:43 p.m.  

  • Look, I'm not particularly a fan of Margaret Wente, but the fact is that Blacks are disproportionately involved in crime in Toronto and most of these Blacks are Jamaicans. Is it racist to say that? Well, maybe, but I was called a racist when I pointed out that Asians are less likely to commit crime than Whites are. So I don't think pointing out the obvious (that Jamaicans are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime in this city) should necessarily qualify a person as racist.

    Emilia Liz (emilializ@yahoo.ca)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at November 22, 2006 9:16 a.m.  

  • Sorry, let me rephrase my e-mail:
    emilia_e_murphy@yahoo.ca.

    Thank you.

    Emilia Liz

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at November 22, 2006 9:32 a.m.  

  • maybe they have all gone to the DARKSIDE....

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at May 03, 2008 1:09 a.m.  

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