Ideology and Police Work

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

 

Something we should keep in mind in the discussion about the Buffalo massacre: Ideology is next to useless when it comes to predicting and preventing acts of terrorism.

 

It is important and useful to understand terrorist ideologies, and it is necessary to refute erroneous and wicked ideas. Of course, none of that is what is happening in the discussion about “replacement theory” and Buffalo. What Democrats are doing is attempting to use Buffalo to discredit anybody who believes that we have too much immigration. Never mind that “people who believe we have too much immigration” included Bernie Sanders until about five minutes ago — the god of electoral politics is a jealous god.

 

There are many immigration hawks who are not much interested in “replacement”; there are many immigration hawks who worry specifically about high levels of immigration changing the social and political character of the country, something that has happened in the past — which is what most “replacement” talk amounts to — who are not Jew-hating kooks on 4chan. But, here’s the thing: There are millions of impenitent racists, conspiracy loons, and Jew-hating kooks in these United States — and very few of them carry out acts of dramatic public violence.

 

What might have stopped the massacre in Buffalo was taking seriously the words and deeds of the shooter, a maladjusted loser who showed up at school wearing a hazmat suit and announced that his post-graduation plans were to carry out a murder-suicide — which is why he already was on the radar of both law enforcement and mental-health professionals.

 

The obvious parallel case is Islamist terrorism. There are about 1.8 billion Muslims in the world; many of them take a very strong view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or other political and cultural issues, but, among those who do, very few subscribe to violent political Islam; but, even among those who do subscribe to the Salafi-jihadist ideology or another similar worldview, there are very, very few who are inclined to actually carry out acts of dramatic public violence.

 

Understanding ideology is useful in thinking through a long-term clash of civilizations or in diagnosis a particular cancer in domestic politics, but it is not very useful when it comes to preventing incidents such as the one in Buffalo. For that sort of thing, we have to rely on ordinary police work (think of how many such killers already were familiar to police long before their infamies) and effective institutions, particularly public schools and mental-health agencies. And we don’t have that.

 

I have written this 1,000 times, but, here’s 1,001: One of the reasons we have so many firearms being used in crimes in these United States is the fact that 90 percent of our firearms-control resources are directed at federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them — a group of people with an extremely low incidence of criminality — while actual gun crimes (illegal possession, straw buying, etc.) routinely go unprosecuted, sometimes as a matter of publicly stated official policy. Most of the criminal shootings in this country are utterly predictable, being in most cases the work of young men with prior criminal records including, in many cases, prior arrests on weapons charges.

 

But you aren’t going to get yourself elected as a Democratic senator talking about that, because young white progressives who vote and donate do not care what happens to poor black people in Chicago and Philadelphia — they care about Tucker Carlson.

 

Which is why Democrats are talking about Tucker Carlson instead of the fact that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois routinely refuses to prosecute ordinary straw-buyer cases. One of these things matters and, with all due respect for Tucker Carlson, one of them really doesn’t matter very much at all.