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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Thoughts on Liberal Fecundity

Don Feder offers a study on the way in which liberals have created disaster scenario after disaster scenario in order to gain power and access to our pocketbooks.

One section that caught my eye was his commentary on hate crimes.

The National Epidemic of Hate Crimes – The late Sen. Edward Kennedy called hate crimes “domestic terrorism” – thereby suggesting that they were just as much a threat to our nation’s security as al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah and every jihad-preaching imam around the world. Neo-Nazis, Ku-Kluxers and freelance haters were roaming our streets looking for victims on which to inflict their vile animus. The alleged epidemic led to the passage last year of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which added “sexual orientation” to the category of protected classes.

Just how much of a hate-crimes crisis there is may be seen from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. (The FBI is required to compile statistics of so-called bias offenses.)

According to the UCR, in 2007, there were 16,929 murders and over 855,000 cases of aggravated assault in the United States.

There were also a grand total of 7,624 hate crimes of all kinds -- motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, whatever.

Of that number, 78% involved either intimidation (words alone), or simple assault (no serious injury occurred), which included pushing and shoving. In 2007, 9 murders were classified as hate crimes – which constituted .0005 % of total homicides. Your chances of being the victim of a hate crime – any hate crime – are comparable to being struck by lightening twice while bungee-jumping on Groundhog Day.


So hate-crime legislation was passed to stop 0.05% of homicides in the USA. That doesn't really seem worth it to me. (checking his maths it is 0.05% not 0.0005%)