This commentary is by John Orlando, a resident of Williston who has taught ethics and philosophy at several Vermont colleges, including St. Michael’s, UVM and Champlain College.
Violent crime has exploded in Burlington since the Progs defunded the police and told them that they could no longer stop vagrancy in 2020. Most people I know will no longer go downtown.
Sadly, neither the Progs nor the mayor will take responsibility for their mess, and keep blaming others as the situation worsens. They claim that gun control will fix the problem, but the facts show otherwise.
Studies using FBI data show that there is no correspondence between stricter gun laws and lower crime. States with the weakest gun laws, like Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, have the lowest violent crime, while states with the strongest laws, like New York, Illinois and Maryland, have the highest violent crime.
It is also shown that gun ownership does not lead to more crime. Canada has a higher rate of gun ownership than the U.S., but lower violent crime. Nearly every home in Switzerland and Israel has a military rifle in it, but they have far lower crime rates than the U.S.
So, what does contribute to crime? Why does the Bronx have a higher crime rate than a small town in New Hampshire if its gun laws are stricter?
The answers are obvious. According to the FBI, the variables affecting crime are:
- Population density and degree of urbanization.
- Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.
- Stability of the population with respect to residents’ mobility, commuting patterns and transient factors.
- Modes of transportation and highway system.
- Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
- Cultural factors and educational, recreational and religious characteristics.
- Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
- Climate.
- Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
- Administrative and investigative emphases of law enforcement.
- Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional, probational).
- Citizens’ attitudes toward crime.
- Crime reporting practices of the citizenry.
Bingo! Notice how gun control and gun ownership are not on the list, yet “Effective strength of law enforcement agencies,” “Stability of the population with respect to residents’ mobility, commuting patterns, and transient factors” and “Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional and probational)” are on the list.
These are precisely the causes that the Progs have undermined in Burlington.
“Defund the police” was a panic response that never made sense. It is akin to saying that because a schoolteacher killed a violent student in Minnesota, we should defund the Burlington schools. Plus, how is overfunding the cause of police violence? Wouldn’t defunding the police lead to more crime? In fact, most Blacks are against defunding the police for the same reason that everyone else is; they don’t want to be victims of crime either, yet they have paid the price for it.
Guns are the only tool where the tool itself is blamed for the actions of its user. We don’t blame the knife for a stabbing, and nobody blamed the car for the six innocent people murdered by the driver in Waukesha. If I am shot, I want the person who shot me to go to jail, not the gun. Yet this simple logic is beyond the Progs.
The facts from resources like the FBI demonstrate exactly what everyone in Vermont knows about the reason Burlington turned into a war zone in 2020. Anyone who has walked by City Hall Park knows, yet the city’s leadership refuses to take responsibility for the mess. They play the violin while Burlington burns, refusing to even look out their back window at City Hall Park.
Only when real leadership comes to Burlington will the city return to being a place where people want to live and visit.
