By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
OPINION: Four heavily armed gangsters formed a skirmish line of sorts outside of a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama’s popular entertainment district known as Five Points South Saturday night around 11 p.m., and then sprayed a large crowd with their illegally converted fully automatic 9mm handguns.
Four people were killed and 17 were wounded – at least four critically. Police later found more than 100 shell casings on the blood-drenched sidewalk.
Investigators determined it was a “targeted hit.” The shooters were after a specific person. The 20 innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire were not even a consideration. The gangsters, who police say were likely paid for the assassination, have not been caught.
This is not Birmingham’s only brush with extreme gang violence. In July, four people were shot and murdered and 10 were wounded in a shooting outside another nightclub. In February, four people were murdered while standing outside of a library.
Officials have offered a $100,000 reward for information about Saturday night’s shooting. Alabama lawmakers even sponsored a bill that would outlaw conversion switches, which turn a legal semi-automatic pistol into a machinegun, even though the switches are already heavily regulated under federal law – possession is punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.
One frustrated Birmingham Police officer told CNN the killings “have more to do with culture than they do criminality. We’re seeing far too many arguments being settled by bullets.”
Biden’s nonresponse
The Biden-Harris administration weaponized the ATF soon after taking office, but rather than siccing ATF agents on inner city gang members who are responsible for the majority of the shootings and murders in the country, the ATF was ordered to target law-abiding gun dealers and gun owners instead, most often for simple clerical errors or some minor violation of ATF’s everchanging rules.
Joe Biden has issued more than 40 anti-gun executive orders since becoming president, but not a single one does anything to yank guns from the hands of criminal street gang members.
The ATF claims it’s a participant in Project Safe Neighborhoods, a federal program designed “to reduce gun violence and other violent crime, and to make our neighborhoods safer for everyone.” However, most of the ATF’s investigations occur after-the-fact, after local law enforcement officers who are not afraid to confront armed gangsters make an arrest and discover an illegal conversion switch or some other violation of federal law.
To be clear, most of ATF’s highly touted arrests take place within the comfy confines of their field offices, not on the streets where it matters – where they should be deployed. After all, possession of stolen firearms, conversion switches and possession by a convicted felon are federal crimes and ATF’s responsibility.
Not Crips or Bloods
Rather than attacking gang violence head-on, the Biden-Harris administration cannot even say gang violence. They talk about groups of youths or at-risk teens. They demonize the gangsters’ tools but never the gangsters themselves. To do otherwise would be racist, they mistakenly believe. However, forcing law-abiding residents of the cities impacted by gang-violence to live trapped in their homes by crime is about as racist as it can get. This type of attitude is mimicked by the corporate media, who ignore the problem because they don’t want to offend anyone by citing an arrestee’s race or gang affiliation.
Today’s gangsters are not the Bloods and Crips or Folk and People law enforcement encountered during the 1980s and 1990s. While a few still claim some type of traditional gang affiliation, most are drug crews who are drawn together solely to make money rather than out of allegiance to a specific gang.
These crews are primarily armed with handguns, not the “assault weapons” the Biden-Harris administration would have you believe. They acquire their illegal handguns the old-fashioned way – either by stealing them or buying them from other criminals. The gangsters aren’t purchasing them at local gun shops, so cracking down on local gun dealers is a waste of resources, which would be better spent cracking down on actual gang members.
Add weak-willed, George Soros-funded prosecutors to mix – who are responsible for the catch-and-release seen in most major cities – and a revolving door of criminals and skyrocketing crime rates follow.
Why this matters
Gang violence impacts all of us. During prohibition, it led to the National Firearms Act of 1934 and its inane $200 stamps.
Gang interdiction is not rocket science, but it requires the type of leadership we have not seen at the federal level for quite some time. There are strategies that have proven effective, including RICO Act prosecutions, sentence enhancements for documented gang membership and mandatory minimums, such as Florida’s 10-20-Life law.
Every so-called gang expert will say we can never arrest our way out of the problem, which is partially true. Gangs are a community problem, and any solution must involve the community. However, before they can marshal community resources – such as families, educators and clergy – the killings must stop or at least slow down. This is where the federal government with its nearly unlimited resources could play a significant role, if gang interdiction ever becomes a federal priority.
Nowadays, while the Biden-Harris administration does not recognize gangs or gangsters, they’re quick to cite their bloody handiwork as one of the reasons for their constant infringements of our civil rights. In other words, the Biden-Harris administration uses gang violence as an excuse to crack down on legal gun ownership by law-abiding Americans.
This has happened before.
“To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless.” Lysander Spooner said that, an American abolitionist and essayist. Spooner died in 1887, but his words still ring true.
The next administration must target gang violence. It must become a federal law enforcement priority. It’s time to stop ignoring the killings.
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