BUCK: I want to talk to you now about another place where Democrats are really, really wrong, and it’s obvious, and it’s important that we get this right. But they’re gonna fight with everything they have, especially now because the midterms are coming up and the loss of power looms. They’ll fight with everything they have to make sure that what is obvious — or should be obvious — is hidden from the public, is somehow made hazy, made a little bit opaque. “What’s really going on?

“Why is crime so bad in so many places across the country?” I mentioned briefly last week, there’s a big Wall Street Journal piece on the major rise in violent crime nationwide statistically in rural parts of the country. So, places that hadn’t seen a homicide in a couple years all of a sudden have two or three homicides. You say, “Well, that’s not a lot of murders in the grand scheme of how many we see nationwide.”

Well, if you have zero and now you got two or three, that certainly shows a worrying trend, and this has played out all over the country. So, something is up here. Something has been up. I will admit that there are multiple factors at play. But we have to address what the real factors are and not allow for the distraction, the, “Oh, it’s too complicated for us to know.” I bring you now the city of Seattle, for example — and hat tip to Jason Rantz up there for playing this on his show.

Rantz: Alleged hostage taker cites Dem law to warn Seattle cops not to chase him

Listen to the 911 call https://t.co/JWiKGA53OV

— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) June 14, 2022

He’s a Fox News contributor too. But he found this audio, obtained audio of a 911 call. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Okay, let me read you. This is from the Fox News piece. “A kidnapping suspect called Seattle police officers during a chase, telling them a newly passed Democratic law prevented them from pursuing him, new audio shows. Isaac Sissel called the Seattle Police Department after allegedly taking his girlfriend and her cat hostage last month to warn them they were participating in ‘an illegal pursuit’ and were ‘not supposed’ to chase him…”

Quote, “SPD is illegally chasing me over I don’t know what. It’s an illegal pursuit… they’re not supposed to be able to chase.” Friends, someone who is alleged to be engaged in a kidnapping or a situation of illegality involving taking someone’s freedom away from them, whatever the final charge may be, if they bring charges, is calling the police department saying (summarized), “Hey, hold on a second!

“That Democrat city council of left-wing lunatics, they passed a law saying cops don’t chase unless there’s a violent crime in process.” No-chase laws, folks. No-chase laws. I just want you to know, I’ve spoken to in the past — many months ago — an alderman for the city of Chicago who said there were similar rules put in place by the city council there for cops not to chase. “Don’t chase.

“When criminals want to run, let them run.” Well, gee, what do you think that means for law and order in the city? If criminals know as a matter of law, of statute that the cops are not supposed to chase them except in very narrowly defined circumstances — and even then, who knows? — what do you think’s gonna happen? Are you gonna be safer? No, of course not. Here’s another thing that I have been telling you about.

And I just want to say, this is the same dynamic… We’re talking about Seattle right now, and we have a lot of listeners who live in the Seattle areas ’cause we had that day where we had them all calling in — some still live in Seattle, obviously, but Seattle area — who left because they said it’s just gotten completely out of hand. But the same storyline plays out in Seattle, in Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and Atlanta, in Houston, in Phoenix.

Democrat ideas about criminal justice and criminal justice reform lead to crazy things being done by the prosecutors’ offices and by the city councils, and then things get worse. People are being preyed upon by career criminals, by the violent, by the disturbed and violent — and this plays out all over the country. We’ve seen this now. The numbers don’t lie: 30% rise in nationwide homicides in 2020 alone; 2021 still at about that level, and some cities are even higher in 2021 than they were before.

And some cities this year, in 2022, are on track for their worst year ever including Seattle. This is an editorial by a Danny Westneat who is a Seattle Times columnist. Look, we have a great station in Seattle. I don’t know if he listens to the Clay and Buck show up there (but he should). The piece is “The Awkwardness of a Liberal City Awash in Guns.” So he makes the case here — I’ll just summarize some of it — that the left is always saying, “We gotta stop the guns!

“We gotta get rid of the illegal guns.” In the case of we’re talking about mass shootings, usually something like that. Well, as we’ve discussed mass shootings are less than 1% of people murdered with guns every year in this country, less than 1%. So where is the 99%? Well, 99% of murders occurring in cities and counties and towns all over America right now, that’s happening mostly with handguns.

But also, it’s occurring with connections to gang violence, the drug trade — criminality, criminal violence — as opposed to psychopath I can mass murderer violence. So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with the gang members on the streets who are shooting people every single day? Not once every few months. Every single day. And young children being hit in the crossfire parents having to mourn children who are shot weekend in, weekend out in Chicago and other cities.

How do you deal with that? Well, it’s police, right? Don’t you have to actually use the…? See, the left undermines the police and says that they can’t trust them and the cops are racist and that became the narrative of the Democrat Party, as we know. But then they want to take your guns away. Who’s gonna do the taking of the guns? The cops. So they can’t actually have it both ways. They can’t say that we’re gonna take all the guns out of the hands of the evildoers and not, one, rely on the cops.

But then also, where is most of the gun crime occurring? What’s really happening? Well, as we know it is disproportionately occurring in major cities, obviously greatest concentration of people. But it is also disproportionately affecting minorities and specifically the African-American community. Young black men disproportionality involved in shootings, disproportionately targeted in shootings.

And so what happens in these cities that are telling you — and he’s making this case. What happens in these cities like Seattle they say, “We’re banning all guns, we’re gonna get rid of all the gun violence from terrible situations like what we’ve seen in” name any mass shooting. Well, they’ve already tried to ban the guns. It doesn’t work. The criminals in the cities don’t care. They’ll do straw purchases, they’ll buy them to the black market, they’ll do whatever they have to to get the guns.

They don’t care, and it’s not hard for them to get the guns. So you’re gonna have to rely on police which they don’t like, and you’re gonna have to enforce the law strictly about gun violations, and this why — as I’ve been talking to you for weeks — whether it’s Larry Krasner’s office in Philadelphia or soon to be formerly Boudin’s office in San Francisco, New York City? Huge problem with this in New York City with the NYPD.

They keep on going as light as they can — including dismissal of charges — against people who have illegal firearms on them. So they’re talking all this stuff about how we need red flag laws, and they still want a ban on AR-15s and all of this stuff. Meanwhile, the Democrats who are actually at the enforcement end of the law as prosecutors, when someone who’s a prohibited possessor — somebody with a criminal record — is found with a gun?

They say, “Well, we’re not going to press the full charges here because we don’t want this to be a part of mass incarceration.” The progressive prosecutor ideology, to be very clear, stretching back now for years is, “There are too many young black men in prison.” This is their “end mass incarceration” line, Larry Krasner, Chesa Boudin. “Therefore we need to empty out the prisons as much as possible and we also need to change the way that we do law enforcement in order to balance things out more.”

That is their open theory. That is what Krasner and others have said. So what this means is on the one hand you have a call for a crackdown on magazine limitations or AR-15s. On the other hand, because the enforcement of gun laws in major cities disproportionately affects young black men, the prosecutors are saying, “Well, we’re gonna dismiss this charge or we’re gonna let this charge go.

“We’re gonna take a plea bargain on that charge,” in huge numbers. Huge numbers comparatively to what those same cities were doing even a few years ago, in terms of the number of dismissals, deferred prosecution, deterrence programs, and all these other things that they’ve set up. So, their ideas have been catastrophic at all levels, but on issue of crime specifically and what’s going on with policing in America today you see it doesn’t even make sense. It doesn’t even hold up.

They’re telling you, “We need to crack down on the guns!” Really? Do you think that Democrat prosecutors in Los Angeles and Houston and New York and Chicago…? Just naming some of the biggest cities in the country, do you think that they are comfortable sending people away for longer periods of time for illegal firearms possessions? No, they don’t want to do that, because we know what the numbers would look like.

Does anyone want to take a guess in New York City, for example, who is the percentage of people who are arrested for illegal possession of a firearm is somewhere in the 80% to 90% range are minority males, black or Hispanic in New York City? So, if you’re gonna enforce the laws around guns more, you’re going to be — de facto — prosecuting more aggressively that community, which goes against the Democrat ethos. They don’t want to do that.

So are they serious about “getting the guns”? No, of course, not. Virtue signaling, emotional satisfaction. This is at the heart of all this. But in this case, this isn’t even just about the price of gas or the price of milk or bread, which are very important things, but this is about people’s lives. This is about letting people with 15 arrests, with 20 arrests, with more than that out over and over again.

This is about pretending that public vagrancy that is a lifestyle choice now for many people — believe it or not, that is a real thing — and California has done research on this now as a state, they’ve learned more and more about this. anyone want to guess, back to the Seattle Times article how many of the…? There’s a 75% rise in shootings in Seattle this year to start off the year compared to last year.

Does anyone want to guess what percentage was the shootings occur in homeless encampments? It’s 20% of them. There’s not that many homeless encampments and they’re not that big in the city of Seattle. One-in-five shootings is happening in these homeless encampments? That’s pretty substantial, isn’t it? Ohhh, but if you wanted to eliminate people living on the streets, doing drugs in the open air, urinating and doing other things out in the streets, you’re a bad person.

This is what the Democrats have been telling you now for years: You’re a bad person. They might say you’re a racist person. You say, “Wait. Hold on a second. I don’t want anyone, irrespective of race, to be doing these things. So how…?” It doesn’t matter. They just shout, “Racism!” when they don’t have a better argument. That’s what the left does because people get scared and they don’t want to be called racist. So they say, “Well, hold on. I just want more law enforcement.”

They say, “Well, that’s…” The left will tell you that’s a racist proposition unless you just want more law enforcement against law-abiding gun owners who might now run afoul of the increasingly Byzantine regulations around guns. You know, the Democrats will clap. I’m telling you the first time one of these states passes a magazine limitation and some guys at the range instead of having a five-round magazine has a 10-round magazine gets arrested, Democrats will celebrate that.

They think that’s great. But people in gangs, people preying upon their fellow human beings day after day in cities? You think the Democrats want to get strict on those guns? No, they do not. No, they do not. So they are unserious. They make everyone less safe. And yet again, on this issue alone, voting Democrat in the midterms is irresponsible. Just on their crime policies. Never mind the economy, never mind covid, never mind the border. So if you’re wondering how I feel about this, I think, hopefully, I made that one quite clear.