How to Solve the Violent Crime Crisis in America

BUCK: The big stories, unfortunately, this weekend were just about a lot of horrific violence — the incredibly evil, awful, and atrocious racist shooting in Buffalo — 10 African-Americans killed, targeted by an evil lunatic. And we’ll discuss more about the politicization of this that happened right away from the Democrats, blaming people who had nothing to do with this, who say nothing, would never say anything other than pure condemnation of this hateful act.

But saying it’s the GOP’s fault and then moving to gun control and all kinds of things. We’ll discuss the political fallout of that event already from Buffalo. There’s also a mass shooting in the Laguna Beach area of California at a church. That one, fortunately, was stopped by parishioners but one fatality there. A number of individuals — mostly senior citizens, Asian-Americans — were shot. Clay told me over the weekend. I saw this headline after he texted me and I dove into a little bit. Twenty people shot. Is that right, Clay?

CLAY: Yeah. Crazy.

BUCK: Twenty people shot outside of a Bucks game in Milwaukee, and then I want to get to all of these, but I will just tell you that I went to Chicago and a lot of you said over the weekend that I should be careful. And I grew up in New York City, and I was here during the time of the greatest violence the city had. So I think of myself as a city dweller who knows his way around, and I will tell you when I was walking in the Millennium Park on a beautiful day, I turned to Carrie, my girlfriend, who some of you saw in photos we posted over the weekend.

I turned and I said, “Maybe we are overestimating how much the violence spread beyond certain neighborhoods in Chicago. I’m gonna dig into this some more.” I want to be open-minded about it, Clay. I said that and standing in front of the Bean in Millennium Park, one of the most famous tourist attractions. There was a fatal shooting a few hours later, a 16-year-old killed, right near the Bean in Millennium Park. We clearly have a violence problem in the country, and it’s time to talk about some honest and real solutions and preventative measures for it.

CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt. And to your point, now there is a curfew basically in effect in Chicago. We got an idiot mayor in Lori Lightfoot, who I think it’s fair to say is just not very and certainly not up to the job. She for some reason was in Texas when all of this was happening in Chicago, Buck, posting herself wearing a mask in a Texas bookstore, reading To Kill a Mockingbird arguing that she was not gonna be banned by what she could read, when the reality is most of the places trying to ban To Kill a Mockingbird are left-wing lunatic cities and school boards.

But how out of touch can you be to, one, it is not be in your community as another awful weekend of violence ensues and, two, to trolling people over the reading of a book in Texas while wearing a mask? It’s just so unartfully tone-deaf that it feels almost intentional to be that dumb. And, Buck, this isn’t an awful situation that we have all over the country. And immediately what we do, in many respects, is try to decide who’s to blame anytime one of these shootings happen, anytime there’s a mass shooting.

The answer is the person who does the mass shooting. I think we don’t spend enough time letting it be known. New York City subway shooter. I think he’s mentally ill. The shooter in Buffalo, it seems, based on the things that he has put out there that he’s mentally ill. Many of the people who are behaving in a criminal fashion and deserve to be put in prison for the rest of their lives are mentally ill, and I believe the solution — and this is the argument we’ve been making for nearly a year on this air.

This is the argument you made on your show when you were solo and the argument I made on my show when I was solo. Buck, when I saw 20 people get shot outside of Milwaukee, outside of a Bucks game… NBA basketball, Game 6, Milwaukee Bucks are playing the Boston Celtics. They had to cancel the gathering of people to watch Game 7 because they didn’t feel like they could safely allow that many people together in Milwaukee. Murders are skyrocketing. This is happening all over the place. There’s only one solution, and it’s to let police do their job and enable them to do so, period. That’s the answer.

BUCK: We have to be willing as a society to lock up serious, violent criminals to protect the rest of society or else this continues. And we have to do it you are respective of whatever leftist narratives there are, whatever stories we hear about the police and how the police are systemically awful or evil. That’s not true. The data doesn’t support it. It’s not rooted in the reality of Americans of all races, creeds, and colors who deal with law enforcement day in and day out.

But it’s obvious to anybody who’s going back to the data, Clay, looking at this, the situation is going to continue. This is not getting better. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. The decay and anarchy in these cities is something that the Democrat politicians in charge are not able to turn around. Feels like some cities like Portland have just been ceded, know, essentially, the down the, to lunatics whatever they want to run things. Same thing in Seattle, where they had the CHAZ. Remember that?

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: There was a whole movement to set up an “autonomous zone” within the city, and the city authorities — Democrats — acted like this wasn’t… You want to talk about an insurrection? When you say, “We’re our own police force and nobody else can come in here and nobody else can do anything,” that’s an actual insurrection.

CLAY: They took over the city.

BUCK: That’s actually something that you would think would fall under sedition. So I sit here and, of course, like everybody listening, you’re heartbroken about what happened in Buffalo, which was just evil on a scale that’s, really, honestly hard to fathom. But it’s also heartbreaking the shooting that happened in not Los Angeles, the Laguna Beach area and the shooting that happened.

I don’t believe there are many fatalities, but there are a lot of people who were hit, in which… You’ve gotta remember, people: Whenever they say “wounded by gunfire,” for a lot of people, they’re in the hospital fighting for their life, even if they make it through, right? And what are the solutions or what are the actions they want to take? Clay, they want to blame Fox News.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They want to institute more firearm regulations that a… A psychopathic, premeditated, evil murderer like this guy who went to Buffalo, gun laws aren’t going to in any way intimidate or prevent him from doing what he’s going to do. If you want to look at how we could have stopped him, apparently the school, there was some awareness that he was a danger, making threats.

And then you get into a what kind of mental health interventions can you actually have and interventions including incarceration by the state because somebody is a danger to their fellow human beings. That’s a serious conversation about what to do. Blaming conservatives? Clay, did you see there was an article in Rolling Stone that was written just over the weekend, just to really jump into this, that the Buffalo shooter is “a mainstream Republican”? That was the headline.

CLAY: I saw that. Yeah.

BUCK: Now, that was written by a person who lost her previous job for defaming a veteran for having a Nazi tattoo, when the veteran actually had a cross that was a symbol of his unit that he served with in Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with Nazis and in no way is a Nazi.

CLAY: Kind of a big miss.

BUCK: Kind of a big miss. But these are the people that now come forward as if they have something serious to say. They just want to sling slander at it other side. They’re unserious about dealing with the violence. They’re unserious about making our streets safer. I just hope that people that care deeply about this, as I think we all do, know that the Democrat Party and its ideology when it comes to law enforcement specifically has failed, dramatically and catastrophically.

CLAY: White, black, Asian, and Hispanic people mostly want the same things. Certainly white, black, Asian, and Hispanic parents want the same things: Kids to grow up safe, healthy, productive. I can say that as a parent. I think just about every parent and grandparent out there wants the same thing. And so the best way for white, black, Asian, and Hispanic kids to grow up healthy is to have safe streets and a police force that is empowered to be able to protect the innocent.

And what we do not have right now in this country — if you look at the data overwhelmingly the rates of crime are skyrocketing. Buck, I think your experience in Chicago, the place where that kid got shot, midday, right, one of the central places that should be the safest in the entire city. This is where tourists like you come to spend time; this is where families go on a beautiful Saturday. There haven’t been a lot of great weather days in Chicago.

It’s why kids are there all running around. We have created a place and a society right now where nowhere is safe in many big cities. And it’s not just, like, you look at the numbers, I mean, cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, the number and rates of crime are skyrocketing. Buck, we got a number one audience in Milwaukee right now. Milwaukee murders are at levels we’ve never seen before, which is why when I saw those 20 kids getting shot outside of a game, you’re trying to… Think about what’s going on here, Buck.

You got moms and dads who are saying, “Hey, what are we gonna go do? Let’s go watch the Milwaukee Bucks, Game 6, outdoors. Let’s go take our kids. Let’s have a great time.” Twenty people get shot there? It’s so bad and so unsafe in Milwaukee that they are telling people we had to cancel the Game 7 viewing because we couldn’t provide security? Think about where we are! We can’t allow groups of people together in a major downtown American city because in Milwaukee right now.

They don’t think they can keep people safe. I mean, that should never happen in any American city. White, black, Asian, Hispanic, no matter who you are, you should be able to go with your family safely to any major American city without having to look over your shoulder worried about whether the criminal element is gonna emerge and take your life or take someone’s life that you love.

BUCK: And I’d remind everybody that the voices that disagree with Clay, with me on crime, criminal justice, the judiciary, and how we could make our cities particularly safer but a lot of places across the country right now, those same voices were telling everybody for over a year the pandemic had caused the violence.

CLAY: True.

BUCK: Which was contrary to anonymous and now as we see actually contrary to the data as well. Not only has the violence continued and accelerated past the acute phase of the pandemic, but when you really look you see that for the first four months or so of 2020, you had a dramatic drop in violent crime, which meant that you should have had a much lower national crime rate when you looked at the natural numbers for 2020.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: But no. When did it start? The rise of BLM and the Democrat-induced panic over law enforcement and systemic racism. That is when the nationwide violence surge began. It coincides very directly, kind of like the rise in inflation coincides with Joe Biden becoming president very directly. These things… You could say it’s just correlation, but it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?