2016 June 23^rd

Trump warns us about immigrants, particularly those from south of the border. He might be right in at least one case. Roger Jimenez, an immigrant from Venezuela has made some comments about the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that are typical of an ISIS follower. He says that he isn’t saddened at all by the slaughter, he only regrets that the shooter “didn’t finish the job” and kill everyone who was there that night.

Many on the right agree with Trump that our screening of immigrants is far from perfect and needs to be improved. So, who is Jimenez and how did he get into the country? Are you ready for this? Roger Jimenez is the Pastor of a thriving Baptist Church in Sacramento, California. Pastor Jimenez tells us, on his church website, that he was brought to Christ and saved as a very young man. Perhaps this was not an entirely successful conversion.

The company from which this Baptist Church has leased their building is outraged and they have told Jimenez that if his congregation wants to get out of their lease early they will be welcome to leave; the lease will not be an impediment. There have been individual protests of this man’s position but so far there has been no comment at all from the Baptist community. Perhaps they are a unique group of Christians.

Today Thomas Sowell, an economist of the right wing persuasion, holds forth in his column about the futility of gun control measures. What else is new? Dr. Sowell sites Joyce Lee Malcolm, a Professor of Law at George Mason University, who has written extensively about how restricting the availability of firearms does nothing to reduce crime. She and Sowell are natural allies. Sowell asks, in his opening paragraph, “Do tighter gun control laws reduce the murder rate. We have 50 states, each with its own gun control laws, and many of these laws have gotten either tighter or loser over the years. There must be tons of data that indicate whether murder rates went up or down when either of these things happened.” There are, of course “tons of data” and all of it is irrelevant to the question. The reason is obvious; there are no commercial boundaries between states that would stop someone in a state with restrictive gun laws from going to a state with less restrictive laws and buying a gun.  This should be obvious, but apparently not to Dr. Thomas Sowell.

Here is an example of Professor Malcolm’s logic: She writes, ‘…in the remainder of the 20^th century (from 1954) gun control laws became ever more severe—and armed robberies in London soared to 1400 by 1974. As the number of legal firearms have dwindled the number of armed crimes have risen.” Of course there is another way to say the same thing, “As the number of gun crimes have risen so have restrictions on gun ownership.” In a country where the police are not armed, perhaps it would make sense to restrict gun ownership as the number of gun crimes increases. The question is which came first; without any provocation Malcolm wants us to believe that the Brits just decided to restrict gun ownership. Now why would they do that? Neither Sowell nor Malcolm offer a reason.