Whenever a lunatic goes bonkers and shoots up a public place, the usual suspects march around in public, waving their banners and making a nuisance of themselves. Whether or not we have more lunatics going on shooting rampages is debatable. The figures are always gaffed by the people presenting them so they can claim science! supports their side. What no one can dispute is that we have more people with more guns, but the lowest violent crimes rates since the 80’s. Whatever is causing the nuts to go bonkers, it is not the guns.

William Saletan, a minor moonbat writer at Slate, is a good example of the deranged logic of Progressives in defense of the One True Faith. His piece on the latest mass shooting is the sort of thing that you would expect from a college freshman, but it is pretty standard stuff from the modern Left. There’s the requisite bogeyman (Republicans), the hero (Obama) and a series of cheers that are supposed to be an argument.

He writes that Obama is “raising a question that Republican candidates for president ought to answer: Our country has a strikingly high rate of killings. If it’s not because of our prodigious stockpile of firearms, what’s your explanation?”

Think about the implication of that statement. The mere presence of guns causes some portion of the public to fly into a rage and murder people. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from that argument. Even nuttier, it means that shaping metal in a certain way imbues it with the magical power to make an otherwise passive man become violent and murderous. Of course, you also have the classic logical fallacy of declaring that only one possible cause can explain the observed result.

Now, it is unlikely that Saletan believes in magic, but he is a true believer. As such, the other possible reasons for American’s elevated crime rates are off-limits. It’s not a lot different than how ancient people would assume witchcraft as an explanation for extraordinary events. When you can’t come up with anything rational, the only thing you have left is the supernatural. For Progressives, guns are magic that make people commit crimes.

Another example of this superstitious fear of knowing the true cause of crime in America is this story from 538 back in the summer. You have the typical Nate Silver treatment of the issue with lots of weird charts and tables. Then you get to the end where he slips in a bit of forbidden knowledge, assuming his Progressive readers never bother to read the whole thing. He writes:

The Charleston killings were unusual in that it was a mass shooting — and also in that the suspect is of a different race than the victims (both black and white homicide victims are much more likely to be killed by someone of their own race.) But that doesn’t negate that the threat black Americans face from homicide is radically different from the one whites do.

Get that? Blacks are killed in much higher numbers than other races, but they are killed by other blacks because murder is almost always intra-racial. Whites tend to kill whites, blacks kill blacks and so forth. Since blacks are much more likely to be victims, and blacks kill other blacks, well, you know what follows. That truth is so horrifying to Progressives it can never be said. It can only be implied and only through oblique references.

The truth is America does not have a gun problem or even a murder problem. America has a black guy problem. According to the Federal government, young black males make up 3% of the population and commit 27% of the homicides. Put another way, if black crime rates fell to the same level of whites, America would have an overall crime rate of a typical European country.

I did a series of posts on Africa a long time ago and one of them listed the intentional homicide rates. Sub-Saharan Africa has some outlandish murder rates, but they are consistent with what we see in American in cities like Baltimore and Detroit. America’s blacks are actually less violent than blacks in the mother country so that speaks well of the civilizing effects of civilization, but it still means there is a biological component to violence.

Progressives, of course, cannot accept that as it means a big chunk of the One True Faith is invalid. Reality, however, is making that increasingly difficult.

Palm readers claim to be able to see a person’s future in the patterns on their hands, but it seems it is possible to also learn about their ancestral past too from their fingers. Fingerprints – already used as a way to identify individuals – appear to encode information about a person’s ancestral background. Researchers have found there are distinct differences in how fingerprint ridges split between people of European and African ancestry. The researchers claim their findings could prove useful not just for anthropologists but also for modern law enforcement when trying to profile suspects.

Professor Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University who led the study, said: ‘This is the first study to look at this issue at this level of detail, and the findings are extremely promising. ‘A lot of additional work needs to be done, but this holds promise for helping law enforcement. ‘This finding also tells us that there’s a level of variation in fingerprints that is of interest to anthropologists, particularly in the area of global population structures.’

The researchers, whose work is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, examined the right index fingerprints of 243 individuals. They looked at both the level one details, such as pattern types and ridge counts, and the level two details, which are more specific variations such as bifurcations – where ridges split – ridge endings and other structures. They analysed the prints of 61 African American women, 61 African American men, 61 European American women and 60 European American men. While they could not find any significant differences between men and women, they did find significant differences in the level two details of fingerprints between people of European and African descent.

If fingerprints carry racial markers, it is no longer possible to argue that race is anything but biological reality. How the Cult of Modern Liberalism contends with the growing amount of data contradicting a major chunk of their worldview is not clear, but denial cannot go on forever. Otherwise, they will all sound as nutty as William Saletan and the next stop is marginalization. We can only hope.