A very white young man is playing the piano in the middle of the street. The sign over his head claims that the sleepy little town in the North of Quebec where this is happening is strong because of diversity. In reality, the best thing about the town is its lack thereof.
LOL, Kid, that’s not the North, maybe try the Tundra at Fort Chimo, now known as Kuujjuaq (great big river), following the ethnic cleansing of “settler” names — even though the 1831 HBC name was an English attempt at the Inuit words for “agree” or “shake hands”. And there sure as hell was no diversity during the racist hollering of the ’60’s activists, the Inuit and all Indians hated each other, while everybody detested the Quebecois bureaucrats ;-D
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Ha! What did I say? The lynching has begun:
https://peterhalligan.substack.com/p/sweden-shootings-down-80-and-no-shootings
So apparently, just like in the US, Sweden deported a bunch of foreign gangbangers and– like magic– violent crime plummeted.
Which really makes me wonder about our homicide rates here in the US:
https://www.consumershield.com/articles/murder-rate-by-year
I can’t find a graph that goes all the way back to 1956, but that’s apparently how far you have to look to find an equally low homicide rate here, but I’m pretty sure the peak rate was in 1991. After the Reagan amnesty and all. So… was that much of our violent crime, for my entire life, just foreign gangbangers we could’ve deported?
I think it’s waning a lot. It was mostly a boomer thing, and they are gradually shuffling offstage.
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Here is a chart, compiled in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/murder-rate-drop-report.html, of US murder rates going back to 1900. It shows that 1991 was a peak but 1980 was a slightly higher peak. Methylethyl’s link is more accurate for 2025, although it is wrong for 2026.
For this year it is too early for a precise number but it is clear we are at a historical low for murders, likely the lowest rate in this country’s history.
Sweden is not a good comparison because their murder rate has always been a tiny fraction of ours. This link https://www.reuters.com/world/homicides-sweden-hit-lowest-level-over-decade-2025-2026-03-31/ says that in 2025 they had 84 murders, which is a rate of 0.8 on the above scale. And their recent peak in 2020 was 1.2.
Violent crime is always horrifying to contemplate, but we should appreciate how low we have gotten it and focus on other things. Aiming for Sweden-like numbers is unrealistic. For years our country has had more guns than people and the number of guns is growing faster than the number of people. We can make better progress working on problems like the economy and national budget.
-P
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How many murders by foreign criminals is acceptable? And why are guns a problem when murder rates are drastically down? I do not understand how guns themselves could be a larger problem than murder rates. Does deporting foreign criminals interfere with working on the economy and the national budget? Who suggested we were “aiming” for Sweden like numbers?
You sound, tbh, like one of those people who can’t bear talking about good things that happened because of Trump, because they happened under Trump. That’s a weird hangup. Fewer people dying violently is an objective good. It would be good no matter what president did it.
The fact that achieving that good had an easy, obvious, duplicatable mechanism that works across countries is worth noting. We could’ve done this any time since the 70s. How many murders could’ve been prevented over 50 years?
What constitutes “better progress” than shipping out foreign criminals who are a net drain on the economy and the national budget? You know what also happens when you ship them out? Life gets better for the working class. HOA dwellers don’t have to deal with the sort of crime and havoc they cause, for the most part, but we do.
So eff that. I WILL talk about successes that make life objectively better for me and my family. They ARE important to me. They aren’t invalidated just because they aren’t the only important things out there. You’re free to not like it AND you’re free to talk about other things. I will talk about what matters to me. Nobody likes a speech nanny.
Even the leftist media openly state that well over a half of ICE detentions are of people with criminal records. DHS says it’s 70% of arrestees. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle at around 60%. This is an insanely high number. But it’s not a bit surprising to people who know even the bare minimum about how the border was crossed for the past 20 years and by whom. It was very easy to cross if you were protected by a cartel. It was almost impossible to do otherwise. Nobody could have come up with a better set-up to flood the country with criminals. And it worked.
This is why I believe that the second Trump administration is a stunning success. The border is closed. Millions of cartel employees are being deported. There’s no other issue I care about more than this. I can’t imagine what other issue can matter more.
What gets me most here is the absolute total mindblowing stupidity of the “guns baaaaad” “criminals… meh whatever: just give them 14 more chances and they’ll surely turn it around” crowd. WTAF. Is it something in the imported bottled glacier water making them retarded? Guns are hella fun. I like guns. I come from a whole gigantic extended family of people who like guns, own a whole bunch of them, shoot deer in the woods with them, and yet, somehow, have never once shot anybody (outside military service anyway: and we don’t ask about that because that would be rude). If the sheer ratio of guns per person was actually a problem, my family would be riddled with bullet holes.
This is not like alcoholism or drugs where it’s important to keep people away from the things they want to abuse, change the environment, blah blah blah because people have “gun problems” and we need to help them recover by reducing the quantity of available guns in their environment.
It’s a CRIMINAL problem. Get rid of the criminals, and there is no gun problem. Duh. Coincidentally, once you take care of the criminal problem, you also don’t have a problem with criminal use of knives, baseball bats, rocks, bricks, pipes, motor vehicles, hammers, fists, and other implements of violence. The problem is violent criminals. Deal with the criminals. Most everybody else can be trusted with guns, excepting the terminally stupid and nobody can save them from themselves. Stupidity is incurable and cannot be ameliorated by the law.
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This chart https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-foreign-born-share-of-the-u-s-population-1850-2024/ shows that the percent of us population that was foreign born was at its lowest ever in 1970, and only rose slightly from their to 1980, even though that was the absolute peak in the murder rate. Since then the share of foreign born population has gone up and up, even while crime fell and fell.
What we are seeing is that foreign-born crime is a much bigger percentage of all crime in Europe than it is in the US. I only mentioned easy availability of guns because it is a simple explanation of why violent crime has always been a bigger issue in the US. Our freedom is a beautiful thing, including our freedom to have and use guns, and one of the ways we pay for freedom is a higher (but thankfully not too high) crime rate. I agree, let us celebrate how low crime has gotten. Trump has the distinction of having presided over an all-time historical low in violent crime, specifically the murder rate. (It is good to emphasize the murder rate because that is the most stable and objective number, the one which is the most comparable between different places or different times because it is the hardest to fudge and the least subject to interpretation.) It is easy to lose sight of how good things have gotten in an era of very popular graphic stories and videos of specific horrible crimes.
What I said before, about how we shold be working on the economy, builds on what Clarissa said in this post last month https://clarissasblog.com/2026/08/05/a-path-to-losing/ We must “seek solutions to collective problems together.” and “You can’t choose your way out of a dysfunctional economy.” These are pressing issues we should all be able to turn our attention to together, rather than having more of the same arguments about how to get our crime rate from good to excellent.
-P
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“Since then the share of foreign born population has gone up and up, even while crime fell and fell.”
I think you’re missing the implication there.
IF the murder rate peaked in 1980, while the foreign-born ratio was relatively low compared to now, AND the rate dropped to pre-1970 levels as a simple consequence of deporting foreign gangbangers, THEN what that implies is: that whole time, the rate of domestic murderers has been dropping for reasons not captured in these numbers (there are some theories: chief among them reduced lead exposure from paint and gasoline). And that we almost erased that progress by importing foreign criminals. And then people go and blame “guns” for this. Because it’s a talking point apparently. And then when someone points out how illogical that is, they pretend they didn’t mean it that way. Do y’all have training sessions on that strategy or is it natural instinct?
And then you wanna substitute some BS about “the economy”. What about it. Anything specific? No? OK great! Let’s do some economy. First: WTF are you talking about when you talk about “the economy”? The GDP? Tax revenues? Tax burden? Deficit spending? Inflation? Standard of living? (and if so for whom and what are you measuring?). Corporate balance sheets? Unemployment rates? Housing affordability? The price of used cars as a percentage of median household income? Please. Be specific. Because most people who bring up “guns” as a generic evil… when they talk about “the economy” they are talking about the stock market and GDP because they live in cloud-cuckoo land and that’s what the economy looks like to them: how’s their portfolio doing and all.
Whereas down here in the wage class, what “the economy” looks like is: fraud and crime. Our lives would be 5000% better if the admin did nothing else but seriously tackle fraud and crime in immigration, healthcare, real estate, fake charities, education, professional licensing… probably a few other domains could use some work too. But those are the big ones. Those are hammering us: and by “us” I mean the more than half the population who are obliged to care about grocery prices. These things are not controversial. But the thing is: if we fixed the fraud and crime, your portfolio would go down. Our wages would go up. Do you see the problem with generic nonspecific handwavy “the economy”?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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