THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Last week we talked about how puzzled reporters have been that white gentile children being kidnapped and murdered has gotten so much attention lately. They point out that forty or fifty such kids are grabbed and done away with by perverts every year. What's the problem?

Those kids are almost always killed by criminals liberal crime policy lets back on the streets, so the media don't like discussing it. It has no "news hook" value, which means it has no value to some liberal cause.

National media are still talking about the 2000 murder of a black man by being dragged behind a pickup truck and an earlier murder of a young man for being homosexual. Those crimes were newsworthy because they were useful, but non-minority kids being murdered has no such value.

Nobody remembers anything, so we got a useful reminder on the Cable News Network of how this "useful news only" rule worked perfectly before the advent of Fox Cable News. We have been listening to reports about the Washington, DC, area sniper for a week with no "news hook."

So CNN did what it has always done when there was a crime: they started talking about gun control. They cross examined police experts about whether a gun control law would take care of this situation. They had a debate on gun control.

A couple of years ago every police official would have said that gun control was at least a part of the solution. It was the ONLY crime solution liberals ever offered, so everybody had to say it was very, very important.

But sometimes the bad guys do lose. Like all liberal policies, gun control doesn't work. It either increases crime or leaves it the same.

Gun control is very, very important to the media because it is the ONLY measure that liberals advocate that sounds anti-crime. Actually, if you poll any prison population you will find that almost every felon is all for gun control. Every liberal policy is pro-criminal, but this is the only one that at least SOUNDS like it's "getting tough."

So CNN did what all national media have always done: a crime spree meant a push for gun control. But this time it didn't seem to take.

Is it possible that liberalism may be seen to be so silly that even the national media have to suppress their knee-jerk reactions? Respectable conservatives are paid to regard leftism with great seriousness. But despite respectable conservative efforts, the sheer silliness of the idea that college professors should rule the world seems to be collapsing under the weight of its own failure.