THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

All the authorities urge us, "DO NOT pick up hitchhikers."

Does this mean ALL hitchhikers are evil? Not at all. The same authorities who urge us not to pick up hitchhikers would agree that most of them are harmless people who simply don't have the money to pay for another form of transportation.

So the slogan, "Don't pick up hitchhikers," is an exercise in PROFILING. Because a few hitchhikers are dangerous criminals, we are urged not to pick up ANY hitchhikers.

Liberals agree to profiling hitchhikers this way. That's OK because hitchhikers are not one of the liberals' pet minority groups.

You are welcome to say that anyone with his thumb out on a public road is a potential criminal. But you are NOT free to say that it is more likely that an illegal alien at the Mexican border will be a brown person who speaks Spanish.

The NAACP and the ACLU are going to court to prevent the INS from checking brown, Latin people on the Mexican border. They admit that it is more likely that a brown person with a Spanish accent is an illegal alien. But they argue that the INS should be required to check blond people with eastern accents just as often.

These nuts are serious.

As with all liberal programs, this one is not supposed to WORK. Liberals admit this would be a waste of resources. But it would benefit one of their pet groups.

The liberal media are saying it is awful that the police check out young blacks more often because they are young and black. They admit that more young blacks commit crimes. They admit that checking out middle-aged whites as often as young blacks would be a waste of police resources. They agree that crime would go up.

But that's OK. No liberal program is ever supposed to WORK.

Please note that all this worry about profiling is limited strictly to groups the left likes: blacks and Hispanics and similar groups.

But when it comes to groups liberals don't like, they profile all the time.

When two insane kids murdered their classmates in Colorado, liberals demanded action against every gun owner in America. Every person in America who owns a weapon is lumped together with these two nutcases, instantly and without question. What if, every time a black criminal raped or murdered a white person, there was instant coast-to-coast discussion about whether black people needed to be controlled more carefully?

In my May 8 article, "Armed Switzerland and the Colorado Killings," I pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Swiss men have real, fully automatic assault weapons at home which are paid for by the government. They have no more gun crimes than England does, and England has absolutely vicious, total gun control.

In that May 8 article, I also pointed out that concealed weapon permit holders in the Untied States have every bit as good a record for their gun ownership as the Swiss do. But liberals profile permit holders together with those two young psychos in Colorado.

So let's get this straight: "profiling" is only bad if it is used in ways which liberals do not approve.

A couple of years ago, a black man got an automatic weapon, boarded a New York subway, and killed every white person he could. He declared that he did it because he hated whites.

A couple of weeks ago, a white supremacist rode around Chicago killing non-whites.

Now let us take a look at what was blamed in each case.

In the case of the black killing whites because he hated them, his gun was blamed. A wife of one of his victims is now in Congress, leading the attack against every legitimate gun owner in this country. The murderer's hatred of whites is never mentioned.

In the case of the white supremacist, CNN's Talk Back Live immediately did a piece on white supremacists. CNN did special after special on "Hate groups," which includes anyone who disagrees with the liberal racial program.

Nothing liberals do ever WORKS (See November 21, 1998 article, "It Doesn't WORK!"). This profiling issue is a good example to explain WHY nothing liberal ever WORKS. It is very simple: 1) Every example of profiling that liberals OBJECT TO is based on reality, and 2) Every kind of profiling liberals DO is based on a myth.

It is not fair for an innocent young black man who is driving around slowly in an affluent neighborhood to be stopped and questioned by police. But if the police do NOT question young blacks who do that, a lot of people will pay a HUGE price for this wonderful, Politically Correct behavior.

Likewise, it would be nice if millions of Mexicans were to suddenly stop flooding across our southern border in violation of American law. But until that happens, any serious surveillance at the Rio Grande will have to concentrate on people who are dark and speak Spanish. Liberals want to ignore reality and have the public pay the price of Political Correctness.

Meanwhile, the knee-jerk liberal reaction of lumping permit holders together with people who shoot up schools has no basis in reality whatsoever.

You can pass laws prohibiting guns within a mile of a school, and it will not stop a single school homicide. Murderers don't worry about gun laws. Actually, the one case where such laws had an effect was in the case of a person shooting up a school who was finally stopped by a teacher who had a gun. Because of the federal law prohibiting guns within a thousand feet of a school, the teacher had to run four blocks to get his gun while the shooter was still shooting.

Gun laws affect only law-abiding people, and law-abiding people are not the problem.

The bottom line is that the same liberals who complain about profiling do their own profiling all the time. The only difference is that liberal profiling never makes any sense.