Mayor Bloomberg shows how out of touch with the regular guy he really is...He just doesn't get it...He's as wrong on this as he is with the control of our schools...
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Want to stay safe in New York City? If Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s theory is right, you may want to surround yourself with readers of The Wall Street Journal.
During a television interview about gun control on Monday, Mr. Bloomberg suggested that the titans of American capitalism who subscribe to the newspaper are simply not the homicidal kind.
“I don’t know how to break this to you,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “but people that go out and murder people don’t read The Wall Street Journal.”
The claim drew consternation from criminologists, who quickly ticked off a long list of financiers — and presumptive Wall Street Journal readers — who have, in fact, murdered people.
Take the case of Scott Schneiderman, a failed stockbroker in New York who was convicted in the 1997 murder of a police officer after a botched robbery.
Or Richard Robert Russo, a senior vice president at Smith Barney in California, who killed his wife after discovering she was having an affair.
Or Joseph H. Ludlam Jr., a fired stockbroker in Virginia, who shot his former boss at work.
“The mayor is wrong,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, who referred a reporter to the local case of Lonnie Lee Gilchrist Jr., a stockbroker who fatally shot a Merrill Lynch executive in 1988.
“People from all social strata commit murder,” he said.
Mr. Bloomberg made the remarks about The Journal while discussing New York City’s crime rate, which is down across the board this year, even as the economy sputters. Murder, for example, is down 26 percent compared with last year.
“This ‘park bench wisdom,’ as I call it, that there is a correlation between the economy and the amount of violence in our society just isn’t true,” the mayor told Mr. Blitzer, before proffering his theory about the correlation between murder and The Journal.
Asked later about the theory, a spokesman for the mayor, Stu Loeser, expanded upon Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks.
“People don’t kill people because they are following the business cycle closely,” he said. “They kill people because they are depraved individuals.”
