Feasting and Starving: The White House Forms an Anti-2nd Amendment Directorate as Victim Services Suffer 40-60% Cuts.
Feasting and Starving: The White House Forms an Anti-2nd Amendment Directorate as Victim Services Suffer 40-60% Cuts.
Programs with a track record of failure receive funding and heightened status as proven necessary services are deprived of funding by the White House and Congress.
VOCA: The 1984 Victims of Crime Act
Victims of crime and their dedicated service providers are experiencing a betrayal of an unimagined scale. Several years ago, Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) trust fund money was flowing fast in 2016 and 2017. According to the Office of Victims of Crime, the trust fund balance in 2017 was 13 billion dollars yet in 2023, was projected at 2.3 billion dollars. If you smell a rat, you’re not alone.
Cops and prosecutors depend on victim advocates to both broker services and provide the assurances to maintain charges and get victims to testify. Despite the inclination of the victim to drop charges in domestic violence cases, often nearly 90 percent of the time, early engagement with advocates results in violent offenders being held accountable while survivors and their children experience safer outcomes.
Therapeutic models practiced by victim advocates at certified domestic violence and rape crisis centers literally knit lives back together with empowerment programing, safe shelter, transitional housing and assistance in obtaining relocation financial assistance.
The proposed funding allocated to VOCA by Congress this year is a 40% cut. Potentially millions of victims nationwide will lose access to lifesaving and life-sustaining domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, elder abuse, and other victim services. Without access to these critical services, the real-time impact will not only be felt by individuals and families, but also in communities nationwide.
The Office of Gun Violence Prevention
The first Generation Z member of Congress, Maxwell Frost, compares his vicarious trauma, growing up with high profile shootings to other generational events like Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001.
Frost on the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook School on the NPR Podcast ‘It’s Been a Minute:’
“And it had a huge impact on me. I mean, I was - (laughter) the lyrics of that song, you know? I'm scared of dying, like, literally. I was, like, scared of being shot and getting shot in school. I went to the vigil in D.C. by myself. I just went over there. I think I hit up some of the families on Facebook and was like, I just feel like I have to be there.” According to Frost, he made it there when he was 15.
According to Giffords, the anti-gun policy center, they endorse him on their candidates page: Maxwell Frost is a gun violence survivor, civil rights activist, and Orlando resident who previously served as the National Organizing Director at March for Our Lives—one of the largest youth-led political movements in the country….Fueled by his own experiences with police violence and having seen the deadly impact of gun violence on his community up close—especially among working people and people of color—Frost joined with national progressive groups, including Giffords, last fall to secure an unprecedented five billion dollars in funding for community-based violence prevention programs in President Biden’s yearly budget proposal. The five billion dollars, should it pass the House will pass through the new office to support Community Violence Intervention programing. Check out my previous article here:
Frost’s agenda on his website is nothing less than a catalogue of Marxist causes including reimagining justice, police replacement theory. Every plank in his platform mirrors the communist failed policies that bankrupted every nation on the wrong side of the iron curtain in the late 80s and early 90s.
On Friday September 22, 2023, at the White House, Frost achieved his first legislative achievement and introduced President Biden in the Rose Garden announcing the creation of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
Deputy Directors of the Office
At the top of the pyramid is the oversight of Vice-President Harris and below her in the chain of command is “Stefanie Feldman, a longtime policy advisor to President Biden on gun violence prevention, will serve as Director of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, alongside leading gun violence prevention advocates Greg Jackson and Rob Wilcox, who will join the Administration as Deputy Directors of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention.”
Rob Wilcox has served as the Federal Legal Director at Everytown for Gun Safety. He is a nationally recognized expert on gun safety, drawing upon more than 20 years of policy, advocacy and litigation experience. Wilcox leads all of Everytown for Gun Safety’s federal policy work and incorporates his experience working with policymakers and stakeholders at all levels of government.
Members of Congress have attributed his influence and pressure to the recent ATF rule change on ‘pistol braces’ or ‘pistol stabilizing braces.’ In 2001, ATF stated in writing that they did not consider braces to be in any manner to have any grounds to be an illegal property of a firearm. The abrupt rule change creates what I consider to be an infringement of the 10 to 40 million law abiding citizens that either purchased perfectly legal weapons with braces or added aftermarket braces, and now places them under tax stamp status and registration under the gun regulation measure of 1934. Check out the YouTube link in the references to see Wilcox interacting with Jim Jordan. Sadly, the Bloomberg stooge is the better of the two deputy directors.
Greg Jackson was leading a division the Organizing for Action group for then President Obama when he himself was shot in Washington D.C. on April 21, 2013. There are several different versions of the story of what happened on that day.
In one version:
He was shot during a late night out in Washington D.C., where he had spent the evening with friends celebrating his cousin’s bachelor party. An altercation between strangers escalated into a shootout and individuals where shooting at a car driving Jackson’s way. Of his group, Jackson was the only one shot.
In another version:
"Like anybody, we ran. But as we ran, I caught one of the stray bullets into my right calf," Jackson explained by phone from his hospital bed in Virginia on Thursday. "So after the bullet hit, I tried to hide until the whole situation was over and then a couple of my cousins came back for me and helped me up, and we called an ambulance."
The shooting was the painful culmination of an abhorrent week for Jackson, 28, who is the Southern region director for Organizing for Action, the post-election form of President Barack Obama's grassroots campaign organization, Obama for America. It was Jackson's job to build up community support for gun violence prevention legislation in the Southern region of the United States; he was shot only days after the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey amendment, which would have strengthened and expanded background checks for gun sales, failed in the Senate.
And yet in another version:
Gregory Jackson Jr. and four of his friends were leaving a cousin’s bachelor party on April 21 in Washington D.C. when something went awry.
The 28-year-old Southern region director for Organizing for Action, the post-election form of President Barack Obama’s grassroots campaign organization, Obama for America, noticed a group of men arguing on the street. Jackson and his friends walked in the opposite direction to avoid the confrontation. But it didn’t matter, someone began shooting and Jackson was right in the line of fire.
In another retelling, there is a call to action to respond to ‘police violence’:
Despite spending most of my childhood in rural Virginia, I lost a childhood friend and was nearly shot on four occasions as an innocent bystander, but I never thought I would become a victim. The day I was shot, I was walking home after celebrating my cousin’s engagement and within moments, a beautiful night turned into a nightmare.
As a survivor of gun violence, witnessing online police officers wrongfully shooting someone in the back evokes the same dark memories of when I was shot in 2013. That’s why when we talk about gun violence in this country, we must also talk about police violence.
A new version on NPR:
JACKSON: I do. I'm a survivor of gun violence. I was shot on April 21 of 2013, unfortunately.
INSKEEP: What happened?
JACKSON: Actually, I was walking home. You know, I was walking home, and there was two folks having an altercation, and it turned into gunfire. And I was shot as an innocent bystander. And the bullet that hit me hit two arteries, and I nearly bled to death. My recovery took 21 days in the hospital, six surgeries and about six months to learning how to walk again and get back to some form of normal.
Eight years later, in 2021 there a new dimension to be shared where police are the bad guys:
Jackson was 28 at the time, overseeing gun-violence prevention efforts for then President Barack Obama’s nonprofit, Organizing for Action. But in the ER, he was a young Black man, he says, treated as a suspect rather than a bystander.
As a gun violence survivor, gun violence prevention is personal for Greg. While being questioned by law enforcement in his hospital bed, Greg remembers being treated like a criminal and not like a victim.
INSKEEP: What would you like to change?
JACKSON: Well, I think there's a lot we can change. But most importantly, we need to acknowledge this as a public health crisis. And with every other public health crisis, we've seen a public health response that includes resources for victim services and those directly impacted.
My parting shots
I’m struck that Jackson has never mentioned anything about who shot him. The inconsistencies abound and as time passes he finds more reasons to complain about the police. I would love for some professional with experience in statement analysis to review the links provided below and comment on your assessment. I do recall in my career a correlation of right-handed robbery victims with mysterious gunshot wounds to their left legs. Please share your conclusions in the comments section.
Are we funding a federal gun violence prevention office headed by a person who wounded themselves with an accidental discharge of an illegally possessed handgun while we are drastically defunding every domestic violence and rape crisis center in the country?
Please keep all our law enforcement officers and victim services professionals in your prayers.
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References
https://www.frostforcongress.com/issues
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/RU/RU02/20220615/114896/HHRG-117-RU02-Bio-WilcoxR-20220615.pdf
https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/News/greg-jackson-bio.pdf
https://justdemocracy.us/stories/greg-jacksons-fight-to-end-gun-violence/
https://time.com/6103401/hospitals-racism-black-patients/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gregory-jackson-jr-obama-ofa_n_3275495
https://www.wtvr.com/2013/05/16/virginia-leader-of-presidents-gun-violence-commission-shot-in-d-c
https://www.thenewsjournal.net/local-agencies-receive-voca-funding-to-help-crime-victims/
https://www.wgem.com/2023/05/02/local-victim-assistance-organizations-worry-about-funding-cuts/
https://people.com/biden-harris-frost-announce-office-gun-violence-prevention-7974230
Concerning - including relative to the sleight of hand.
Most of those statements are just appeals to credibility in order to promote the party-line.
Like modern marketing, it's more about the stories you tell than the products you make.
All I learned was Greg caught a stray bullet on April 21, 2013. They seem to like to mention that a lot. A LOT. But really little mention or concern about catching the idiots that were shootin' up the place.
That's a red flag for using this as an agenda rather than concern for a solution.