One Maniac

This meme prompted a fair amount of research today, so I think it deserves a blog post. June 17, 2015, a white supremacist killed 9 people in a historic black church in South Carolina.

TV shows are cancelled

TV Land pulled the Dukes of Hazard (1979-85) from their line up.  First, was there any other show that was pulled? I could only find the one.  Second, technically the Dukes of Hazard was cancelled 20 years ago.  It was just pulled from syndication.

Historical statues are vandalized

This is one of two points that the meme gets absolutely correct.  Confederate monuments have been vandalized and they continue to be vandalized.  So far the only comparative event in response has been the placing of rebel flags at Martin Luther King's Georgia church.

Confederate merchandise banned

"Ban" is even the word that the ebay spokesperson even used.  Amazon, Walmart, Sears, and ebay have all decided to no longer sale rebel flag merchandise.

Unprecedented attack on Southern heritage

Growing up in Georgia, there was an important part left out of the Southern heritage argument.  The rebel flag was added to the Georgia flag in 1956 to oppose race mixing.  In 1961, South Carolina raised the rebel flag above their legislature to oppose race mixing.  While the Confederate flag does not have a well known segregationist past, the rebel flag does.  Honestly the rebel flag deserves to be attacked given the fact that two state governments used rebel flags in opposition to race mixing and did not remove them until the 21st century when even Bob Jones had to remove their opposition to race mixing.  Doesn't this Southern heritage deserve attack?

Race relations set back 40 years

By what criteria?  We just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.  Why not 50 years?  Why not 20 years?  This is arbitrary.

DOJ donated millions to victims families

This is the research that prompted this blog.  According to Newsweek and Reuters the Department of Justice fast tracked 29 million dollars from the Crime Victim Assistance Formula Grant program for the victims of the Charleston shooting.

First, let's provide some background.  In 1984, Congress passed the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 (VOCA).

The federal government passed the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 (VOCA) to provide financial support to state compensation programs that were unable to cover victims of federal crimes. VOCA also led to the development of victim compensation programs in the 14 states that lacked compensation programs at the time VOVA was enacted (S. Derene, personal communication, May 21, 2014). VOCA established the Crime Victims Fund (CVF), a federal source of funding that reimburses out-of-pocket expenses and funds services for victims and survivors of crime. The Department of Justice administers these funds, which come from offenders convicted of federal crimes in the form of criminal fines, penalties for criminal convictions, forfeited bail bonds, forfeitures of profits from crime, and charges for convictions that range from $25 for misdemeanors to $400 for felonies (Office for Victims of Crime 2013a).

In 2001 the Patriot Act amended the CVF making possible for private donations to be made to the CVF.  These payouts are not lump sums.

Crime victim compensation is a direct reimbursement to or on behalf of a crime victim for the following statutorily identified crime-related expenses:

• Medical costs.

• Funeral and burial costs.

• Mental health counseling.

• Lost wages or loss of support.

Other compensable expenses may include the replacement or repair of eyeglasses or other corrective lenses, dental services and devices, prosthetic devices, crime scene cleanup, and forensic sexual assault exams. However, property damage and loss are not covered.

 Congress has placed a number of restrictions on how CVF can operate.  From 1984 to 1999, the CVF would payout everything that it took in.  In 2000, in response to fluctuating income, Congress started to limit the payouts to build up a rainy day fund.

Starting in 2000, in response to large fluctuations in deposits, Congress placed a cap on funds available for distribution. These annual caps were intended to maintain the Fund as a stable source of support for future victim services. From 2000 to 2012, the amount of the annual cap varied from $500 million to $705 million. In FY 2013, the cap was set at $730 million.

The plan worked. By 2013, the CVF had amassed 9 billion.  VOCA has become a vital part of how our nation responds to tragedy.  Over 4,400 agencies rely on VOCA and they serve over 3 million victims annually.  In response to the financial downturn, Congress cut VOCA's budget by 65 million. The 2009 Stimulus bill provided 100 million to VOCA and expanded the CVF with Crime Victim Assistance Grants.  As best I can tell, this was mainly a rebranding.  The grants have all the restrictions as the regular CVF payouts.

Now that the background has been established so that we even know what we are talking about, the DOJ says that Reuters and Newsweek were wrong.  They misunderstood that the 29 million grant was not for the Charleston shooting only, but for South Carolina as a whole to help with all "the sexual assault victims, spousal abuse victims, child abuse and neglect victims, and previously underserved victims of violent crime."  The 29 million probably did not go far enough.

Nothing

The meme posts the ISIS flag, but to date there has been no firm connection of the shooter to ISIS which is composed of only about 200,000 people.  Still, let's use ISIS as a comparison.

• There are no ISIS shows to cancel.  There is no show where the heroes fly ISIS flag.
• There was vandalism of mosques in response to the Chattanooga shooting.
• You cannot buy the ISIS flag on Amazon either.
• ISIS is almost universally hated and deserves to be attacked.  Still Muslims as a whole have been attacked.  Franklin Graham proposed issuing a ban on Muslim immigration similar to the ban on Asian immigration from 1924-1965.

Now to the VOCA response to the Chattanooga shooting; the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), that administers VOCA payouts, posted a page dedicated to the Chattanooga shooting.  (Here is the page for the Charleston shooting.) They provided information on how to be at least partially reimbursed for "the financial burden of funeral, mental health, medical, and other expenses related to the shootings".  The OVC provided links to charities that can also help.  There was mental health information including on "coping after terrorism".  Clearly this is more than nothing.

I am getting tired of these conservatives spreading false information and poisoning conservatism. Everything that I have written is publicly available. I will admit that there was a bit of a learning curve trying to understand VOCA.  Even the great Reuters misunderstood the details.  Still, nothing I have done on this blog post is anything that Uncle Sam's Misguided Children could not have also done.