Matthew Heimbach, that eminent Towson University sociologist and criminologist, is quite the cheeky fellow.

Not too long ago Heimbach started a White Student Union chapter on the college campus. Heimbach apparently felt that Towson’s white students are so oppressed, marginalized and discriminated against that a WSU is necessary. That, dear readers, takes cheek.

In late March, Heimbach managed to top himself in the chutzpah department. White Student Union members at Towson, Heimbach declared, would form campus patrols to stem a crime wave perpetrated by black males.  

It’s certainly Heimbach’s right to feel as paranoid as he wants about any racial or ethnic group when it comes to violent crime. But has the guy been watching the news lately?

Let’s all refresh Mr. Heimbach’s memory, shall we?

Aurora, Colo.

Newtown, Conn., Sandy Hook

Elementary School

Midland, City, Ala.

Glenn Rose, Texas

Oak Creek, Wisc.

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Tucson, Ariz.

There are names associated with all these places, so let’s jump start Heimbach’s memory with those as well.

 James Holmes

 Adam Lanza

Jimmy Lee Dykes

Eddie Ray Routh

Wade Michael Page

Evan Ebel

Jared Loughner

For the past couple of years, Heimbach has apparently been quaking in his boots at the thought of black guys and crime, so much so that he can’t remember any of these names. So let’s clue Heimbach in on what these guys were accused of.

 Holmes: charged in the shooting deaths of 12 people and the wounding of 58 others in a theater complex last summer.

Lanza: the mastermind behind the Newtown massacre, which left 20 school children dead. Lanza also gunned down six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Before he went on his shooting spree, Lanza fatally shot his mother, Nancy Lanza. Twenty-seven bodies too late, Adam Lanza finally took his own life.

Dykes: fatally shot a school bus driver and kidnapped a 6-year-old boy. Dykes held the boy for at least a week before a SWAT team finally took him out.

Routh: fatally shot two veterans at a shooting range.

Page: went on a shooting rampage at a Sikh temple that left six dead and four wounded.

Ebel: allegedly a member of the white supremacist prison gang called the 211 Crew, Ebel is suspected of fatally shooting Tom Clements, the director of Colorado’s department of corrections, at his home. Ebel is also suspected of fatally shooting pizza delivery guy Nathan Leon in Denver this past March 18.

Loughner: killed six and wounded 13, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in January of 2011.

Heimbach has claimed that one of the reasons he started the White Student Union was to promote “white pride.” Since all the guys named are white, I have to wonder if Heimbach is beaming with pride.

At least two of the white guys – Ebel and Page – were suspected of having links with white supremacist groups, the original white pride guys. If Heimbach can get over his feelings of victimization and persecution, he’d realize just why it is that people are alarmed when someone starts a group based on “white pride.”

“White pride” has led to some very dead bodies, many of them white.

If Heimbach wants us all to have a discussion about crime and race, then we should oblige him. But let’s make our starting point the question I’ve been asking for years.

Repeat: I’ve been asking this FOR YEARS. Not since Aurora. Not since Newtown. I mean, literally, for years.

In the overwhelming majority of these cases that involve mass shootings, the perpetrator is a white guy. On occasion you might get an Asian guy or a Latino guy. There have even been a few black mass shooters.

Colin Ferguson, who shot up a Long Island Railroad train 20 years ago, is black. And let’s not forget what race John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo belonged to.

But, as a rule, most mass shooters have been white. And almost all have been male. So many, in fact, that I can’t remember the name of a female mass shooter.

If Heimbach knows anything, he knows this: he and other white students at Towson have more to fear from some white guy gone nut job than those black guys described in the crime reports Heimbach relishes reading.

Gregg Bernstein, meet John L. Brady.

Mr. Bernstein, who became Baltimore’s state’s attorney after running a campaign complaining about what a horrible state’s attorney Patricia Jessamy was, just met Brady the hard way.

All you brilliant Balti-morons that voted Jessamy out, that bought into Bernstein’s okey doke about what a pathetic job Jessamy did as state’s attorney should now tell us how you feel about Bernstein’s office committing one of the most egregious Brady violations ever.

 I’m not saying Jessamy’s office never committed a Brady violation. But it certainly wasn’t one as, as, well, as downright Brobdingnagian as the one Bernstein’s office committed. And the Brady violation certainly wasn’t committed in a high-profile case.

Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Alfred Nance, who was supposed to sentence Michael Maurice Johnson for murdering Phylicia Barnes, instead ordered that Johnson be given a new trial. Then he nailed Bernstein’s prosecutors for committing the Brady violation associated with the case.

A brief summation might be in order. In 1963, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case of Brady v. Maryland. The justices contended that prosecutors, by law, must turn over any evidence to defense attorneys that might point to the innocence of their clients.

The Brady case involved two losers: one was named John L. Brady and the other was named Charles Donald Boblit. Both were charged with felony murder after a man named William Booth was fatally strangled during a robbery Brady and Boblit committed.

Both men were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Brady’s lawyer contended that since his client didn’t commit the actual murder, he shouldn’t have received the death penalty.

It transpired that prosecutors did indeed withhold statements from Brady’s attorney in which Boblit admitted to strangling Booth.

NOTE: Bernstein’s office committed a major screw-up in a major case.

The Brady violation in the Phylicia Barnes case involved prosecution witness James McCray, who testified that Johnson told him about the murder and asked McCray for help in disposing of Barnes’ body.

Throughout Johnson’s trial, prosecutors contended that McCray was in a Charles County jail when Johnson was arrested. There was no way, prosecutors repeatedly hammered home to jurors, for McCray to know details of the case unless Johnson provided them.

McCray, prosecutors alleged, had no access to either the media or the Internet at the Charles County facility.

Nance ruled that, at the time of Johnson’s arrest, McCray was in the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he could easily have heard about Johnson’s arrest and details of the Barnes case. Nance said the prosecutors were late in providing that information to Johnson’s lawyers.

Oh, this tale of prosecutorial incompetence and misconduct just gets better and better, but not for Bernstein.

Having nailed prosecutors for a Brady violation, Nance moved on to what he called “newly discovered evidence” in the case. That would be the revelation that a Montgomery County detective with the last name of Ravin did an interview with McCray. After that interview, and after talking with detectives from other jurisdictions, Ravin concluded that McCray wasn’t a credible witness.

“This Court finds that the newly discovered evidence is material and persuasive,” Nance ruled. “As discussed…..the State rested its argument that McCray was credible, because he could not have known any facts about the case other than first-hand knowledge because he was incarcerated in Charles County without access to the Internet.

 “However, evidence also shows McCray was also incarcerated in Baltimore County and Montgomery County for periods of time where he may have had access to the media. The State’s handwritten disclosure of McCray’s record fails to meet Brady requirements. “The newly discovered evidence that asserts that McCray was found not credible in Montgomery County compounds with the Brady violations…..and indicates material prejudicial to the Defendant.”

Allow me to break that down into plain, simple English: Bernstein’s office committed a major screw-up in a major case. I challenge this guy that had the nerve to dog Jessamy about her record to find a similar screw-up in a similar case on her watch.

Quote: This “let’s protect our children” ploy is

a cheap, tawdry appeal to the emotions, which is probably why it’s popular among Democrats and liberals.

Et tu, Howard County?

That ritzy subdivision to the south and west of Baltimore doesn’t have much gun crime, or much of any other type of crime either. Out of all of the state’s subdivisions, Howard County is probably the one that needs a gun buyback program the least.

But the county had one anyway on Saturday, March 16.

County residents – and  non-county residents, I suppose – just drove to a Howard County government parking lot along Route 108 and handed in their firearms. In exchange, they got $100.

According to a story in The Baltimore Sun on March 18, county leaders are now convinced that they live in a much safer place.

chief William McMahon of the Howard County Police Department: “This is part of an overall gun safety program.”

Howard County Executive Ken Ulman: “There are now hundreds of fewer rifles and handguns in Howard County that could fall into the hands of children or thieves.”

I see a bright future for Ulman in Democratic Party politics in this state. Notice the sly, sneaky way he gratuitously implied that we’re doing this all for the safety of the kiddies?

That’s what all this “gun buyback” business is about, you know: protecting “the children.”

After the Newtown massacre of Dec. 14, protecting “the children” – through more draconian gun laws, through gun buy-back programs – became all the rage among liberal Democrats.

The implication was clear: liberals and Democrats love “our children” and want to protect them at all costs. Conservatives, Republicans and those nut jobs in the National Rifle Association HATE “our children,” and want to see them slaughtered in our schools and on our streets.

This “let’s protect our children” ploy is a cheap, tawdry appeal to the emotions, which is probably why it’s popular among Democrats and liberals. After Newtown, Democrats and liberals ratcheted up the emotional appeal, “arguing” that we must do something, ANYTHING, to solve the gun problem.

So we have renewed proposals to ban so-called assault weapons. We have laws proposed that would limit the capacity of rounds a particular firearm can have. We have calls for more thorough background checks.

Here’s the problem: none of that would have prevented the tragedy at Newtown.

The weapons Adam Lanza used to kill his mother, Nancy Lanza, himself, 20 students at Sandy Hook Elementary School and six staff members belonged to Nancy Lanza, not Adam. She would have passed any background check.

It has come to light that Adam Lanza was indeed a very disturbed young man. The signs were there for Nancy Lanza to see.

Instead of getting her son the help he needed – or, at the very least, getting all firearms out of her house – Nancy Lanza, according to news reports, aided and abetted Adam Lanza’s use and knowledge of firearms.

The Newtown tragedy was completely preventable; the person that could have prevented it was the one person that didn’t: Nancy Lanza.

Let’s bring this closer to home for a second. Robert Gladden Jr., the nut job that recently pleaded guilty to shooting up Perry Hall High School on the first day of the 2012-2013 school year, sent a text message the night before he went on his mini-rampage.

“I am going to bring a shotgun and 21 shells,” the text read. “I’ll let your imagination do the rest. And I trust you not to tell anyone about this so please don’t.”

Gladden couldn’t have had any better luck if he’d dialed “m” for “moron.” The hapless twit he texted kept quiet, apparently oblivious to the carnage that could have unfolded at Perry Hall the next day.

Democrats and liberals want to protect us – especially “our children” – from guns. Who’s going to protect us from the clueless cretins among us?

Here’s a stroke of managerial genius, courtesy of those big brains running the Baltimore Ravens: reward your most valuable player by punishing him. The most valuable player in question is, or rather was, wide receiver Anquan Boldin. It sure as heck wasn’t quarterback Joe Flacco.

But when the dust settled after the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory, it was Flacco that got paid – a six-year contract worth $120.6 million – and Boldin that got dissed. Because of salary cap issues, the Ravens couldn’t raise Boldin’s $6 million annual salary. But they didn’t have to ask the man to take a $2 million pay cut either.That’s a pay cut of 33 percent. Show of hands: how many of YOU would take a 33 percent pay cut after doing excellent work?

By every demonstrable measure, Boldin had an excellent season. Without him, the Ravens don’t win the Super Bowl. Without Boldin, the Ravens don’t even make it to the Super Bowl, much less win the thing. I’ll beat this dead horse one more time. (I would say one last time, but the truth is I’d probably be lying.) Let’s go back to the regular-season game in which the Ravens played the San Diego Chargers.

The Ravens trailed by three late in the fourth quarter. The Chargers were giving them quite a smack-around and the Ravens faced a fourth and 29. Flacco tossed a pass to running back Ray Rice, who was just a wee bit beyond the line of scrimmage. That means Rice had to run a good 25 to 28 yards to make that first down.Rice eluded tacklers for about 10 to 15 yards. With about another 10 to 15 yards to go for that first down, a Chargers tackler zeroed in on him before being taken out by a Ravens blocker.

Who threw that block that sprung Rice for that final 15 yards. Check the tape, it was Boldin.

The Ravens used that first down to eventually tie the game and win it in overtime. Without that victory, they finish the season at 9-7 and probably don’t even make the playoffs.

Now I understand National Football League salary cap issues. I knew that some Ravens, once Flacco got paid, probably wouldn’t be suiting up for the 2013 season.

I knew that one of those Ravens might well be Boldin. What I didn’t know was how ridiculously and egregiously the Ravens would diss Boldin in the process.

Lesson number one for Ravens management – who, believe me, are of the type that inspired the observation that “the first myth of management is that it exists” – you NEVER ask anyone to take a pay cut for excellent work.

Not for one percent. Not for five percent. Not for 10 percent. And you sure as hell don’t ask excellent performers to take a 33 percent pay cut.

Lesson number two: you don’t trade away excellent players for low-round draft choices. The Ravens traded Boldin to the San Francisco 49ers for a sixth-round draft choice.

You read that correctly: a sixth-round draft choice. What Ravens management is telling us is that their most valuable and productive player of the 2012 season was essentially worth no more than a sixth-round draft pick.

One of two things typically happen to sixth-round NFL draft picks. Either they don’t make the team, or they end up riding the bench. What does it tell us about Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti and general manager Ozzie Newsome that they think Boldin is nothing more than a scrub?

I hope Bisciotti and Newsome aren’t feeling their oats and thinking that the Ravens’ Super Bowl XXLVII victory is because of anything they did. The decision to diss and then trade Boldin tells us exactly what happened.

The Ravens won Super Bowl XXLVII in spite of, not because of, Bisciotti and Newsome.