Meeting of the minds?

Liberals advocate gun control. Conservatives are focused on crime control that may or may not involve bans on specific types of firearms or ammunition. And never the twain shall meet.

Or could they?

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. offers a point of potential agreement. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, he explores the question: Why is Chicago, with very strict gun-control laws, a veritable shooting gallery, while New York, also with very strict gun-control laws, is relatively safe? One day late last year, readers will recall, New York actually went through a whole day without a single major crime — no murders, no rapes, no muggings. Chicago, meanwhile, averaged about three murders every two days in 2012.

Conservatives often say criminals don’t care about gun laws and are always able to get a firearm if they feel they need one. That isn’t any less true of New York criminals than it is of Chicago criminals. So why the huge disparity in gun crimes in the two cities? Simple: New York has a stop-and-frisk program, in which police proactively stop gun-toting thugs from committing crimes, and Chicago doesn’t. Interestingly, liberals hate stop-and-frisk, even though it takes guns off the streets and curbs murder rates. The New York Civil Liberties Union has tried vigorously to get a court to ban the practice.

Mr. Jenkins explains:

No law perhaps can stop somebody with no criminal record and no public history of mental illness from acquiring a gun to carry out a mass shooting. We’re not quite ready to give up on the Adam Lanza problem, but the Chicago problem is solved in principle, requiring only a willingness to inflict on certain communities the indignity of stop-and-frisk along with very high incarceration rates for illegal weapon possession (including people, let’s face it, who have good reason to fear for their lives and to carry a gun for self-protection).

Stop-and-frisk works; nobody denies that. Some people do believe it is racially unequal — the majority of suspects grabbed by New York police are black or Hispanic. But of course they are. It is well documented that black-on-black crime is much more prevalent than black-on-white (or white-on-black) crime. So why does the NYCLU object to police using proven techniques to protect black and Hispanic people from criminals?

So maybe if liberals agree to back off on their opposition to stop-and-frisk, conservatives will compromise on some of their hard-line stances on assault weapons, large-capacity magazines and background checks. And then we’d all be safer.