Another holiday weekend, another spike in big-city shootings
It's almost like clockwork. A holiday weekend comes along, and violent crime in Democrat-controlled cities spikes. During this past Memorial Day weekend, 30 people were killed and about 100 injured in America's big cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. This was a holiday where we were supposed to be remembering soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice, not adding to the list of the dead.
While the media are quick to jump on mass shootings, as happened in Buffalo and Uvalde, they are one-time events in those cities. On the other hand, weekends where a dozen or more people are killed in a major city are ignored. Why? It would seem to feed into the "if it bleeds, it leads" narrative of the media.
Those killed in major cities are largely people "of color." Where are the cries of racism as the media did with Uvalde, saying the police would have gone in sooner if the children had been white?
Many of those killed in the cities are innocent non-white children. This past weekend, a 9-year-old boy and his father were sprayed with bullets in their car as they came home from a cookout in Philadelphia. They were among 15 people killed in the city over the holiday weekend.
Where are the reporters claiming that the government doesn't care about the children? In Chicago, where nine people were killed over the weekend and 47 injured, a group of citizens were commemorating the anniversary of another teen's death outside an elementary school. A gunman opened fire on the crowd, and a 16-year-old was among the wounded.
Sadly, it appears that the media need a lot of blood to spill at once from gunfire to care about an incident. The more people shot at once, the better it is for their numbers. They can work people into a frenzy and politicians react to these outlying events as if they are the norm. Meanwhile, they fail to see the trend right in front of their faces. It is like the story of how to cook a frog. You put the frog in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and before long, it's too late for the frog to escape, and it is cooked.
That is what is happening in these cities. Crime is increasing, not in incidents where dozens are shot at once, but where one or two people are shot. Over and over again, these incidents happen. It's the heat slowly turning up. Now we're reaching the point in many cities where there is a massive problem that hasn't been addressed.
The other thing is that the incidents in places like Chicago and New York show that the media's and Democrats' answer to the problem doesn't work. They want you to believe that taking away guns will solve the problem. Well, the big cities have some of the strictest gun control laws around. They also have the worst problems with shootings.
It's not the guns or the laws. The problem is the people. We need to address what is driving people to shoot, stab, and run cars into other people. It is doubtful that will happen, because the problem might very well be the media and politicians who are doing what they can to drive wedges among people, make them afraid of each other, and drive them to the point of needing to do something.
You don't hear them talking about taking away their First Amendment rights to speech to control violence, but you do hear them say that about the Second Amendment. Gun control hasn't worked. The more they pass laws, the worse it has gotten. It's time to look for an answer that works and not keep posturing.
Michael A. Letts is the CEO and founder of In-VestUSA, a national grassroots non-profit organization helping hundreds of communities provide thousands of bulletproof vests for their police forces through educational, public relations, sponsorship, and fundraising programs.
Photo credit: Kat Wilcox, public domain.