Why Can’t We Talk About the Murder Wave? Two years in, pols and media still deny crisis, dodge role of defund and decarceration During a weekly briefing last Monday, Philadelphia district attorney and prominent "progressive prosecutor" Larry Krasner sought to downplay the surge in violence his city has endured over the last two years. "We don't have a crisis of lawlessness, we don't have a crisis of crime, we don't have a crisis of violence," Krasner said. "It's important that we don't let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime." Those claims are at odds with the facts on the ground. Philadelphia has seen over 500 homicides this year, the most in 60 years; shootings, which began surging last year, remain well above pre-2020 norms. As former mayor Michael Nutter (D.) put it in a blistering op-ed, "I'd like to ask Krasner: How many more Black and brown people, and others, would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a ‘crisis'?" Krasner's comments, though, typify a rhetorical approach adopted by prominent politicians, think tanks, and the media amid a record surge in homicides across the country. Since murders began rising in the wake of last summer's anti-police protests, progressives have sought to discount or otherwise wave away the spike and conspicuously avoided discussing the role of the diminished criminal justice system. This wariness reflects a progressive fear of "tough on crime" rhetoric but is likely to cost them electorally—if it has not already. Many have followed Krasner's approach, downplaying the surge as "just" a homicide spike. In June, for example, the Guardian published a "factcheck" of the "‘crime wave’'narrative police are pushing," insisting that the increase was really only in murders and adding that "Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago." A recent report from Democratic think tank Third Way similarly emphasized that "contrary to the media narrative, overall crime decreased in 2020 compared to 2019," only belatedly noting the record increase in homicides and gun violence.
We can certainly talk about the major spike in gun violence and gun homicide all across America, and we should. This spike is in all of this gun violence comes at a time of flat or decreasing rates in other areas of crime, ie property crime. And the reason for this is there are too many guns floating around in America.
People who allow their guns to be stolen from trucks and homes etc. in the suburbs fuelling this. Time for some serious punishments for anyone losing guns because they were too cheap and lazy to keep them secure. Your gun, your crime (maybe time.. Something 80s era catchy anyway).
Kind of lazy thinking on your part. Let’s say you have water leaking into your living room from the ceiling. Do you spend your efforts only mopping up the water in your living room, or do you make an effort to find where the leak is coming from and repair it?
I'm pretty sure they get guns stolen from vehicles there as well. If you choose to be a member of the 2nd amendment's militia, it follows there should be military punishment for mishandling and losing your weapons.
Most gun owners are not the problem! But that is neither here nor there in this conversation. Why did you bring up “rural gun owners?”
Because the thousands of murders every year are in the cities, almost all black on black. There needs to be a legal way to scour those neighborhoods for guns.