Every once in a while, I come upon something which leaves me shaking my head. This is from John Hamasaki on Twitter. Mr Hamasaki is saying, basically, that in order to live in an urban environment, you must simply accept being a crime victim!

Mr Hamasaki is saying that a loss of “thousands of dollars” is pretty much just something you have to expect, and living in the suburbs, living somewhere more reasonably safe, shelters people so very much that they just aren’t tough enough for “city life.”

Of course, it is hardly just a “property crime” problem, as though the loss of property for which people worked hard to obtain — something else that’s part of “city life” — is mostly a nothingburger. Car break-ins have surged dramatically in Mr Hamasaki’s home town, but he doesn’t care. Catalytic converter theft is becoming more and more common, especially in states where emissions testing is required as part of an annual inspection, and they can cost up to $3,500 to replace. If you live in Philadelphia, where the median household income is $52,649, that’s a big chunk of change, though as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, perhaps it’s not quite as big a chunk of change for him. As a candidate to replace ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he had the support of the same ‘progressive’ allies — translation: soft on crime — as the recalled Mr Boudin.

Car thefts have increasingly become carjackings, because newer vehicles require a separate key fob for the vehicle to start, and the easiest way to get that is to hijack the car while the owner is present with the fob. Of course, carjackings are robberies by force, most frequently armed carjackings in which owners are confronted with a gun in their faces.

The bad guys don’t always stick with simple larceny. The crime wave which really got started in 2020 is a huge murder rate as well. Mr Hamasaki believes that you’ve got to be tough to live in the city? Well, in Pennsylvania, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which did not include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh increased by 1.18% between 2018 and 2021, while in Allegheny County — Pittsburgh — it jumped 33.77%, and in Philly, a whopping 59.21%. 54.72% of all murders in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia, which has just 12.37% of the commonwealth’s population. With 78.11% of the state’s population, the counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw only 33.30% of the killings.

Mr Hamasaki complained that those of us who complain about unchecked crime simply hate cities. No, it’s what our major cities have become that people hate. But when kids get gunned down near their schools in targeted gang hits, and city parents refuse to send their kids to those schools, it’s people in the cities themselves who are concerned and scared. When applications for concealed carry permits more than sextupled in Philly, it’s not because people aren’t ‘tough enough’ for ‘city life,’ but because they’re just plain scared.

Robert E Howard, the 1930s author of the Conan stories, wrote in the Tower of the Elephant, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Mr Hamasaki appears to be sanctioning the new savagery in our cities, without realizing that it can get your skull split, in the more modern form of getting your brains blown out by a Glock 9mm.