Salon senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte moved to South Philadelphia sometime in early 2019, but unless she never listens to the local news — always a possibility, given that she never writes on it — she has to have noticed the tremendous homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love.^[1]One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love? As of the end of Wednesday, June 23^rd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported 262 homicides. 262 murders in 174 days so far is 1.506 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to, if that average is maintained, 550 for the year.^[2]With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming. Philadelphia’s record is 500, during the crack cocaine drug gang wars of 1990, with last year coming in in second place with 499.

At the end of June 23^rd last year, there had been ‘only’ 190 homicides in the city, so this year’s number is 37.37% higher than 2020.

How Democratic is Philadelphia? Joe Biden carried Philadelphia County 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%)

Unless something changes pretty drastically, 2021 isn’t just going to set the record, but blow it out of the water. And remember: the long, hot summer has just begun.

So, what is leading to all of this mayhem? According to Miss Marcotte, it ain’t the bad guys, but those inanimate guns!

oe Biden is right about the rise in crime: Blame guns — not police or protesters — for the violence

Conservatives are using crime as cover for ugly race-baiting, but their own lax gun policies are the real culprit

By Amanda Marcotte | June 23, 2021 | 1:11PM (EDT)

Violent crime is on the rise and it’s making Republicans happier than a fire sale on wraparound sunglasses.

Conservatives will find any excuse to indulge in their favorite sport: racist fear-mongering. The current uptick in violent crime fulfills their desire to use police to terrorize and stigmatize people of color while spinning it as merely in the interest of “public safety.” (Which is especially rich coming from the same people who left hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of COVID-19 rather than accept emergency pandemic measures.) And boy, they’re throwing themselves into the scare tactics with a relish usually reserved for sharing grammatically confusing memes on Facebook.

As the AP reported earlier this month, Republican politicians across the country are using rising crime rates as an excuse to pass laws aimed at suppressing Black Lives Matter protests and at protecting police budgets from re-evaluation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on June 11 blaming crime on “radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces,” which is, at best, a wild exaggeration of what have largely been efforts to redirect funds to crime prevention. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, falsely accused Democrats of supporting “the dangerous idea of defunding the police.”

Now, we noted, just yesterday morning, that very white, very liberal Portland, Oregon, had cut its police budget enough that the department was 150 officers under strength, and according to Portland Police Department numbers, the city is on pace for 92 murders this year, shattering 1987’s record of 70. With a city population of 662,549, that would give the city a murder rate of 13.89 per 100,000 population. How liberal is Portland? Joe Biden carried Multnomah County 367,249 (79.21%) to 82,995 (17.90%).

Just two days prior to that, we noted that Austin, Texas, where Miss Marcotte lived before her boyfriend and she moved to Brooklyn, had slashed its police budget by ¹/₃. Austin is the most liberal city in Texas; Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%).

Our deadliest city, St Louis? As of June 22^nd, there had been 88 murders in the Gateway City, and 82 of the victims, 93.18%, were black. Of the 36 known killers of those 88 dead black people, all were black. Joe Biden carried the city by 110,089 (80.85%) to 21,474 (15.77%).

So, unless those inanimate guns are just leaping into the air by themselves and shooting people, those guns are seemingly leaping into the hands of Democrats.

Miss Marcotte claims that, since the rise in the homicide rate is seemingly everywhere, with no distinct differences between places like Austin, where the police have lost a third of their funding, and other big cities, where the funding drops have been significantly less, the increase in the homicide rate cannot be attributed to defunding. But then she goes on:

The sociological reasons for the rise are still ambiguous, though there is little doubt that the pandemic contributed by adding economic and social stress, while also depriving young people of jobs and school opportunities that keep them out of trouble. Pfaff also suggests there may be a reason to believe that rising tensions between police and communities contribute, if only because people are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement they see, for good reason, as oppressive. If that relationship “deteriorates significantly,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis-Missouri, told Salon’s Igor Derysh in February, “that simply widens the space for street justice to take hold.”

Well, yes, that’s true enough, but it undermines her other points. She claimed that crime, overall, had dropped, and the violent crime rate had spiked only modestly. As I have previously noted, there are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals.

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

So when I read that other crime has decreased, I just don’t believe it. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime; it’s a crime committed primarily by people who have committed other crimes. When you read about a murder who was caught — and the police actually catching killers is getting progressively worse — you almost always read that the killer was legally barred from owning a firearm, or that he was carrying it illegally. Noting Miss Marcotte’s own statement that people are less willing to cooperate with the police, it stands to reason that crimes of reporting would be reported less.

After a few paragraphs in which the author ties the existence of illegally purchased or possessed guns to the existence of legally owned firearms, she gives us her solution:

The surest way to reduce murder rates is to get guns out of people’s hands.

Miss Marcotte’s biggest issue has always been abortion, but it’s certainly not the only right she cherishes. She frequently and loudly exercises the rights she believes she should have. She exercises her freedom of speech and of the press in her tweets, her articles in Salon, and other places. She exercises her right to use contraception. She has exercised her right of peaceable assembly to join the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Philadelphia. An avowed atheist, she exercises her right not to go to church. She will defend those rights to, well, to the death is the common phrase, but I can’t say that she’d go that far.

But the right she has and chooses not to exercise — and, to me, it is actually choosing to exercise the right in the negative^[3]Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press. — is her right to keep and bear arms. Because it is a right she chooses not to keep and bear arms, she doesn’t think that anyone else should have that right. Her solution to the illegal use of firearms is to take guns away from people who have not used their weapons illegally.

Miss Marcotte is but a small, if vocal, part of the left in America. Very much proclaiming her own views, she, like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, doesn’t like hearing other people expressing their own. The left just plain don’t like anyone exercising their constitutional rights in a way of which they don’t approve.

Me? I support Miss Marcotte’s right to choose to buy, or not buy, a firearm. I support her right to write, or not write, whatever she chooses. I support her right not to go to church, and I even support her right not to read what I happen to write. Our freedoms are both positive and negative; we may choose to do or not do something as we please.

The left used to support that, but that was a long, long time ago.