The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has reported that 62 Philadelphians have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 20^th. While that number is lower than the same date in 2021 and 2022, it’s higher than in 2020, which saw 499 ‘official’ homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. And, as we have reported frequently, very few of those killings — other than the fatal shooting of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, allegedly by a privileged punk kid from Bucks County — have received much press coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the entire area.

Well, this morning, the newspaper I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer^[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. showed us just what shootings in the city are really important!

Off-duty FBI agent shoots dog in Center City

The incident occurred Monday evening on the 1500 block of Spruce Street. It was not immediately known if the dog survived.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, February 21, 2023 | 7:38 AM EST

An off-duty FBI agent shot a dog outside a Center City apartment building Monday, the FBI and Philadelphia police said.

Video posted on social media showed the aftermath of the incident on the sidewalk in front of the Touraine residential high-rise on the 1500 block of Spruce Street.

The special agent was walking a small dog when she encountered at least one other person walking two dogs, according to witnesses. A fight broke out involving the three dogs.

It was not immediately known if the dog that was shot survived. The FBI did not identify the agent.

At the end of the story:

Animal rights organization Revolution Philly is planning to protest the animal shooting in front of FBI headquarters at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

“This woman is a trained professional and a dog owner. Her first reaction shouldn’t be to shoot first,” said Revolution Philly organizer Tiffany Stair in a statement. “This is unacceptable and we are demanding that she be held accountable.”

The entire article, exclusive of the headline, subheading, photos, and byline, was 237 words over nine paragraphs, a lot longer than the usual reports of killings.

Polar Bear, the Great Pyrenees who is trying to move in with us.

We have two dogs ourselves, and a third, a 150 lb Great Pyrenees we have named Polar Bear, who is trying to move in with us. If we didn’t know his actual human, who lives ¾ mile away from us, we’d let him, but his real human loves him. Bear loves our dogs, and us, more than his human. So, yes, to us, the shooting of a dog is a bad, bad thing.

But, radically enough, the idea that a dog was shot, and perhaps killed — that part is as yet unknown — is generating a protest by Revolution Philly, while the 230 reported shooting victims^[2]Through February 20, 2023, including 46 fatally shot, plus 16 other murders, have mostly drawn nothing but the sound of crickets in the city, strikes me as a terrible thing.

Murder has simply been normalized in Philadelphia. Yes, Officer Fitzgerald’s senseless murder, by a punk who seemingly thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto in real life, has generated a lot of emotion in Philly, but for the most part, murder victims are mourned by their family and friends, and otherwise dismissed as just the same old, same old.

And why not? The city is governed by Democrats, has been since Harry Truman was President, and it seems as though preserving prenatal infanticide is the most important issue to them. It’s not as though teenagers don’t get that message, that people who are inconvenient can simply be disposed of, and it really isn’t a surprise that teenaged gangbangers and wannabes find life cheap enough that they will shoot people over the least provocation. The Democrats want to ‘explain’ the city’s killing spree as the result of poverty, racism, segregation, and community ‘disinvestment,’ but the 18-year-old white kid who (allegedly) killed Officer Fitzgerald was a privileged kid, living in his mother’s $1.2 million, 15-acre estate in Bucks County, who’d had one previous ‘contact’, a telephoned and internet reported bomb threat that got him one month’s probation in Bucks County, with law enforcement as a juvenile. For whatever reasons there were, his parents — who are now divorced, with a rumored, but unconfirmed by reliable sources, custody dispute — didn’t teach their son respect for life, and now he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars.

The death penalty, to which I am opposed anyway, is off the table: Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) has stated that he will not allow any executions to proceed as long as he is in office,^[3]In Pennsylvania, the Governor does not have independent authority to commute capital sentences, but can only do so with the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) has campaigned on, and vowed, never to seek the death penalty in any capital crimes committed while he is prosecutor. A photo of the alleged killer shows him in custody, leaning back, apparently awaiting questioning, with a posture that says, “What the f(ornicate) did I do? The rest of my life is trashed,” perhaps the best picture from this entire, sad episode. His father and mother — and the mother may be charged with a crime as well, for allegedly picking up her son after he called her for help — are going to have to live with that image, burned into their minds, wondering what they could have done differently.

There’s also a photo of him, as a juvenile, wearing a Biden-Harris t-shirt. Yeah, that’s a way not to rear your children right!

Philadelphia, and many other urban areas as well, are places in which human life has become cheap, and with life being cheap, life is being taken cheaply. When we have politicians telling us that human life before birth can be sucked out and destroyed, because some babies are just plain inconvenient, when we have parents supporting and voting for the politicians who support prenatal infanticide, we’re going to get more punks like the one who murdered Officer Fitzgerald. And we’re also going to get more punks roaming the streets of our major cities who apparently think nothing of blowing away rival gang members or girls that cheated on them or people who resist armed carjacking attempts or just look at them the wrong way.