Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Update on a Lexington killer Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn allows another killer a chance to get out of jail while still relatively young

On March 12th, we reported that Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn had ‘negotiated’ another lenient plea bargain arrangement for a murderer.

Xavier Hardin, mugshot from Fayette County Detention Center, dated June 15, 2021, and is a public record.

Lexington man who committed deadly Fayette Mall shooting reaches plea deal. Here’s why

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 12:19 PM EST | Updated: 1:06 PM EST

The man who shot and killed a 17 year old inside Fayette Mall in 2020 has reached an agreement with prosecutors to accept a conviction for manslaughter instead of murder, according to court records.

Xavier Hardin, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., after reaching a plea agreement earlier this week, according to court records. Hardin, who was 19 at the time of the incident, also injured two bystanders when he fired shots inside the mall on Aug. 23, 2020.

Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said Hardin’s plea agreement was reached through mediation and Bottoms’ family was in agreement with the plea deal. The plea agreement accounted “for the facts of the case,” Red Corn said, which included that “both the defendant and Kenneth were carrying handguns that day at the mall.”

“There were video recordings of their encounter, and the defendant raised a claim of self-protection,” Red Corn said. “Regardless of the defendant’s claim, he injured innocent persons and put others in harm’s way when (he) started shooting. This is another tragic example of why teens should not be carrying guns in the first place.”

There’s more at the original here. Naturally, what my late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal didn’t publish Mr Hardin’s photo, due to the stupid McClatchy mugshot policy, but The First Street Journal is not bound by that! Continue reading →

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Ihre Papiere, bitte!

As we have previously noted, with the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home. If you think that the government is not interested in your medical records, and would never actually check them, think again. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A digital COVID vaccination record is coming in Philly, but is there a need?

A digital vaccination card is coming to Philly, but not many places are asking for the record any more.

by Kasturi Pananjady and Jason Laughlin | Friday, May 27, 2022 | 9:09 AM EDT

Philadelphia is pushing ahead with an effort to issue digital vaccine cards to residents, though businesses and health experts say they may be irrelevant at this stage in the pandemic.

The digital record encrypts the same vaccination information found on paper cards in a QR code format that can be scanned by businesses and others seeking to confirm vaccine status.

“There is a value, but its uptake would be very limited,” said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “People don’t really use vaccination records much unless you travel outside the United States.”

The city is moving ahead with the system despite ending its vaccine mandate for indoor dining in February. It has no plans to renew any COVID-19 safety restrictions. It declined to say when the digital cards will be available, citing technical issues with the rollout.

Proof of vaccination, though, is useful for more than just access to indoor dining, said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the health department. Some businesses do still require customers prove vaccination, as do many employers and schools, Rankin said. The digital proof of vaccination would also be helpful as people get booster shots.

There’s more at the original, and I can’t just quote it all; that’s plagiarism and a copyright violation, but the article noted several points:

  • Philadelphia had planned an online portal for vaccination records even before the panicdemic.
  • People seeking their vaccination records must use a two-factor identification process, including a digital log-in which would send an e-mail or text message for authentication. If the system did not have an e-mail or cell phone number on file, the system wouldn’t work for that individual, so the city askedg vaccine providers to maintain up to date contact information in January.
  • Public health services been seeking a national vaccination database that physicians could access, but such nas not yet been created.

Some of the systems which would be used to scan the QR code in a digital vaccination record do not retain the information, but that does not mean that all of them do. You could ask the doorman who scans your code, but he might not actually know, nor do you have any way to verify that he’s telling the truth when he does answer.

It is, of course, for our own good, right? After all, COVID-19 was a serious public health emergency, right? So, naturally, those not vaccinated simply needed to be excluded from all of public life, right?

So, if “gun violence” is a “public health emergency,” the way the left keep telling us, then the same justifications used to infringe on our constitutional rights during the panicdemic will be available against people who own firearms, won’t they? Except, of course, that would only apply to law-abiding people whom the government know have firearms, not the thugs carrying them illegally.

Expect calls for a national firearms registry!

Political interest in a national record-keeping system sparked by the pandemic has recently waned. That’s in part because vaccinated people are still able to transmit the virus, making vaccination less critical as a tool to prevent COVID’s spread.

It’s something of a surprise that the Inquirer admitted what we already knew, that the various vaccinations, while they seem to mitigate the virulence of the disease, don’t appear to do much in preventing people from either contracting or spreading the virus. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Remember: this was during the first Xi Omicron variant, before there was any real spread of the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant, which is, supposedly, even more infectious.

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What would so-called ‘red flag’ laws actually do? Far more harm than good is what they would do!

How does one actually implement the so-called “red flag” laws? It’s clear that neither Salvadore Ramos nor Payton Gendron were reported to law enforcement prior to buying his weapons, despite having left significant warnings via social media.

Nikolas Cruz had many ‘encounters’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, but they always let him off with a warning. He assaulted a student in school, but the soft-hearted and soft-headed school board, eager to disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, declined to report that to law enforcement.

William Teach discusses foot-in-the-door gun control proposals.

If private citizens were unwilling to see Messrs Ramos and Gendron as serious enough threats to take some action, if the idiots in Broward County were unwilling to actually enforce laws already on the books, with what does that leave us? Nina Jankowicz and her Ministry of Truth scouring Twitter and Facebook, reading every message, trying to ferret out bad people? Perhaps some sort of government surveillance of email, looking for nut cases?

No, what we’ll have are people using the system to cause problems for their enemies, cheating wives or their boyfriends trying to get at husbands, beta males trying to take the alphas down a peg, gang members trying to get opposing gang members disarmed and into the ‘system,’ cheating husbands or their girlfriends trying to get cheated on wives checked on by the police, or just liberals trying a new form of ‘SWATting‘ against sensible people. How about #woke teachers or school administrators upset when they find out some of their students are hunters? We’ve already seen efforts to get physicians and their staffs to ask patients, especially children, if there are any guns in their homes! With the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home.

I was asked that question one time, and I responded that not only was it none of their business, but that I found the question intrusive and offensive.

Robert Stacy McCain talks about The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

In the end, they’re typical leftist ideas to get more and more government supervision of our lives, Minority Report thinking that we can somehow police impure thoughts of people who may not have committed any crime.

You think that’s alarmist concern? Look at the way the government tried to track people — ‘contact tracing,’ they called it[1]In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient … Continue reading — who tested positive for COVID-19, and tried to punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.

The left say that this is a minor thing, just something to keep us safer, especially after the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. But these ‘minor things’ are just more attempts to get their foot in the door, just another ‘minor step’ to achieve their eventual goal of disarming the public.

References

References
↑1 In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient testing support and/or limited public health resources, the following evaluation and monitoring hierarchy (Box 4) and the case investigation and contact tracing prioritization recommendations can be used to help guide prioritization. The hierarchy is based on the assumption that if close contacts listed in Priority 1 become infected, they could potentially expose many people, those at higher risk for severe disease, or critical infrastructure workers. If close contacts in Priority 2 become infected, they may be at higher risk for severe disease, so prompt notification, monitoring, and linkage to needed medical and support services is important.
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But the horse identified as a mare! Apparently, the rules are the same for horses and a horse's ass.

Shades of William Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who identified as a female, calling himself “Lia”!

Shoes from Herbager, French Derby winner, embedded in concrete along Main Street in Paris, Kentucky. Photo by D R Pico. Click to enlarge.

I am slightly familiar with Blood Horse magazine only because a friend of my mother’s worked there in the 1970s. This is the kind of publication that you’ll see around horse farms. In Paris, Kentucky, north of Lexington, with a lot of thoroughbred farms along Paris Pike between the two cities, you’ll see horseshoes of famous race horses embedded in concrete along the sidewalks.

Suit Alleges Stakes-Winning Broodmare Prospect is Male

Kept True competed against females in 14 races and won over $300,000.

By Dick Downey | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 | 6:26 PM EDT

A New York-bred stakes winner that sold for $150,000 at Keeneland as a broodmare prospect is actually a male, according to a lawsuit pending in Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington. Continue reading →

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Black lives don’t matter, at least not to credentialed media

While I have mentioned the censorship of The Philadelphia Inquirer previously, we don’t always get the evidence quite so directly.

Police Officer Miguel Torres, Badge Number 7191, reported on a shooting in Mantua:

16th District — Shooting Incident

35XX Fairmont Avenue on highway at 7L06 PM. Victim #1 – Black female 19 years old was shot 2X in the right side. She was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16S6. She is in stable condition. Victim #2 – Black female 34 years old was shot 2X in the right leg. She was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by EPW 1601. She is in stable condition. Victim #3 – Black male 59 years old was shot 3X in the right leg. He was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16S7. He is in stable condition. Victim #4 – Black male unknown age was shot multiple times in the right side. He was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16T1. He is in critical condition. Scene held, no arrest and no weapon recovered.

So, how did the Inquirer report the incident?

Gun violence across the city Wednesday also included a quadruple shooting in Mantua. At about 7 p.m., while walking on the 3500 block of Fairmount Avenue, a 19-year-old woman was shot twice in her right side, a 34-year-old woman was hit twice in right leg and a 59-year-old man was shot three times in his right leg. A 19-year-old male was shot multiple times in his right side,. All of the victims were brought to Penn Presbyterian, police said. Three were in stable condition, but the teenage male was in critical condition.

Police told reporters on the scene that the four victims were walking to a prom send-off party when they were shot, possibly by someone riding by on a bicycle, according to FOX29.

Reporter Rita Giordano cited Fox 29 News as her source, but the Fox 29 report did not state that the victims were transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, so Miss Giordano had to have a second source. The police report noted that each of the victims was black, something wholly omitted from the Inquirer article. Why does the Inquirer censor the news?

The 19-year-old male victim appeared to be the person specifically targeted when the “gunman rode past the four victims on a mountain bike and fired at least 9 shots from a semi-automatic weapon,” according to the Fox 29 News report. The other victims were simply struck by “stray bullets.” Continue reading →

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics How The Washington Post manipulates statistics to mislead readers

Screen capture of Washington Post headline, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The headline was dramatic: More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Read that, and you’d think that half the schools in America were being machine gunned down, which is, let’s be honest about it, exactly what the editors of The Washington Post want you to believe.

But what, exactly, does “experienced gun violence at school” mean? From their methodology:

To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school’s enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day.

So, if a firearm was discharged on school grounds during school hours, but no one was struck, 93% of the school’s enrollment “experienced gun violence at school.

  • One of the incidents shown by the Post was on November 15, 2021, when an armed 13-year-old boy in Poughkeepsie High School, in Poughkeepsie, New York, fired “several rounds in front of the school, striking multiple vehicles”, but neither killing nor injuring anyone. The Post counted that as 570 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
  • On November 19, 2021, at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado, “Teenagers exchanged gunfire in the parking lot, wounding three students.” The Post counted that as 1,940 students “experiencing gun violence at school,” even though this was a gun battle between gangs, and not an attempt to shoot up the school.
  • November 29, 2021, at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona, a 15-year-old boy shot the 16-year-old who had just sold him the gun in a school bathroom. While it was hardly an attempt to shoot up the school, the Post counts this a 2,400 students having “experienced gun violence at school.”
  • December 1, 2021 at Sam Rayburn High School, in Pasadena, Texas, a 21-year-old man fired a shot into the air while robbing a student on campus, with no one injured or killed. The Post counts this as 2,530 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • February 28, 2022, at Jonesboro High School, in Clayton County, Georgia, a student discharged a weapon in school, hitting nobody. The Post counts this as 1,282 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.

There are many, many more similar examples, of accidents, stray bullets, gang battles and one-on-one fights, things that make up the vast majority of the incidents compiled into the statistics, but which the editors hope you don’t read, which the editors hope the readers will conflate to thousands of Columbines or Marjory Stoneman Douglases.

Given that so many readers do not read closely enough, do not delve more deeply into the stories, the editors can reasonably hope that their propaganda is persuasive. Not lies, per se, but statistics compiled in such a way to have the effect of lies.

Here’s the money line:

The Post has found that at least 185 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 369 have been injured.

Remember: that’s 185 killed, and 369 injured, since 1999. Both of those numbers are lower than the number killed and injured in Philadelphia so far this year.

Screen capture of The Washington Post’s website main page, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by a misfit high school dropout who was bullied while he was in school due to a “childhood speech impediment” was certainly a terrible thing, but in practicing journalism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading rather than journalism, by publishing wholly sensationalized but nevertheless misleading statistics, the editors of the Post are pretty much lying outright in their attempt to push Congress into infringing upon our Second Amendment rights.

The Post had ten, ten! separate articles listed on their website main page on Wednesday morning, most geared toward a push toward unconstitutional gun control, because that’s what the editors do.

The Post, perhaps inadvertently, undermined its own gun control reasoning:

In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post’s analysis.

The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn’t like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.[2]Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?

Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that — often because of an adult’s negligence — dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.

In other words, most of the weapons used were legally purchased by other people, people with no criminal intent, and then taken by those who did have criminal intent in mind. The only way that ‘gun control’ stops that is if private ownership of firearms by the law abiding is banned . . . which is, of course, what the editors want anyway.

Supporters of dictatorial government always want a disarmed citizenry. Their fellow travelers in the credentialed media are only too glad to help.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?
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Sanctions against Russia go up in gas

It seems that the Europeans, who are angry, angry, angry! at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin aren’t angry enough to do without Russian natural gas. From The Washington Post:

Europe accepts Putin’s demands on gas payments to avoid more shut-offs

By Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 | 1:22 PM EDT

ROME — European energy companies appear to have bent to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that they purchase natural gas using an elaborate new payment system, a concession that avoids more gas shut-offs and also gives Putin a public relations victory while continuing to fund his war effort in Ukraine.

The system, which involves the creation of two accounts at Gazprombank, enables Europe to say it is technically paying for natural gas in euros, while Russia can say it is receiving payment in rubles — a requirement Putin imposed on “unfriendly” nations.

Putin’s insistence on rubles may be more about forcing European countries to scramble at his behest than about shoring up his country’s currency, some economists and energy experts suspect. European Union countries have been touchy about the notion they might violate their sanctions on Russia, and questions about the arrangement tested European unity, leading to weeks of chaos and contradictory guidance from Brussels. It also got countries talking about how much they still need Russian gas, even as they debate a Russian oil embargo.

Well, of course they need Russian gas! And they’ll continue to need Russian gas, especially as worsening economic conditions force reductions in investments on alternative energy sources. In the end, Mr Putin has them in a place in which their hearts and minds will follow.

But that also means sending money to Russia even as they condemn the Kremlin-launched war, sanction oligarchs and supply weapons to Ukraine.

Russia had already used strict capital controls and a massive interest rate hike to stabilize the ruble. With Europe now signaling that it will use the payment system as bills come due this week, the currency is strengthening all the more.

The system set up is a face-saving one, but it really doesn’t save a lot of face, not to anyone who has even a remote understanding of what is being done. The Europeans will pay their bills in euros, not the rubles President Putin had demanded, and then a special account at Газпромбанк will take the euros and convert them to rubles.

On February 24, 2022, the White House announced severe sanctions against Russian banks:

Today, the United States, along with Allies and partners, is imposing severe and immediate economic costs on Russia in response to Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine. Today’s actions include sweeping financial sanctions and stringent export controls that will have profound impact on Russia’s economy, financial system, and access to cutting-edge technology. The sanctions measures impose severe costs on Russia’s largest financial institutions and will further isolate Russia from the global financial system. With today’s financial sanctions, we have now targeted all ten of Russia’s largest financial institutions, including the imposition of full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions, and debt and equity restrictions, on institutions holding nearly 80% of Russian banking sector assets. The unprecedented export control measures will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, restricting Russia’s access to vital technological inputs, atrophying its industrial base, and undercutting Russia’s strategic ambitions to exert influence on the world stage. The impact of these measures will be significantly magnified due to historical multilateral cooperation with a wide range of Allies and partners who are mirroring our actions, inhibiting Putin’s ambition to diversify Russia’s brittle, one-dimensional economy. The scale of Putin’s aggression and the threat it poses to the international order require a resolute response, and we will continue imposing severe costs if he does not change course.

It appears, however, that “full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions” are somehow less important when it comes to Europe’s need for natural gas!

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The Field Negro and #BlackLivesMatter Do #BlackLivesMatter only when they are taken by a white guy?

There is a Philadelphia blogger named Wayne Bennett who writes a site called The Field Negro.[1]If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro. Several years ago, Mr Bennett had a box in his sidebar called Killadelphia, in which he kept track of murders in his hometown, though he ceased doing that a few years ago. Mr Bennett still maintains that blog, though he writes far less frequently than previously, with only three postings so far this month. Yes, he is fairly liberal, but I still used to enjoy reading his site, although it’s one which has almost totally dropped from my attention.

The City of Brotherly Love utterly destroyed its previous yearly homicide record with 562 killings last year, and if the totals are down 7.46% date-over-date as of last Sunday, as we pointed out yesterday that’s only because the gang-bangers’ marksmanship has suffered. The number of shootings in the city are almost the same — down 1.10% — and if the bad guys were as successful in their attempted murders as they were last year, the total number of killings would be just three fewer than the same date last year.

It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Philadelphia writer Amanda Marcotte blamed the Buffalo massacre on Tucker Carlson and other evil reich-wing Republicans. At least as far as I can tell, she never writes about murders in her adopted hometown.

From Mr Bennett, I expected better, but I didn’t get it. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro.
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Killadelphia All the News That's Politically Correct!

The WordPress software I use for The First Street Journal assigns numbers to posts with the same name; the system tells me that this is the 34th post entitled “Killadelphia”. That says something right there!

Robert Stacy McCain wrote too quickly:

The homicide total so far this year is 180 in “Killadelphia,” meaning that the city’s averaging about one homicide a day, but nobody seems to consider this an emergency, and Congress is sending billions to Ukraine.

If only it was just one homicide per day! The 180 murdered number was for Thursday, May 19th, the date for which that 180 total is accurate — the Philly Police do not update their statistics on Saturday or Sunday — was the 139th day of the year, meaning that the City of Brotherly Love is killing the brothers at the rate of 1.295 per day!

But, come Monday morning, and we get the update: there have now been 186 souls who have been sent early to their eternal rewards on Philly’s mean streets as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, May 22nd, upping that average to 1.310 per day. As of right now, the statistics project 520 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love for 2022.[1]Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of … Continue reading

As of the same date, 807 people had been shot in the city. Maybe the gang bangers had actually killed 180 people, but they tried to kill at least 807!

As of May 18th, ‘only’ 160 out of 180 homicides was committed by firearm; on the same day Philly reported 802 shootings, down from 807 on the same date in 2021. While homicides were down by 9.91%, shootings were down only 0.62%. Translation: the thugs are shooting at each other at about the same rate, but they have become poorer shots, killing only 19.95% of their intended victims.

Actually, it’s even lower than that, since we have no statistics on how many people were shot at, but missed completely.

Interestingly enough, The Philadelphia Inquirer actually reported on the weekend’s bloodletting, in a story which was linked on the main page of the newspaper’s website, which was yet another surprise to me! Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of homicides in 2021. I do this to account for the fact that homicides tend to increase as the weather warms up, and this approximates the trend as the year progresses. Other methods of doing this could be used. If I simply multiplied the current daily homicide number by 365, it would result in an anticipated homicide number of 478, but that doesn’t take into account the effects of warmer weather, nor does it seem anywhere like a reasonable number the way the trends are moving.