At some point, people have to admit that Amanda Marcotte is simply not a serious writer. Now, it could be said that I am not, either, given that no one is paying me to write, and I certainly do not have her audience, but for a political writer, living in Philadelphia, to not have mentioned — did she even notice? — that her adopted hometown had just hit, and then quickly passed, 300 homicides for the year, seems pretty unusual. Heck, even The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed! The image to the right, on which you can click to enlarge, is her Salon article archive, and, two days short of half a year after President Trump left office, it’s pretty much all Donald Trump, all the time.

But, her pain is understandable, because it has been shared by so many other leftist writers. The COVID-19 restrictions, on which so many on the left blamed the surge in homicides, are now almost all in the past, and the evil reich-wing Mr Trump is out of office. The Democrats control the White House, the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. In Pennsylvania, the Governor is a Democrat, as is the Mayor of Philadelphia, as is the City Council, and as is the city’s District Attorney, a man who greatly resists “mass incarceration,” and is so soft-on-crime that it ought to embarrass those who are soft-on-crime. The city’s only serious newspaper is an “anti-racist news organization,” and, let’s face it, virtually every liberal municipal policy imaginable has already been put into force in the City of Brotherly Love.

And yet, and yet, the good people of Philadelphia continue to shoot each other at a prodigious rate. At least 303 murders through 198 days yields a homicide rate of 1.5303 per day, and that works out to 558 or 559 (558.56, to be exact, but you can’t kill half a person) projected homicides for 2021. The record is 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, with last year’s 499 taking second place.

With all of the liberal policies that one could reasonably imagine being enacted, being in force, in Philadelphia, Miss Marcotte’s fellow city residents are still gunning each other down at appalling rates.

The Windy City has seen more total murders. The Chicago Tribune listed 364 homicides as of July 6^th, while the Chicago Sun-Times listed 33 more people bleeding out their life’s blood in the city streets between July 7^th and July 17^th. That’s 397 homicides in 198 days, 2.0051 per day, on pace for 732 for the year. Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s very liberal policies, combined with the completely Democrat controlled state government, don’t seem to have helped much.

However, if Chicago has seen more homicides than Philadelphia, with a population of 2,679,080, Chicago is 68% bigger than Philly, with 1,591,034 souls. Using the projected killings, Chicago projects to a homicide rate of 27.32 per 100,000 population, while Philly basically says, “Hold my beer!” 558 projected murders divided by 15.79 yields a homicide rate of 35.34 per 100,000!

But, pointing that out doesn’t fit Teh Narrative^[1]Not a typo: “Teh Narrative” was intentional. for the left, does it?

So, what is Teh Narrative? That this is a gun control issue, that it’s all about too many guns available, and so we must restrict the rights of law abiding citizens, as though the gang bangers are going to obey such laws.

But, if they tell the truth, that this isn’t a gun control problem, but a cultural problem, a specific cultural problem, virtually everything the left say about ‘racial justice’ and ‘systemic racism’ just falls apart.