I really, really, really wanted to write about something else this morning; I’ve spent so much time on the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia that I felt in a rut.

Then the Memorial Day weekend happened, and I had two stories entitled Killadelphia in a row, as the blood flowed freely in the city’s streets. A three-day holiday weekend, commemorating American soldiers who dies in wars to protect our liberty, our freedom, and our country’s interests abroad, was celebrated by killing other Americans, civilians, because the City of Brotherly Love has run out of that love, because civilization has degenerated into savagery. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer couldn’t ignore it!

A 10-year-old boy and his father were killed in a drive-by shooting on a holiday weekend marred by gun violence

Thirteen people were killed in the city over the holiday weekend, police said.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Monday, May 30, 2022

A Philadelphia man and his 10-year-old son were killed in a drive-by shooting on Sunday during a holiday weekend that saw 13 homicides in the city, police said.

Except, of course, that’s not how the math works. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page told us, Friday morning, that there had been 194 people murdered through 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 26^th, but this morning has been updated to 209, through 11:59 PM on Memorial Day. While my degree is not in mathematics, the last time I heard 209 – 194 = 15, not 13.

I saw no reports of homicides on Friday, May 27^th, although, since the Police Department does not update statistics on Saturdays, a couple could have happened.

Or, a couple of people shot earlier, but initially survived, could have died from their wounds.

Gerald “Jerry” Parks, 38, and his son Jamel were headed home from a barbecue and had just parked near their home in Wissinoming about 10:30 p.m., police said, when a vehicle pulled alongside their car and someone fired a volley of shots.

“I came outside, and they were saying somebody was shot. So I went to see if it was his car — and it was,” the child’s mother, Vanessa Frame, told 6ABC News. “And he was just in there. Just lying there. … I grabbed my son, and he just was like — [you] could clearly see he was gone,” Frame said.

Inspector D.F. Pace said more than a dozen rounds were fired from two separate weapons, striking the father and son multiple times as they sat in the car in the 2100 block of Carver Street, near Torresdale Avenue.

Police gave no motive for the shooting and no arrests had been made.

OK, let’s tell the truth here, the police know the motive, at least in general terms. This was clearly a premeditated hit, so the gunmen, or perhaps someone who hired them, had a ‘beef’ with Mr Parks, and they settled it in what has become the Philadelphia way: fire away!

The only thing that makes this story news is that Mr Parks’ 10-year-old son was killed as well, pretty much as, to put it unsympathetically, collateral damage.

At 6:38 p.m Monday, a 25-year-old man was killed in a shootout at 17^th and Oxford Streets in North Philadelphia, authorities said. Police recovered 68 shell casings and also recovered a pistol and a rifle. Police made no arrests.

A “shootout,” huh? If the 25-year-old gentleman was killed in a gun battle, that tells us one thing: he was just as much of a bad guy as the men who killed him, and was walking around the city, packing heat himself.

17^th and Oxford isn’t exactly the worst neighborhood in Philly. Part of the cleanup of the old combat zone around Broad Street, near Temple University, some of the buildings have been refurbished, and some torn down and replaced with newer construction.

Then again, there is, or at least was 10 months ago, this building at that intersection graffitied up with “Kill the KKKop in your head”, so perhaps sprucing up the place physically didn’t mean sprucing it up socially.

We noted, back in February, George Soros’ stooge District Attorney, Larry Krasner, bovine feces claim that yes, homicides had been increasing, but, overall, crime was going down. There are two different types of crime, crimes of evidence, and crimes of reporting. Murder is a crime of evidence, because it leaves a dead body, and dead bodies get found. It’s hard to dispose of 100 to 300 pounds of dead and decaying flesh and bone and muscle and fat unless someone has carefully planned how to do it.

But assaults, or robberies, or rapes? Assaults and rapes can be crimes of evidence, if the victim goes to the hospital for treatment. But if the victims is not seriously enough injured to seek medical care, or if the rape victim chooses not to report it, then those crimes become crimes of reporting, and if they are not reported to the police, then as far as the police are concerned, as far as the statistics measure, the crimes never happened. Yet, while the statistics vary, it seems that fewer than half of all “violent victimization” are reported to the police, and rape appears to be the least reported crime. According to the survey, only 32.5% or rapes or sexual assaults were reported in 2015, and that dropped to 23.2% the following year.^[1]See Table 4. In a city, in communities, in which the vast majority of crimes which are known about go unsolved, why would people who are already distrustful of the police, people who have low expectations that the crimes will actually be solved, even bother reporting the crimes? Why would residential burglaries be down 22% but non-residential burglaries up 15%? Same crime, just different targets, but different conditions for the owners. Commercial owners who find their businesses burgled^[2]Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. have a far greater possibility of getting an insurance recovery, while residents do not, so of course the victims of commercial burglaries are more likely to report the crimes. Residential burglaries? With so many unsolved crimes, and distrust of the police high, reporting such a crime must seem mostly useless to people.

Aggravated assault? The total number of aggravated assaults increased 14.58%, using the city’s own numbers; it’s simply that the tools used were more heavily included firearms than before.

But carjackings do get reported, because it’s the usually violent theft of something large, potentially recoverable, and usually worth tens of thousands of dollars to the victims, victims who may still be paying for their vehicles.

The Inquirer did report this:

Carjacking continues to plague Philadelphia. Here’s how young carjackers say they get away with it.

Through May 25 this year, 546 carjackings were reported in Philadelphia — more than in all of 2020. If this pace continues, the city will approach 1,400 carjackings, a 500% increase over 2019.

by Ellie Rushing and Dylan Purcell | Tuesday, May 31, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

Also read: Robert Stacy McCain: Carjacking while pregnant

The first time they carjacked, they were mostly bored.

The sun was setting, and two teens, then 15 and 19, were riding SEPTA with two other friends, and had nothing to do. They were sick of taking public transportation, they said, and wanted an easier way to get around.

“Someone said let’s go get a johnny,” said a West Philadelphia teen, using Philly slang for a stolen car.

I wonder: does that come from the johnny cab in Total Recall?

There’s a lot more at the original, but if you read it, you cannot but think that, while some of the carjackings are planned out by ‘professionals,’ for economic reasons, a lot of them are simply teenagers who have no cultural values against theft, against violent crime, against possibly having to shoot someone, teenagers who just don’t plan anything, but act on spur of the moment inspiration.

The majority of those arrested for carjacking are 20 or younger, and Philadelphia police and young people themselves say the crime is partly a fad fueled by social media, with some teens touting their stolen cars to seem tough.

The good people of Philadelphia are scratching their heads at all of this, wondering how all of this can happen. The editors of the Inquirer blame guns, and poverty, and others blame the lax law enforcement of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw. But that’s not the case; the blame for the crime wave in Philly falls on parents, and it falls on teenaged girls.

What? On teenaged girls? What kind of [insert slang term for the anus here] are you to suggest such a thing?

Well, I’ll tell you, and believe me, while it won’t be politically correct, it will be the truth.

What is the number one, most important thing on the minds of teenaged boys? Yup, you got it, teenaged girls, specifically getting into the pants of teenaged girls. Sex!

The cure for Philly’s ills lays in the choices made by the teenaged girls in the city, the choices as to whom they give away sex. When the teenaged girls are impressed by the bad boys, the ones carrying guns, the ones who act tough, the ones in street gangs, and give those bad boys sex, they encourage and enable the bad behavior which impressed them in the first place. When the bad boys get sex from the teenaged girls, the model of behavior is both rewarded and encouraged. The boys who stay in school, the ones who study hard and try to make something of themselves somewhere other than in the streets? If they aren’t getting rewarded for that behavior by the teenaged girls, or at least the hotter teenaged girls, then their behavior is discouraged, both for themselves and for the boys beginning to enter puberty, beginning to get interested in those girls.

Yes, that’s wholly sexist, terribly politically incorrect, but it’s also the truth.

There are three actors who need to get involved here. The community leaders — not the mayor, not city officials, but the leaders at the neighborhood level — need to talk to parents, and to the girls growing up. Parents need to recognize that yes, their daughters are probably going to have sex, and need to educate them, need to point out to them the value of boys who will eventually become men who will stick around, who will stay in school, who will get respectable jobs to support their families, as opposed to the street thugs who might seem all tough but stand a very good chance of not hanging around, of going to jail, or winding up stone-cold graveyard dead, the ones who will not be supporting any of the children they might sire.

And the churches. Parents, both parents, need to take their children to church, and churches need to reinforce the lessons that good parents try to teach their sons and daughters. Churches need to reinforce the apparently old-fashioned idea of men and women getting together in permanent families.

Community leaders, parents, and churches need to teach the lesson: a street-tough drug dealer can make six figures, he’s also likely to spend a whole lot of years behind bars, while a union electrician can make six figures in Philly, and keep making that income, year in and year out. The boys growing up need to learn the moral lessons that stealing other people’s cars, that shooting their enemies, is the wrong thing to do, for themselves as well as for others, so that they’ll never seriously consider doing those things, even if they think they can get away with it.

The last thing I want to do is to encourage pre-marital sex, but I am not stupid enough or naïve enough to believe that it does not occur, or that most teenagers won’t engage in it. But sex is, and always has been, a very powerful motivating force in human behavior, and channeling it into positive and societally beneficial relationships has been the basis for all of civilization. Whether you are Christian or Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist, you come from a religious heritage which has attempted to socialize the sex drive into paths which support families, support children, and support a social order in which people aren’t just killing each other over stupidity. Perhaps you do not believe in God, perhaps you are an atheist, but even if that’s the case, you ought to be able to see how religion throughout the ages, throughout the world, has been used as a civilizing force within our societies, a moral push which encourages people to do that which is not only right but socially beneficial.

Philadelphia has lost that, Chicago has lost that, and even our smaller towns and rural areas have, to some extent, lost that. The bad behavior might not lead to quite as much violence in areas where people are not packed together like sardines, but even in rural eastern Kentucky, where almost everybody has guns though killings are less frequent, we are awash in drug addiction and problems. A better moral compass will cure almost all of our problems.

“If it feels good, do it” has been the death knell of our civilization and our society, and a good part of the contraction of religious attendance. But our societies, societies around the globe, have worked very hard to channel the if it feels good, do it concerning sex into paths which are supportive of individuals, of families, and of society, and we have to get back to that again.

To fail to do that means a descent into barbarism, the barbarism we are already seeing in what is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love.