The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, or at least its website main page, was just full of stories about firearms. Soccer beat writer and website home page editor Jonathan Tannenwald wrote “Alejandro Bedoya leads Union protest against gun violence: ‘This ain’t American exceptionalism’: ‘It ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time,’ the Union’s captain said after his team wore T-shirts at Saturday’s game with the message ‘END GUN VIOLENCE.’” Breaking news editor and President of the News Guild Diane Mastrull wrote “2 women leaving a church funeral service were hit by stray bullets in Philly fatal shooting,” noting, almost as an aside, that there were three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday. She did, however, scrub the story of any reference to race, even though the Philadelphia Police reported the race of the victims in each report. In that, she was following what is quite obviously the newspaper’s editorial policy under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ and executive editor Gabriel Escobar’s orders.

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared that the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper as a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.” Those days are long gone!

But the Inquirer did publish a few stories which might not quite fit Miss Hughes’ and Mr Escobar’s editorial slant.

Justices to rule by summer in gun case with U.S. raw from mass shootings

With mass shootings in Texas, New York and California fresh in Americans’ mind, the Supreme Court will soon issue its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade

by Jessica Gresko, Associated Press | Thursday, May 26, 2022

WASHINGTON — With mass shootings in Texas, New York and California fresh in Americans’ mind, the Supreme Court will soon issue its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, one expected to make it easier to carry guns in public in some of the largest cities.

Given that the criminals have been “carry(ing) guns in public in some of the largest cities” already, it’s difficult to see how the anticipated ruling could make “carry(ing) guns in public in some of the largest cities” easier for anyone other than law-abiding citizens.

Already in an uncomfortable spotlight over a leaked draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade’s nationwide right to abortion, the justices also are facing a possible backlash from the guns case. In both cases the court could issue decisions that polls say would be unpopular with the majority of people in the United States.

“I think the court is heading into uncharted waters. I can’t recall the last time the Supreme Court ruled in so many cases likely to spark a strong political backlash,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on the court and gun policy.

Winkler predicted the recent shootings would not do anything to change the outcome in the guns case, where the court’s conservative majority has been expected to strike down a New York gun law. “Pro-gun justices are pro-gun,” he said, adding it is not likely that recent mass shootings have done anything to change that.

The author, Jessica Gresko of the Associated Press, wrote a very slanted and biased article. She characterized several Supreme Court Justices as “pro-gun,” rather than what they really are, pro our constitutional rights.

The Inquirer, of course, is very much opposed to our rights to keep and bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. But it seems that the public are not:

Gun sales and permits surged during the pandemic in Philly and Pennsylvania

In Philadelphia last year 600% more gun permits were issued than the year before, as sales continue historic highs.

by Max Marin, Ryan W. Briggs , and Dylan Purcell | Sunday, May 29, 2022

In Uvalde, Texas, a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school, after picking up two powerful, AR-15-style rifles ordered through an online seller shortly after his 18th birthday — something that would have also been perfectly legal in Pennsylvania.

Here, over the last two years, more residents have been arming themselves than at any point in the last few decades or more. In Philadelphia, plagued by violent crime, firearm permit applications soared to likely the highest they’ve ever been.

Gee, what a surprise! After Philadelphia, under Mayor Jim Kenney, George Soros’ funded ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, came within one killing of matching its all time homicide record in 2020, and then utterly smashed the record to pieces with 562 murders in 2021, is it any wonder that people think that they need weapons to protect themselves?

As we previously noted, Philadelphia magazine reported on this surge of applications more than two months ago.

In the city, the number of licenses issued in 2021 spiked by more than 600%, with 52,230 new carry permits. The year before: 7,444, according to an Inquirer analysis.

Statewide, gun sales surged in 2020 by 49% over the prior year, with a total of 1,141,413 firearms reported as either lawfully purchased or privately transferred, according to data from the Pennsylvania State Police. Licensed firearm dealers accounted for the vast majority of those transactions.

Those, of course, are the sales and transfers about which the Pennsylvania State Police are aware; those are legal sales and transfers. Given the Keystone State’s 2020 population of 13,002,700, 8.78% of Pennsylvanians bought a gun in 2020.

Notably, the state’s population decreased to 12,964,056 (-0.30%) in 2021, and a guesstimated 12,916,089 (-0.37%) this year. I wonder if the unchecked bloodshed in Philly has anything to do with that.

Pennsylvanians for the most part are not worried about the people who legally bought firearms, because they know that those aren’t the criminals. The Inquirer, in its consistent pursuit of stories to trash the police, hammered on, and released the name of, the police officer who (allegedly) shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, but did so during a pursuit which happened after young Mr Siderio, the son of two criminals, had first fired on the police with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun. The public are worried about young punks like Mr Siderio, the teenagers and 12-year-old boy charged with killing 70-year-old Chung Yan Chin during a violent carjacking, 17-year-old Latif Williams, charged with the murder of Samuel Collington, and 15-year-old Yazid West, charged with shooting two teenaged girls in a car near Temple University and a suspect in two other shootings. None of those punks could legally own or possess a firearm in Philadelphia, and those are the people about whom the public are concerned.

The stories about the Uvalde police taking no action to protect the students at Robb Elementary School can only hammer home to the public that the police cannot be counted on to protect their lives.

North Phillip Street, looking toward Allegheny Avenue, via Google Maps, August 2019. Note all of the row homes which have installed bars on their porches to keep the bad guys out. Click to enlarge.

And yet another murder in the city. Police reported a 49-year-old black man was shot in the back and killed at Phillip Street and Allegheny Avenue at 9:37 AM. That’s several blocks from the open air drug market at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, but still a rough area, with a lot of homes on Phillip Street showing that owners have effectively put themselves in jail, by locking in their porches with metal bars.

Then, at 1:45 PM in the alley behind the 6300 block of West Columbia Avenue, an as yet unidentified black male, approximately 18 to 21 years of age was shot multiple times, and pronounced dead at 1:58 PM at Temple University Hospital. This is a street in Overbrook Park, and it doesn’t look like a terribly bad neighborhood. Perhaps the people of Philadelphia who think that this stuff only happens in the bombed out neighborhoods ought to take a closer look.

That’s at least 13 people murdered in Philly in the last seven days. It’s more than one Robb Elementary School shooting over the last two weeks, but I’m guessing that none of the victims were killed by ‘assault rifles.’

That makes 199 people killed in Philly so far this year. With Monday being a holiday, the odds are pretty good that the City of Brotherly Love will hit 200 before the weekend is over.