The Washington Post quoted Philadelphian City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, a Democrat who represents the area of southwest Philadelphia in which the mass murder occurred, though possibly in a way she might regret:

Philadelphia City Council member Jamie R. Gauthier (D), who represents areas where the shooting occurred, described her district as “under siege” by gun violence.

“It creates a situation where mostly Black and Brown people can’t be in their neighborhood enjoying summer weather. Kids — anyone — enjoying their block should not live in fear of being shot and killed,” she said Tuesday.

Now that Democrats control the state house for the first time in 12 years following last November’s election, Gauthier said some movement on gun control legislation has started. However, any house bills would still face opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.

“In Pennsylvania, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the cities and outside of that, you have a lot of rural areas that don’t look like us and don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence — and don’t have the same motivation to really cut off access to these types of weapons,” she said. “We have a long way to go to get these kinds of weapons off the street.”

“(D)on’t look like us” means ‘are mostly white,’ or so I inferred, rather different from the Kingsessing neighborhood in southwest Philly. that’s fairly innocuous. But then we get to “don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence,” and it raises the obvious question: why does Miss Gauthier’s district, why does her city, have “issues with everyday gun violence” when so much of Pennsylvania outside of Philly does not?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!

The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.

Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.

Councilwoman Gauthier was born in Kingsessing; she more than represents the third councilmanic district, but this mass killing was in her home neighborhood. She knows it, and has told the truth about it, however inadvertently, so it has to be asked: why is her neighborhood, why is her city, so much worse than the rest of the Keystone State?

Carbon County, 2022 population of 65,460, where I lived before retirement, has had exactly zero murders this year, and a high, for them, number of killings in 2022, two. My former home county has plenty of woods, and there are a lot of hunters there. I remember stopping at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on my way to work, when buck season began, and I’d see plenty of deer hunters, including some teenagers, in their camouflage gear, and with their weapons in their trucks and Jeeps, and never worried about it in the slightest. Everyone I knew in Jim Thorpe had a firearm of some type, but, shockingly enough, we weren’t killing people at anywhere close to the rate of the City of Brotherly Love.

The Democratic ‘leaders’ in Philly have long been whining that state law does not allow the city to pass and institute gun control laws which are stricter than those of the Commonwealth as a whole, but that begs the obvious question: if the homicide rate in Philly is the fault of the state’s gun control laws, why don’t we see homicide rates across Pennsylvania like are the case in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?

Dear Councilwoman Gauthier: the problem isn’t the laws, but the rotten people in your neighborhood, the people you represent.
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