Tag Archives: #Killadelphia

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Killadelphia: A Philadelphia councilcritter tells us the truth The problem isn't guns; the problem is her rotten constituents

Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D-Philadelphia). Photo from her city biography page and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

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!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

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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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Killadelphia: 12-year-old killed on his birthday

I have said it numerous times before: The Philadelphia Inquirer only cares about individual homicides when the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl.

Well, another innocent kid got killed:

Laron Williams Jr. was killed on his 12th birthday, struck by stray bullets in what may be a drug-related shooting

The Williams family, overwhelmed with grief, on Friday asked for the city’s prayers.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, June 23, 2023

Laron Williams Jr. was killed on his 12th birthday, struck by stray bullets while crossing the street.

It was 2 p.m., and the child — just a year away from becoming a teenager — walked 50 feet from his East Germantown house to pick up lunch from the sweet woman on Crowson Street who cooks for the neighborhood children. He said goodbye to her, then walked back across the 700 block of East Locust Avenue, headed for home.

But as he did, a man armed with a rifle jumped out of a car up the block and started shooting down the street. At least 11 shots were fired. Two men, ages 47 and 30, were struck multiple times, and fell on top of one another, police said.

And Laron — known to friends and family as “L.J.” — was caught in the line of fire. He was shot in the back multiple times, police said, and collapsed at the base of the stairs of the home he’d lived in all his life. His parents held him until police arrived, and officers rushed him to Einstein Medical Center.

There’s more at the original, but young Mr Williams did not survive. Khalif Chambers, 30, of Germantown, and Riley Darden, 47, of Norristown, the two adults, also perished.

A source with knowledge of the investigation, who was not permitted to speak publicly, said the shooting was tied to an ongoing drug feud.

Well, of course it was!

At least as of the time Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing published her article, the Philadelphia Police had not made any arrests in the case. Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore stated that at least one of the adult victims may have been deliberately targeted, but declined to address what the motive for the shooting had been.

Miss Rushing then gave readers four paragraphs about young Mr Williams life, before relating the statistics: 205 official homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, June 22nd:

  • Over 100 persons under 18 shot, including 14 aged 12 or younger
  • 18 minors killed
  • 14 children aged 12 or younger shot, at least seven of whom were struck by stray bullets
  • Roughly 12% of city’s shooting victims were under 18, a slightly higher percentage than during 2021 and 2022

Of course, Philly’s worn-out Mayor, Jim Kenney, had something to say on Twitter, something Miss Rushing noted, and something which was widely mocked. Mr Kenney has had 7½ years in office, and while he is combitching about the state legislature, under Mayor Michael Nutter, his immediate predecessor, the homicide numbers got lower during his term, and his last three years in office, they were under 300 for the year, under 250 in two of them, and the state’s firearms laws were no different then.

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Killadelphia: Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas begins with the truth, but then has to tell a huge lie to fit the newspaper’s requirements

There is at least a slight possibility that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas isn’t a totally Kool Aid drinking #woke progressive, as her Monday morning column told a very uncomfortable truth.

After a Philadelphia mother lost her son to gun violence, she blamed one person

This mother’s personal journey is part of the layered, complicated story of gun violence in our beleaguered city.

by Helen Ubiñas | Monday, June 5, 2023 | 6:01 AM EDT

Helen Ubiñas

Andrea Robinson is brutally honest about the person responsible for helping lead her son to the streets that eventually cost him his life: her.

When Robinson’s son, Jermaine, was gunned down in April 2021 at age 29, it was the bleak culmination of a life lived on the edge.

He got kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher. He stole his grandmother’s gun. He lied incessantly — moments all, Robinson recognizes now, that essentially followed in her footsteps.

“I planted all the seeds,” she said.

Further down:

Robinson grew up with her mom and older sister in North Philadelphia. She regularly attended school and church. But when she got pregnant with Jermaine at 15, she fell away from both and into a life in the streets with the father of her two oldest children.

Yup, 15-year-old, being reared by a single mother, becomes a single, underaged mother, and a high school dropout, herself. What could possibly go wrong?

She drove around in “johnnies” — stolen cars. She wore clothes and jewelry that had been shoplifted. All the while, she told her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Her life was a messy tangle of contradictions.

In other words, she became a criminal herself, and, surprisingly enough, her children followed the example she set.

His friends insist her son’s nickname — “Shooter” — referred to his rapping talents. But Robinson said she knows better, just as she knows that she must answer for her part in her son’s choices.

Miss Robinson is answering for her part in her son’s crimes by trying to tell her tale to others in North Philly, to try to get them to avoid the mistakes she made. And she’s answering for her part in her son’s crimes by having to live on while he’s stone-cold graveyard dead.

Then came the paragraph for District Attorney Larry Krasner:

After the age of 11, the longest Jermaine stayed out of the criminal justice system was the two years before his death. But he never served much time for drug and gun charges. After Jermaine could no longer convince his mother to believe his lies, he exploited a legal system that Robinson said often just “slapped him on the wrist.”

That’s darkly humorous: Mr Robinson was killed in April of 2021, so the two years before his death were while Mr Krasner and his social justice brand of prosecution infested the City of Brotherly Love, but if Mr Robinson received nothing but slaps on the wrist for his past crimes, those would have been primarily under District Attorneys Lynne Abraham Ford (in office 1991 through 2009) and Seth Williams (in office 2010 through mid 2017). Neither Mrs Ford, 82, nor Mr Williams, a now convicted felon, will ever be a prosecutor again, but perhaps, somehow, some way, Mr Krasner might be able to get it through his thick skull that cutting Mr Robinson didn’t, in the end, do him any favors. A guy with the street name ‘Shooter’ was shot himself, sent to his eternal reward by some other street punk.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas had to make sure we didn’t draw any politically incorrect conclusions from her story:

Whenever I write about gun violence, there are always those who insist on putting the blame on victims or the victims’ families. They trot out the myth of Black-on-Black criminality, despite white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that Black people do against other Black people. The reality is that the vast majority of most crimes are committed by a person of the same race as the victim.

Bovine feces. Through June 1st in Philadelphia, there have been a total of 150 fatal and 600 non-fatal shootings in the city. Of those, 107 of the victims killed were black males, 71.33%, and 407 of the wounded but surviving victims, 67.83%, were black males. For white males, there were 6 killed, 4.00% of the total, and 20 wounded, 3.33%.

According to the Census Bureau, only 40.8% of the city’s population are black, while 38.5% are while. If “white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that black people do against other black people,” shouldn’t we see the numbers of shootings by race being close to equal?

The St Louis Metropolitan Police Department is one of the few which breaks down the homicide statistics by race on a daily basis, something which would undoubtedly horrify Miss Ubiñas and her colleagues at the Inquirer, and in a city in which white residents outnumber blacks, 49.1% to 44.3%, 63 out of 72 murder victims, 97.5% were black, and 48 out of 51 identified murder suspects, 94.12%, are black.

Yeah, I know: math is racist!

Simply put, Miss Ubiñas was willing to tell the truth about Mr Robinson’s criminal life, and the responsibility that his mother took for rearing a very bad guy, but the Robinsons being black made her jump back and tell a big, fat, well-known, and obvious lie, because, horrors!, telling the truth alone would violate the newspaper’s mission to be an “anti-racist news organization.” That lying about the facts due to race might be racist in itself would just never occur to anyone in the Inky’s newsroom.

Philadelphia Inquirer circulation.

Could things like that have anything to do with the newspaper’s cratering circulation?

Maybe the newspaper could do something really radical like just tell the truth?

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Killadelphia: Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

I have not been posting nearly as many ‘math’ stories about the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love this year, because that math is so different.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 165 total homicides through 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 24, while the website Broad + Liberty has the total at 168. The 24th was the 144th day of the year, which leads to a homicide rate, using the ‘official’ PPD number, of 1.1458 homicides per day, on pace for 418 murders for the entire year.

Of course, that ignores the normal increase in homicides during the long, hot summer!

The number of homicides is 12.23$ lower than the same day in 2022. If we multiply that over the course of the year, that would yield a total homicide number for the year of 452.87, certainly a vast improvement over 2022’s 516 killings. Doing the same math, using 2021’s record-setting pace, the math works out to 450.15 homicides.

But then I look at 2020’s official homicide total of 499 — though there’s reason to believe that 502 is the correct figure — and the math works out quite differently. The current numbers are 12.24% higher than 2020’s homicide pace, which works out to 560.10 murders for 2023.

So, why is this significant? Because today, May 25th, is the third anniversary of the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. The idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests led to more black people being killed!

The death of Mr Floyd was hardly the only tragedy of 2020, as the COVID-19 panicdemic[1]No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been. hit, the economy was trashed, and our civil rights unconstitutionally restricted.

But life has returned to (mostly) normal now, and with the numbers working out as they do, I have to wonder: absent another monumental stupidity like we saw three years ago, could Philadelphia see well under 500 homicides this year? Is something around 450 a reasonable projection?

References

References
↑1 No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Sometimes, reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t really pay attention to their sources. Dylan Purcell wrote:

Through midnight Friday there were 155 homicides citywide, a 14% decline from the same date last year.

Well, that’s what the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page said on Saturday, but, as the website states, the figures are only updated Monday through Friday during normal business hours. The 155 figure is actually from Thursday, May 18th, but Mr Purcell was apparently unaware of that. Since Mr Purcell describes himself as “a local investigative reporter specializing in data and documents that expose wrongdoing”, one would think that he’d understand his data sources better.

And I note that the template still states that the percentage change is compared to 2021, but it’s actually the change compared to 2022.

Multiple weekend shootings in Philly leave four dead, and a 17-year-old in critical condition

A 21-year-old man was killed in the triple shooting in which two teenagers were wounded

by Dylan Purcell | Saturday, May 20, 2023

Multiple shootings Friday night and early Saturday in Philadelphia left four people dead and five others hospitalized, including a 17-year-old who was in critical condition, police said.

A 21-year-old man died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds in a triple shooting on the 5600 block of Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia about 8:45 p.m. Friday, according to police. The victim was identified as Michael Goodwin, of the 1200 block of South Greylock Street.

The two other victims — a 17-year-old who is in “extremely critical condition” and a 16-year-old reported in stable condition, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Of course, Mr Purcell deleted what was actually reported, that a 21-year-old black man died, because reporting all of the news is against the Inquirer’s editorial guidelines.

Less than an hour earlier, a shooting inside a barbershop in the 2000 block of Kensington Avenue took the life of a 43-year-old man. The victim, Adinson Suarez-Marte, of the 3000 block of Hartville Street, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital for several gunshot wounds to his torso. He was pronounced shortly after arrival.

Police are seeking information on as many as eight men who they said were seen wearing dark clothing and masks. No arrests were made, or weapons recovered from the barbershop scene.

As many as eight men being sought? In other words, a gang shooting, not that the Inky uses the word “gang” anymore.

Mr Purcell also noted an apparent murder/suicide that was found shortly after midnight, which would place it under Saturday’s statistics.

The website Broad + Liberty maintains its own homicide tracker, because, quite frankly, a lot of people do not believe that the city’s statistics are completely reliable, and that site documents 160 homicides through Thursday, May 18th. B+L has a third homicide listed for the 19th, beyond the two the Inquirer reported, and does not, as of 12:40 PM EDT on Sunday, May 21st, include the reported murder/suicide.

Broad + Liberty is very careful in its collection of statistics, and includes links to its documentation of homicides; while a few of the reports are listed as media reports, the vast majority are from Philadelphia Police Department news releases or emails. This is a source Mr Purcell needs to consider, but if the Inquirer has ever questioned the PPD statistics, I’ve yet to see it.

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Killadelphia: The city is losing population, and not just to murder!

In news that should surprise exactly no one, Philadelphia is losing population, and it’s worse than every other city among the twenty most populous in the United States.

Most large U.S. cities reversed or slowed pandemic population drops. But not Philly.

New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows 19 of the 20 most populous American cities either gained residents or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philly being the exception.

by Ximena Conde | Friday, May 19, 2023 | 5:24 AM EDT

Nineteen of the 20 most populous American cities reversed or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philadelphia being the notable exception — data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows.

Not to worry: the blurb means exclusive article for subscribers to The Philadelphia Inquirer, not The First Street Journal. As Robert Stacy McCain would put it, I read the Inquirer so that you don’t have to! 🙂

Does this spell a period of gloom for the city? Hard to say. Experts have consistently cautioned against reading too much into year-to-year population changes.

“One year of data is not a trend,” said Katie Martin, project director at Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative.

What’s more, the census numbers only tell us the number of people arriving or leaving; they don’t tell us what’s driving the changes or if they’re permanent.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Americans to spend a lot more time at home and reevaluate their priorities, mulling whether it was better to live in cities or the suburbs. Trend stories emerged of Brooklynites moving to nearby cities like Philadelphia because of the bang for-your-buck housing prices. At the same time, other stories told of families retreating to the suburbs out of fear that packed city living brought about more risk of contagion and concerns over rising gun violence in major cities, including Philadelphia.

Let’s tell the truth here: the homicide numbers have been worse in Philadelphia than the other large cities, and Philly is the poorest city of over a million people in the US. And while reporter Ximena Conde said that there were 33,000 residents lost between July 2020 and July 2022, I’m a bit more of a numbers geek than she is, so I looked up the numbers from the Census Bureau’s website, and saw listed the official Census number from April 1, 2020, and population guesstimate for July 1, 2022: 1,603,799 and 1,567,258. That works out to a loss of 36,541 souls, or 2.28%.

And, Killadelphia being what it is, I also added up the homicides from April 1, 2020 through June 30, 2022. Between those dates, there were 403 of the total of 499 homicides in 2020, 562 in 2021, and 257 of the 516 in 2022. Of the 36,541 people lost in the city during those dates, 1,222, or 3.34%, were lost to being murdered.

Southern and Southwestern cities like Phoenix, San Antonio, and Jacksonville continued to experience population growth, which those regions were experiencing long before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago saw smaller population declines than the first pandemic year.

Does Miss Conde mean cities in mostly Republican governed states, with far fewer panicdemic[1]Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic! restrictions? One point she did not mention is that foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and Commissioner of Health Cheryl Bettigole kept COVID-19 restrictions, including indoor mask mandates, far longer than most cities, and the city’s teachers union — you know: the teachers who concealed a fellow teacher’s sexual abuse of a student for years — kept resisting reopening the public schools. Americans really don’t like authoritarian controls.

Of course, those Southern and Southwestern cities don’t have Pennsylvania winters, so I can’t blame Philly’s population loss solely on the city’s government and culture.

A lot of my Philadelphia friends are reacting positively to the Cherelle Parker Mullins having won the Democratic mayoral nomination: she’s at least somewhat moderate for a Democrat, and at least appears to be more active and energetic than outgoing Mr Kenney. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will almost certainly be not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down, once Mr Kenney’s term ends at the beginning of 2024, and that can only be good news for the seriously undermanned Philadelphia Police Department.  The city will still be afflicted with the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating defense lawyer now ensconced as District Attorney at least through 2025, but perhaps, just perhaps, Philly can become greater than what it has been.

Even the homicide rate, though far, far, far too high, appears to be coming down, though is still above the 2020 pace which resulted in 499 — or was it 502? — homicides.

There are a lot of reasons to appreciate Philly, for its architecture and its history. The restaurants are great, and nothing can top a hot, fresh Philadelphia pretzel. A lot of people like (ughhh!) Philly cheesesteaks, though I think that they’re vile. But the current culture of the city is terrible, and that has to be driving some people away. Yes, 1,222 of the people who ‘left’ the city did so because someone else killed them, but that still means that 35,319 souls left for other reasons.

References

References
↑1 Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic!
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Killadelphia: How do you define a “mass shooting?”

On May 7th, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas suggested that our definition of what constitutes a “mass shooting” needs to be changed.

The Inquirer defines a mass shooting as one that occurs in public and kills three or more people.

The FBI classifies mass shootings as four or more deaths in a single incident.

Meanwhile, Congress has used the definition of three or more, and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks mass shootings, defines them as any incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, a classification also used by some national media outlets. (I often wonder why any shooting with more than one victim isn’t considered a mass shooting, but that may be a column for another day.)

Well, this isn’t a mass shooting under the Inquirer’s definition, bit I’m pretty sure that, if it was, there’d be a mass shooting in Philly almost every day of the year.

Quadruple shooting in East Germantown kills 17-year-old boy, wounds 2 other teens and a 7-year-old

Three people were injured and one was killed in the shooting.

by Jason Laughlin and Beatrice Forman | Thursday, May 11, 2023 |7:49 PM EDT

A shooting in East Germantown killed one teenager and injured three other youths, including a 7-year-old child, on Thursday night, the Philadelphia Police Department said.

Police said they received a report of the shooting on the 5900 block of North 21st Street shortly before 6 p.m. A 17-year-old boy who was shot in the face was transported to Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The other three victims — ages 7, 15, and 16 — were also transported there, where police said they are all in stable condition.

The 7-year-old was shot once in the upper thigh. The 15-year-old boy was shot twice in the head and twice in the back. The 16-year-old boy was also shot once, in the right shoulder.

NBC Channel 10 stated that the 7-year-old was not part of the group, but struck by a stray bullet.

That’s all the Inquirer had, one boy killed, and three others, at least two of whom were male, wounded.

In the meantime, Philly Crime Update tweeted, at 7:59 PM EDT, “🚨TRIPLE SHOOTING at 4800 Tackawanna St. possibly a 4th victim at Einstein stand by”.

The 4800 block of Tackawanna Street, in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, is a mix of older rowhomes and some housing project looking multi-family buildings. The 5900 block of North 21st Street consists of older rowhomes, some of which have been updated and flipped.

Now why aren’t these mass shootings? They aren’t not mass killings, but seven, and possibly eight, people were shot, and I have to wonder: how many of the victims were deliberately targeted? According to the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard, there have been 603 shootings in the City of Brotherly Love through May 8th, 118 of them fatal. May 8th was the 128th day of the year, and if fewer people have been killed this year than last, that’s still 4.71 people shot per day in Philly.

At least the way I would count it, that’s a mass shooting every day, but let’s tell the truth here: since the vast majority of the victims are black, and the vast majority of the shooters are also black, it’s way, way, way too politically incorrect to call that carnage a mass shooting.

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Killadelphia: Campaign canvassers for Helen Gym Flaherty prove the futility of gun control laws

As we noted on Tuesday, two ‘progressive’ campaign canvassers in Philadelphia, both carrying concealed weapons, got into a shootout on Monday. The Philadelphia Inquirer had more on the story late on Tuesday:

Family mourns loss of canvasser, as gun violence intersects with a common campaign practice

The shooting, which remained under investigation, underscored the relevance of the most important issue in the election: the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis.

by Jesse Bunch, Sean Collins Walsh, and Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, May 9, 2023 | 9:41 PM EDT

Eddie Brokenbough was struggling to make ends meet.

The 46-year-old, whom relatives described as a dedicated father of 10, experienced difficulties finding a good-paying job because, like many Philadelphians, he had a criminal record.

To supplement his income as a construction flagger, Brokenbough sometimes worked as a political canvasser, knocking on doors for organizations trying to get out the vote.

On Monday, Brokenbough was fatally shot while canvassing for the progressive group One PA by another canvasser from the same organization after the two men had an altercation.

The previous Inquirer story reported that Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, the head of the Police Department’s homicide unit, said that the two men “had always had a beef” with each other, though what that “beef” was about has not been reported.

The shooting also underscored the relevance of the most important issue in the election: the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis. Both men involved were armed, police said, and the shooter, 22, told investigators he was acting in self-defense.

The unnamed 22-year-old shooter, with whom Mr Brokenbough apparently had an ongoing dispute, was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and claimed that he only fired in self-defense after Mr Brokenbough drew his weapon first.

Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore stated that all of the interviews have been submitted to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and that office said the incident was still under investigation. Thus far, no charges have been filed, and the shooter has been released. He had a permit to carry, so there is no gun charge against him.

But next comes the real beef — pun most definitely intended — of the story:

One PA said guns are not permitted in its offices or during canvassing, and it has temporarily suspended its canvassing efforts.

Brokenbough was prohibited from legally carrying a firearm because of an earlier conviction on charges of aggravated assault and illegal gun possession, after he shot a man in the arm for speaking to his girlfriend in 2012, according to court records.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 ½ to 23 months in prison, plus five years’ probation. His conviction prohibits him from possessing a gun.

So, what happened? Mr Brokenbaugh, a previously convicted criminal with an illegal gun conviction in the past, was legally barred from owning a firearm, but did so anyway. One PA, a ‘progressive’ organization, prohibits its employees and contract canvassers, yet both of the campaign workers were carrying firearms. In a setting in which neither man, at least before they ran into each other, should have had any need to be armed, and one of which was committing a felony by carrying a weapon, both were.

Mr Brokenbough knew that he was breaking the law, and chose to do so anyway. The unnamed 22-year-old, who wasn’t breaking the law, was still violating the rules of the organization which hired him.

So, if both the convicted felon, and the law-abiding citizen, were violating the rules, why would anyone believe that passing more gun control laws would stop anyone who wanted to own and carry a firearm? And remember: these weren’t evil reich-wing Republicans here, but men working for a hard-left, socialist organization, canvassing for Helen Gym Flaherty!

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Killadelphia Dear Philadelphia Inquirer: Don't tell us a story, just tell us the truth!

We previously noted the killing of three Philadelphia teenagers in a quadruple shooting in the 5900 block of Palmetto Street, and how The Philadelphia Inquirer gave us several paragraphs telling us what good kids the victims were. I expressed some doubt about that, given an odd line noting the belief of the Philadelphia Police Department that the alleged shooters then took the surviving victim to the hospital.

We then pointed out, the following day, the seeming editorial slant of the Inquirer to tell us that some juvenile victims of homicide are as pure as the wind-driven snow, even if the early evidence seems to cast doubt on that.

Well, here we go!

‘Transaction’ gone wrong led to the shooting of four teens in Northeast Philly on Friday, police say

The victims’ families, meanwhile, are grieving and preparing to bury their children.

by Ellie Rushing | Monday, May 1, 2023

Police say they have identified two people who are wanted in connection with a quadruple shooting in Northeast Philadelphia on Friday that left three juveniles dead and another seriously injured, and investigators believe the violence was the result of a “transaction” gone wrong.

Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, head of the Homicide Unit, said that around 2:15 p.m., two groups of young men arrived in separate cars on the 5900 block of Palmetto Street, and went inside a rowhouse “for some sort of transaction.”

But at some point during the meeting, shortly after 3:15 p.m., something went wrong and gunfire erupted, Ransom said.

“Some sort of transaction,” huh? Just what sort of “transaction” in a private residence can result in gunfire?

Ransom declined to say what the transaction involved, citing the ongoing investigation.

Drugs? Perhaps selling guns? The police haven’t told us, but my imagination isn’t quite good enough to guess what sorts of legal “transaction” could have been involved, despite the characterization in the previous Inky story telling us what great kids the victims were.

Ransom said two cousins are wanted in connection with the shooting: Tyree Lennon, 22, and Taj Lennon, 15.

No, of course the Inquirer didn’t provide us with Tyree Lennon’s mugshot; that came from Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News. Mr Keeley continued, in the series of tweets, to tell us something about the older Mr Lennon:

22yr old WANTED by @PhillyPolice in TRIPLE MURDER of 14, 17 & 18 yr olds on Palmetto St. had just been released by a judge & put on house arrest just 15 days before the three teens shot & killed at the home. He had already (violated) the house arrest in the days before murders.

2/3 Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office requested $1 Million bail. Judge then reduced that to 10% of $400k & put him on house arrest. He had three bench warrants. One for violent attack on 11 month old baby in the SAME Palmetto Street house where murders happened Friday.

3/3 Law Enforcement sources say on October 24, 2020, Tyree Lennon bit 11 month old baby on face, leg & arm drawing blood. Sources say he then beat & strangled baby’s mother. @phillypolice had “violent struggle with Lennon” when they arrested him that day & he had ghost gun on him.”

4/ on April 13th, just 15 days before the triple murder, @philadao (Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office — DRP) asked for over $1 Million bail on all of (Lennon’s) prior gun & aggravated assault charges. Bench warrant court Judge reduced it & permitted house arrest release.

5/ He had already violated the house arrest before the murders in Palmetto Street house. Another bench warrant for that house arrest violation was issued the day after the triple murder April 29th.

Tweets slightly edited by The First Street Journal for spacing and clarity.

As we have previously noted, the rest of the professional media in Philly don’t much like Mr Keeley reporting the facts when it comes to crime, but the Inquirer story had no details on Tyree Lennon other than his name, and a site search of inquirer.com for “Tyree Lennon”, at 12:42 on Tuesday, May 2nd, returned no other stories mentioning him.

Some have stated on Twitter that it was Judge Jacki Lyde-Frazier who reduced Mr Lennon’s bail. If this is true, how do we hole Judge Frazier-Lyde accountable for reducing the bail to a level that Mr Lennon could manage, to let him out of jail, to (allegedly) shoot four people? When even the notoriously police-hating, soft-on-crime District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office are requesting a million-dollar bail amount, you know that they believed that Mr Lennon was a real threat and flight risk.

Back to the Inky:

Two others, ages 15 and 16, have also been charged with illegal gun possession in connection with the incident. Police believe the teens dropped off a 16-year-old, who had been shot in the stomach at the Palmetto Street shooting, at Jefferson Frankford Hospital on Friday afternoon. Police recovered their vehicle, a Ford Edge, crashed nearby shortly after and arrested the teens.

There’s a lot of information we haven’t been given. Were the two teens arrested with the Lennons, or were they with the victims? Whichever it was, they were carrying firearms illegally.

“My son was a good kid,” said Khalif Frezghi’s mother, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. “He was caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

We really can’t expect a murder victim’s mother to say anything other than something good about him, but if he was at the Lennons’ for an unspecified but very probably illegal “transaction,” he was more than at “the wrong place, at the wrong time,” but also there for the wrong thing, with the wrong people, as well.

After the previous quoted paragraph were more, telling us what good kids the deceased were, and the Inquirer published them uncritically. The Inky is still trying to push the image that the deceased were just innocent little angels, trying to tell us a story rather than simply telling us the truth.