Adopted Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte doesn’t normally write about the City of Brotherly Love, but with the gang gun battle on Sunday, even she had to pay attention. From Salon:

U.S. gun laws are causing mayhem and mass murder — and Republicans couldn’t be more thrilled

Crappy gun laws cause our crime problems. But Republicans blame liberal prosecutors and make racist arguments

by Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 6, 2022 | 1:30 PM EDT

After reassuring multiple people by text that my partner and I had been tucked safely in bed at 11:30 on Saturday night, I finally cracked and posted a general reassurance on Facebook. No, we had not been near the shooting on South Street in Philadelphia, where we live, that resulted in 3 deaths and 11 major injuries. But people’s concerns weren’t misplaced. We had been at a party in that neighborhood just the night before. Saturday’s was the ninth mass shooting in the city this year alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have been shootings at train stations and house parties. One group of victims was going to the prom. These things really are a matter of luck in a society that’s swimming in as much gun violence as ours.

It’s interesting that the author lives in Philadelphia, but cites The Washington Post. Perhaps she doesn’t subscribe to her hometown newspaper?

I get it: Miss Marcotte isn’t really interested in digging more deeply into a story, if the surface fits Teh Narrative she wishes to use. The “group of victims” going to prom”? There was one male targeted, because some other people wanted him dead, and the other three were simply in the way. This was gang violence, but that’s not something she wishes to discuss.

Billy the Kid, By Ben Wittick – Brian Lebel Old West Show and AuctionFile: Billy the Kid tintype, Fort Sumner, 1879-80.jpg, Public Domain, Click to enlarge.

What made the South Street shooting particularly nerve-rattling was how unhinged the situation seems to have been. Current reports suggest it started as a fight between two young men, but at least three other civilians and a police officer whipped out guns and sent bullets flying everywhere. There’s a very Wild West quality to the whole thing, except, you know, it happened in a 21st-century crowded city, with advanced gun tech, making the body count much higher than someone like Billy the Kid would have experienced.

The police officer shot at one of the original shooters; Miss Marcotte makes it sound like he was just firing blindly as well. But with at least five separate gang-bangers shooting, three dead and 11 others wounded is something that Henry McCarty, AKA Billy the Kid, could easily have accomplished with four others in a gang and weapons from the 1880s.

As Melissa Ryan wrote Monday morning in the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter, “For the Right, mass shootings are a feature, not a bug.” And as I have been arguing for at Salon, mass shootings are effective for Republicans at demoralizing their opposition and training their base to unlearn any lingering sense of empathy. Historian Ruth Ben-Shiat argued in October in the Washington Post, that gun violence “fosters political, social and psychological conditions that are propitious for autocracy.” A major GOP campaign message going into the midterms is that “woke” Democrats are letting criminals run amok in the cities. Dramatic gun violence really helps sell this message, which is why Republicans are guaranteed to block any bill that would make it even slightly harder for violent and unhinged people to get guns.

Given that the left are the ones who wish to impose an autocratic rule restricting, or completely banning, private ownership of firearms, the author’s claims are pretty silly. Of course, none of the gun control proposals would make it slightly harder for violent and unhinged people to obtain firearms; the most they could do would be to restrict the rights of normal and law-abiding Americans. We’ll eventually find out, if anyone bothers to report it, that the guns used in the South Street shooting were all illegally possessed.

Gun violence in Philadelphia is bad, just like in the rest of the country. The reasons aren’t mysterious. Gun sales surged during the pandemic because decades of propaganda caused people to think they needed them to be “safe.” (In reality, having a gun in the house increases your chances of injury or death.) More guns lead to more violence. Research shows that was especially true of this gun buying surge, as the percentage of newly purchased guns being used in crime surged. Things only promise to get worse because, no matter how much research says otherwise, people still have this asinine idea that the way to protect themselves from gun violence is to buy more guns. So this vicious cycle is perpetuated. People buy guns, which leads to more gun violence, which leads to more gun sales, and so on and so forth. Next thing you know, there are shootouts on South Street because everyone thinks they’re in some goddamn action movie.

Oh, so “Gun sales surged during the pandemic because decades of propaganda caused people to think they needed them to be ‘safe'”? Apparently the author didn’t notice that, in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, homicides in Philly soared from an already high 356 the previous year, to 499, one short of the city’s all time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. From slightly under one murder a day, the city shot up to 1.3634 killings per day, a 40.1685% increase.

Then, in 2021, with the evil reich wing Donald Trump out of office and the sweetness-and-light Democrats in power in Washington as well as Philly, the killings soared to 562, a 12.6253% increase, and 57.8652% higher than two years earlier.

But it’s certainly true that gun permits applications and sales soared. Philadelphia magazine reported:

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.

The people who were lawfully applying for carry permits and buying firearms weren’t doing so because they wanted to protect themselves from roving gangs of nurses armed with vaccine syringes! And I can’t seem to recall any shootings of people trying to defend themselves from strangers threatening them with sickness and death by not wearing facemasks. Given that Philadelphians gave Joe Biden 81.44% of their votes in 2020, I’m guessing that the surge in city residents seeking firearms aren’t all Trumpelstiltskins.

Instead, city residents were treated to stories about the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the  Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy.

The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

This works out great for the gun companies, who are booking record profits. It’s also working out for Republicans, who happily exploit all this gun violence to sell paranoid, racist voters a story about how it’s all the fault of Democrats, “wokeism” and Black people. Sometimes this gets very explicitly white nationalist. As Roger Sollenberger of Daily Beast reported over the weekend, Blake Masters, the Donald Trump-endorsed GOP candidate for Senate in Arizona, gave an interview in April in which he summed up what he thought was the cause of gun violence: “Black people, frankly.”

Also see: William Teach; Dem Don Beyer To Introduce Massive Tax On Scary Rifle And Big Magazine Purchases

The racism looks even uglier in the aftermath of the Buffalo, New York shooting, in which a white 18-year-old is alleged to have murdered a bunch of elderly Black grocery shoppers because he bought into the “great replacement” conspiracy theory Masters is peddling. It also notably ignores actually links shootings across the country, whether its’s gang violence, fights, or mass shootings: Angry young men, regardless of race, who have way too easy access to weapons. Masters isn’t stupid, and while I have no doubt his racism is entirely sincere, he is also a cynical propagandist. He’s feeding directly into this vicious cycle. Whip up his conservatives into thinking they’re in danger from people of different races, so that they buy more guns and support lax gun laws that then leads to more crime. Then use the crime to whip up more racist paranoia.

Well, Miss Marcotte got at least a little bit of that right: people really aren’t in danger from people of different races. Nor are non-Hispanic whites in a great deal of danger from Hispanic or black criminals. No, the vast majority of the shootings and murders in Philly, and other larger cities, are cases in which both the victims and perpetrators are black. The South Street shootings were no different: the perpetrators, the two guys who started a fight with a third guy, and then wound up shooting and killing him, were black, as was their victim. The three deceased victims are a 34 year old black male, a 22 year old black male, and a 27 year old black female. The 11 wounded include 7 black males, ages 23, 18, 18, 20, 17, and 20, 3 black females, ages 17,19, and 17, and one 69 year old while male. One non-shooting victim, injured by shattered glass, is a 49 year old black female.

In May alone, black males were 148 out of 226 total shooting victims, 65.49%, and 37 out of 48 homicide by shooting victims, 77.08%. Black females were 11.95% of the shooting victims, and 4.17% of the fatal shooting victims.

Yes, there were 14 people shot in the gun battle that everyone is calling a mass shooting, but as of Sunday, June 5th, there have been 54 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love. Seven were killed, five black males and two black females. Two non-Hispanic white males and two non-Hispanic white females were among the 54 shot, while 36 black males and 6 black females were shot.

The population of Philadelphia are 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

Miss Marcotte blamed “Angry young men, regardless of race, who have way too easy access to weapons,” but herself ignored that one very politically incorrect fact, that the tremendous surge in murder rates has been almost entirely among black males.

Miss Marcotte would almost certainly call my paying attention to those numbers racist, but isn’t it racist to not just ignore the facts, but, as The Philadelphia Inquirer does, actually cover them up? As we have already noted, the Inky had the video of the fight that started the whole mess, but deliberately declined to note that the “two men (who) appear to exchange words with a third man in front of Rita’s Water Ice” were all black men. The evidence was right in front of their eyes, but that very politically incorrect fact had to be excluded.

If there is a problem with homicides in our country, and there most certainly is, that problem cannot be addressed if we are not willing to tell the whole truth about the problem. Miss Marcotte and the left all want to blame the guns, but for some reason, white people are not killing other white people at anywhere near the same rates as happens among black Americans. White Philadelphians live under the exact same gun laws as black Philadelphians, but, as even the Editorial Board of the Inquirer noted, “The percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.”

Miss Marcotte entitled her post, “U.S. gun laws are causing mayhem and mass murder — and Republicans couldn’t be more thrilled.” Now, why would we be thrilled? The shootings are leading to, hopefully fruitless but not guaranteed to be so, proposals to increased restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. While today’s Supreme Court would seem inclined to protect us from those, there’s no guarantee that if Justice Clarence Thomas passed away while Joe Biden was still President that the Court in the future, the near future, might be more sympathetic to the gun grabbers. The left, in their obstinate refusal to see what the problems actually are — fatherlessness and a toxic culture in our inner-city black communities — will produce only ‘solutions’ which restrict the rights of law-abiding Americans while doing nothing to stop the criminals.