Free Republic

Yesterday, the Baltimore Police Department confirmed that another body dropped on the streets of Charm City had brought their 2018 murder total to 297. The unnamed victim was a known gang member, described by police as “a former Public Enemy No. 1” and had been acquitted of a firebombing over the summer. Given the city’s recent history, the odds of there not being at least three more killings over the next sixteen days are not encouraging, to put it mildly. If this plays out as expected, it will represent four years running where the death toll has exceeded 300, and...

There are places in the world where the obvious, open carry of firearms is a dangerous thing to do.  This occurs where life becomes cheaper than the value of a modern firearm, legal firearms are hard to obtain, and the police are held in low esteem. I first heard of this in the early 1980's in graduate school when an erudite colleague, Norman Whisler, showed me articles from India where officers were murdered for their service firearms on a fairly regular basis.   The harder a society makes it to obtain modern firearms, the more police who openly carry are...

The gun prohibitionists are already saying that blood will run in the streets when the Illinois General Assembly crafts some form of concealed carry legislation in accordance with today's ruling by Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “As the dissenting opinion points out, the two judges who threw out Illinois' law did not take account of the danger to the public from stray bullets, and they ignored the Illinois legislature's determination that carrying weapons has been shown to escalate violence,” said Lee Goodman, an organizer with the Stop Concealed Carry Coalition.If Lee had taken the...

While the Florida trial that is weighing the question of whether 29-year-old George Zimmerman committed second-degree murder, manslaughter, or is not guilty of a crime in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has dominated the media in recent days, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released a study revealing that the homicide rate among Americans in the 10- to 24-year-old age group hit a 30-year low in 2010, the most recent year in the study. “The homicide rate among persons aged 10-24 years in 2010 was 7.5 percent per 100,000, the lowest in the 30-year study...

I spent a little time browsing FBI Crime Stats for 2010(Last year that has been finalized) and made some interesting discoveries. Did you know that 90% of blacks are murdered by blacks, and 83% of whites are murdered by whites? Did you know that there are 14.82 murders per 100K by blacks versus 2.17 per 100K for whites? Per capita there are 7x more murders committed by blacks than whites. I didn’t make this up. It comes directly from the FBI. I just cut the numbers in a more revealing manner.

The Feb. 1 letter commenting on Pennsylvania's black homicide rate, "We Need a Comprehensive Plan to Reduce Violence," asks the entire taxpaying community to solve a problem that is totally the parents' responsibility. Why do people think it's OK for the public to pay for their personal choices? When your child sells drugs and shoots at people, it's your fault as a parent. If you don't have the means to properly raise a child, then don't have one. My wife and I (both from the inner city) made some poor choices early in life and have been paying for them...

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's homicide rate jumped last year after reaching a 30-year low in 2003. But for the third consecutive year, the number of spousal homicides declined, although all other categories of family homicide rose, Statistics Canada reported Thursday. Firearm homicides increased slightly to 172, which was 11 more than in 2003 and 20 more than in 2002. And 65 per cent of those were committed with a handgun. Still, firearm homicides in Canada were much lower than those in the United States, coming in at 28 per cent compared with 66 per cent. In total, police reported 622...