We know that the sun rises in the east and water is wet. Somehow we discovered these facts without the benefit of expensive government-funded studies. The latest revelation: gang members, not guns, commit most of the crime in America’s cities.
Why, it’s almost like we’ve covered this at TTAG before.
Unfortunately, some the smartest people just haven’t made the connection between gangs and criminal violence yet, so the taxpayer dollars that were wasted spent to figure this out were so worth it.
In a shocking display of political incorrectness, a Biden administration National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform study found that “most gun violence is concentrated on a small number of very high risk young black males.”
Stop the presses. The next thing they’ll tell us is the cohort committing most of the violence with guns are gang members with who’d been in trouble with the law before.
Oh, wait.
WTOP News has the story . . .
The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform looked at the numbers for homicides and nonfatal shooting in D.C. in 2019 and 2020, and found that “most gun violence is tightly concentrated on a small number of very high-risk young Black male adults that share a common set of risk factors.”
Those factors include involvements in street crews, a previous criminal justice history and connection to a recent shooting. Often, they’ve been the victims of crime themselves. While the motive for the shooting “may not be a traditional gang war,” the report says, “often shootings are precipitated by a petty conflict over a young woman, a simple argument, or the now-ubiquitous social media slight.”
The story continues, giving some rough numbers behind crazy level of violence in D.C. But these crimes aren’t being carried out by thousands of bad guys. Instead, it’s the work of a few hundred, tops.
The homicide rate in D.C. rose by 18% in 2020 compared to 2019, the study found, and about 500 identifiable people are behind 70% of the 863 incidents involving gun violence. The studies also showed that about 200 people are driving a majority of these incidents at any one point in time.
More than 90% of victims and suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male and about 96% were Black.
The study also found that another 86% of victims and suspects have been involved with the criminal justice system and the average age of victims is 31, while the average age of suspects is 27 years old.
The study also reveals that — to no one’s surprise — the victims of this small number of career criminals are themselves overwhelmingly young, male, and black.
The victims and suspects of homicides and nonfatal shootings in the District of Columbia are primarily male, Black, and between the ages of 18-34. Nearly 92 percent of victims and suspects in homicides and 88 percent of victims and suspects in nonfatal shootings were male. About 96 percent of victims and suspects in both homicides and nonfatal shootings were Black, despite Black residents comprising only 46 percent of the overall population in the District (Table 1). Approximately 66 percent of homicide victims/suspects and 64 percent of nonfatal shooting victim/suspects were between the ages of 18-34, with a mean age of 29.5 and 29.8, respectively (Table 2). Across homicides and shootings, both victims and suspects are demographically similar overall.
In other words, the people most negatively affected by “social justice”-oriented policies — strict gun control laws, defunded police departments, decarceration, bail reform laws, and “progressive” prosecutors who don’t prosecute — are minorities themselves. The people politicians and advocates ostensibly want to help.
Given results like these, you’d think people would acknowledge that further restricting the rights of a hundred million or so lawful gun owners in America won’t do anything to solve the crime problem in cities like the District of Columbia. You’d think they’d talk about targeting the source of the problem, the couple of hundred bad actors in each metropolitan area, in order to make a measurable impact on the lives and safety of the city’s law-abiding residents.
How much safer would doing that make them, you ask? About 70% safer.
You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.
Instead, mayors like D.C.’s Muriel Bowser are more interested in funding pork barrel projects to shovel money to favored constituencies. Projects like the District’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and “violence interruptors.” Meanwhile, the sources of most of the city’s violent crime problems remain on the street.
It’s almost as if politicians like Mayor Bowser have no real interest in actually doing something to reduce the crime problems in their cities at all.
