'American Slaughter' -- July 4th edition

So far this year homicides are in decline in Chicago and elsewhere, but young black males are still killing each other disproportionately at a steady rate of about 5,000 a year. Where's the outrage?

The good news is that homicides are falling pretty quickly these days in the bloody USA.

As of July 4th, even in Chicago — the nation’s most publicized homicide-ridden city — murders are down significantly.

According to the great web site HeyJackass!, the Windy City’s homicide total for the July 4th weekend — always a favorite top-of-the news item for the national media — was 9.

That sounds terrible and tragic, and it is. But last year 23 of Chicago’s 2.7 million souls were killed and 86 were wounded over the Fourth. The 10-year average is 14 and 69.

Murders are in overall decline in Chicago. So far this year, there have been 215 homicides of all kinds, about 100 fewer than last year at this date. 180 of the dead were “shot and killed,” which means 35 other human beings were killed with knives, fists, clubs or whatever.

HeyJackass!

The rest of the summer of 2025 still could see insurrections and street riots in the usual U.S. cities, thanks to reactions to the Trump administration’s strict, hyper-active deportation policy.

But so far this year homicides are way down in Chicago and in most cities, which is obviously a good thing and a welcome trend since murders spiked during covid lockdowns.

Data analyst Jeff Asher recently compiled some numbers from the most murderous cities.

As Asher says, “There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to the multi-year decline in crime we are experiencing, and it will be a while before the impact of these factors in reducing crime is truly understood.”

Chicago, Chicago, that murdering town

Chicago, aka the murder capital of the United States, has always been the national media’s poster child for deadly weekend shooting sprees and urban drug gang violence.

HeyJackass! keeps a close running tab on Chicago’s violence. Here’s part of its homepage from July 6.

During every July 4th weekend, except maybe this one, we’d hear the national media blare the shocking statistics. Last year it was:

By  Sun-Times Wire

19 killed, 86 wounded in shootings during extended Fourth of July weekend in Chicago — Updated Jul 6, 2024, 11:48pm EDT

This July 4th was not so bad. Only 9 dead and 44 wounded — the lowest since 2019. As HeyJackass! reported:

Chicago gets most of the bad homicide publicity, but it doesn’t have the highest murder rate per 100,000 people in the country. St. Louis (69) Baltimore (51) and New Orleans (40) are the top three.

Chicago is a distant No. 10 with 24 murders per 100,000 people — but murder “rates” are cold, dry numbers fit only for sociologists.

In 2023 there were 632 human beings murdered in Chicago, down 15% from 2022. In 2024, according to HeyJackass, the number of people killed fell to 609 (with 2,444 wounded).

That’s an improvement, sadly, but the dropping murder count in Chicago is just a footnote in an ongoing bloody American tragedy.

Since 1995, Chicago has been a permanent killing field for young black men. Every year at least 300 young black men have been shot, stabbed and beaten to death by other young black men.

That 300 murder-per-year figure is a conservative estimate, given that Chicago has averaged over 500 homicides a year for 30 years and roughly 80 percent of those killed were black.

Yet it still adds up to nearly 10,000 young black men in Chicago alone have been killed by their peers since 1995.

That’s a shocking number. But Chicago’s murders make up only a fraction of the “American Slaughter,” the country’s annual and un-publicized slaughter of young black men that has taken 150,000 lives since 1995.

The homicide gap

In 2022, according to Statista, there were 19,196 homicides in the U.S. The total number of black victims was 10,470. Though whites outnumber blacks in the population by about 5-1, the number of white homicides that year was 7,704.

The glaring black-white homicide gap in the U.S. is decades old and it occurs every year. The demographics of murder victims and their murderers for the whole country are macro versions of Chicago’s.

Each year since 1995 roughly 5,000 black men under 34 have been killed in America by other young black men, usually with handguns. That means the running toll of murdered young black men since Bill Clinton was in office is a staggering 150,000.

It’s a figure so shocking — and never pointed out in the national media — that it’s hardly believable. It’s 50,000 more Americans than were killed in Vietnam and Korea combined.

So where are the big deep stories by the corporate media about the American Slaughter and its causes and cures?

Where are the Million Man marches for those 150,000 slain young black men? Where are the cries and outrage of national black -- and white -- leaders?

Where are Obama and Oprah and LeBron and Kamala and all the famous politicians and pundits and moral preachers of every color and political party who supposedly care about important racial issues?

What could possibly be more important to the country than trying to end a bloody 30 years war on young black men by other young black men?

Young people of all colors commit a disproportionate number of crimes — and the most murders.

But the country’s annual murder toll goes up and down for all kinds of social and economic reasons. So does the murder rate per 100,000 people — an abstract crime statistic thrown around by the media that means nothing to the average American.

In 1993 there were nearly 25,000 homicides in the U.S. By 2014 they had fallen to 14,300. But by 2021, thanks largely to the effects of BLM madness and covid lockdowns, homicides spiked to 22,536 from 17,000 in 2019.

To make things clear and simple, let’s skip the murder-rate statistics and just count all the dead people.

Let’s say there are 20,000 murders in the USA in an average year. That comes to roughly 54 murders per day. About 60 percent of those homicide victims — roughly 32 a day — are black Americans. Mostly they are males under age 34.

In 2023, the country’s final homicide toll, though down compared to the covid years, included roughly 10,000 blacks of all ages. Again, based on the numbers, at least 5,000 of those victims was a black male under 34 who was killed by a black male under 34.

Reducing this annual urban slaughter should have been the chief concern of national black leaders and the legacy corporate news media for decades. It’s hardly a secret to the local black communities were the killings occur.

A group called the Gifford Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence knows what’s going on. It says that “For decades, gun violence has taken a disproportionate and grueling toll on Black communities—leading to tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun injuries.”

The report says, “Homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century” and that “for young Black men, gun homicides are the leading cause of death and more than outstrip the next leading causes of death combined.^”

Yet black leaders apparently do not realize the scope of the slaughter of young black men or don’t want to discuss it. And the major news media are AWOL.

Clue the journalists

Journalists have either been too clueless to have noticed the deaths of 150,000 young black men or too chicken to ask national and local black leaders why the black culture is so violent and what they are doing to fix it.

As in previous years, in 2025 no black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures will jump in front of the cameras and call for a national crusade to slow the mass killings.

They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts for the deaths of tens of thousands of young black men.

Meanwhile, the American Slaughter will continue to be what it has been for more than 30 years — the bloody elephant in the American newsroom that people can’t see or are afraid to say anything about.

‘American Slaughter’ — the Pittsburgh edition

January 3, 2025

Pittsburgh

1993 was an especially bloody year for the City of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County.

As Post-Gazette crime reporter Mike Fuoco reported in his annual year-end roundup of local homicides 31 years ago, 118 men and women were murdered in a city/county population of about 1.3 million. It was the highest number since 1917.

As usual, and as Fuoco pointed out early in his article, those Pittsburghers who were killed in 1993 were disproportionately young, black and male and virtually all of them were killed by other young black males who used handguns.

Homicide-wise, not much has changed in Pittsburgh in three decades — except for the steady shrinking of the city’s population and the names of this year’s list of dead young black men.

The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs and rusted out steel towns are well-known for having low crime and murder rates. Like most cities, in 2023 and 2024 the city of Pittsburgh’s homicides fell.

In 2023, according to the Post-Gazette’s year-end unofficial wrap-up of city and county homicide statistics, there were 100 homicide victims. There were 52 in the city (pop. 303,000) and 48 were in the rest of Allegheny County (pop., about 900,000).

The city’s 52 homicides in 2023 were significantly lower than the 71 murders it had in 2022, a year when national violence rates were still spiking as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

For 2024, the city’s preliminary numbers show a further drop in homicides — 41 compared to 52 in 2023. But in 2024 Allegheny County’s unofficial death toll jumped to 67 homicides, up from 48 in 2023.

In other words, the city-county total for 2024 went up to 108 homicides, eight more than 2023. Reports of shootings in the city were down in 2024, if that hard-to-count criterion is considered a sign of progress.

The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs and rusted out steel towns are well-known for having low violent crime and murder rates. And the number of blacks murdered in the city, which is 37 percent black, and all of Allegheny County (13 percent black) each year is relatively low.

But in terms of who is murdered and who does the killing in Pittsburgh, it is the same old, tragic and insufficiently publicized or lamented story that is repeated in dozens of larger cities across the USA.

In 2023, as has been the case in Pittsburgh for decades, about 82 percent of all the murder victims in the city and the county were black. A few were women and 32 of the 41 black victims were under age 34. Eight were under age 17.

As of late December 2024, the breakdown of murder victims for the year was roughly the same. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, black men made up 30 of the city’s 41 homicide victims — 73 percent. Four of the victims were children under 18 and 11 other young people were shot and wounded.

Each January the media in Pittsburgh toss out the cold numbers for the previous year and often note that most murder victims are young black men. But they have not kept a running total of the shocking slaughter that’s been occurring outside their newsrooms for decades.

Since 1995, roughly 50 black males between 14 and 34 have been murdered every year in the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County. Over three decades, that adds up to about 1,500 dead young black men and teens.