A 12-year-old, the son of criminals, takes a shot at the police, and winds up dead. A 15-year-old is arrested for shooting at teenaged girls in a fleeing car, hitting two of them, and the police say that he is a suspect in two other shootings as well. A 17-year-old is accused of shooting and killing a Temple University student in a botched robbery.
Is it any wonder that Philadelphians are applying for concealed carry permits at a record-breaking pace?
13-year-old boy shot in head in West Philly
The victim was sitting alone in a car at 49th and Hoopes Streets when someone started shooting shortly before 8:30 p.m., police said.
by Robert Moran | Monday, April 4, 2022 | 9:55 PM EDT
A 13-year-old boy was hospitalized in critical condition after he was shot in the head Monday night in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, police said.
The shooting was reported shortly before 8:30 p.m. at 49th and Hoopes Street.
Hoopes Street consists almost entirely of two-story row homes, in not the best or repair, and 49th in that area is no better, yet people are being charged $1,195 a month to rent these marginal residences, at least according to this listing on Zillow. A vacant lot at 4935 Hoopes Street is being listed for $50,000, while this disaster at 4931 Hoopes is being listed for $125,000.¹ No wonder people in this neighborhood have little hope; they’re being robbed just to live in dumps! Yet it was a neighborhood which got a 13-year-old boy shot in the head; what could have been worth that in that neighborhood?
The boy, who lives in the neighborhood, was sitting alone in the front passenger seat of an Acura SUV when someone approached the car from that side and opened fire, said Capt. John Walker, commanding officer of the Shooting Investigation Group.
The police believe that the victim was personally targeted, and several shots were fired at him. As of Tuesday morning, Fox29 is reporting that the victim is still “fighting for his life,” so he is not a current homicide statistic.
What does it say that I have quite reasonably referred to a 13-year-old boy as a “statistic”?
A 15-year-old boy was shot dead in the city earlier in the day, and police said that at least 20 shots had been fired in the confrontation. Fox29 reported, that a law enforcement source said that investigators believe the shooting may have stemmed from a fist fight earlier in the day.
At some point it has to be asked: what can a 15-year-old, an eighth grader, and a 13-year-old have done to have caused their enemies to hunt them down and assassinate them in deliberate, targeted killings? One murder was possibly a revenge engagement from a fist fight? If that’s the case, then investigators will know with whom the fist fight occurred, and he’ll be caught. One kid is dead, and another will be locked up, hopefully for the rest of his miserable life, behind a fist fight?
In just the first three days of April, ten people, all of them black, were shot in the city, two fatally, and it’s nothing other than routine in the City of Brotherly Love. 125 people have been murdered in Philly as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, April 4th, and April 4th in 2021 was the end of a weekend.
This is a cultural thing, an urban culture which glorifies carrying guns to the point that adolescents are doing so, exhibiting the quick, responsive, irresponsible and immature judgement of adolescents, and other adolescents are frequently the victims when these kids start firing away. But no one will ask why this is the case, no one will even acknowledge that this could be the result of an urban culture, because that will lead to the obvious point: this is a primarily black phenomenon, and to point out that is raaaaacist.
It ought to be obvious: you cannot address a problem, and certainly cannot solve a problem, if you will not admit the problem, if you cannot discuss the problem, and no one wants to do that, not with this problem. The political, intellectual, and journalistic leaders in the city would rather ignore the problem, would rather see the killing continue, than to risk being labeled racists by doing the very radical thing of just telling the truth.
We have previously noted that not only does The Philadelphia Inquirer decline to print such news itself, but has criticized other media for reporting the news the editors of the Inquirer believe should be ignored.
Of course, the people of Philly know that the problem of killings in the city is a largely black problem; just because the Inquirer specifically, and the rest of the media more generally, try to obscure that doesn’t mean that the public are unaware. When Philadelphians hear that these killings are happening in Kensington or North Philadelphia or Strawberry Mansion or around Temple University or in West Philly, they know that these are heavily black neighborhoods. The primarily law-abiding black residents in those areas have to dread what can happen on their streets, and the wealthier white liberals don’t need to care, because Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square just don’t experience that violence. The truth is that black lives don’t matter, not in Philadelphia, at least they don’t matter enough to address the problems.
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¹ – Here are the four photos of 4931 Hoopes Street, from the current Zillow listing. Those photos will eventually disappear from the listing if that dump is ever sold.
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Philadelphia updated its shooting statistics after this article was published. There were 13 shooting victims on just Monday, April 4th, all of them male, 11 black and two white. As it happens, the two listed fatalities, of the 15-year-old and a 34-year-old, were the two white males who were shot. The 34-year-old was shot while inside, in the 4800 block of Frankford Avenue.
The 4800 block of Frankford Avenue is a lower-rent commercial district, while the side streets are more Philadelphia row houses, though they look to be in better shape than Hoopes Street.