At 4:07 p.m.on Wednesday, Fox 4 KC posted it first shooting story of the day, “Police investigating homicide after one person shot, killed near 50th & Chestnut.”
About 4:45 p.m. One person was shot near 89th and Sleepy Hollow Road. The fact that the victim suffered a non-critical injury made it a non-news item, save in a 41 KSHB recap.
At 6:02 p.m. KMBC News 9 weighed in with this headline, “Police investigating double shooting near 79th and Brooklyn; 1 in critical condition.”
At 9:11 p.m. 41 KSHB reported, “1 dead, 2 injured in KCMO shooting.” This melee unfolded near Monroe and Bridge Manor Drive in South Kansas City.
At 11:17 p.m. KCTV 5 reported, “Child, man shot in the 400 block of Lawndale in Kansas City.”
In a city of 319 square miles in a metropolitan area of roughly 8500 square miles, these five shooting incidents took place in a roughly 36-square mile patch of east Kansas City, no more than three miles wide.
This is not an anomaly. This is the norm. Yet we allow this patch and comparable patches like it all across America to deform our discourse and define us who we are as a city and a nation. Beyond these patches, Kansas City is as safe as any big city and America is as safe as any western nation.
What prevents us from dissecting the root causes of violence within the patch is the eagerness of liberal demagogues, black and white, to impute racism to anyone who ventures some opinion other than “guns” or “poverty” or “social injustice.”
In 1965 future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan got his hand badly slapped for his prescient report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” Moynihan argued that that the collapse of the nuclear family in the black lower class would widen the economic gap between blacks and other ethnic groups and lead to a variety of other social pathologies.
At the time, the out of wedlock birth rate among blacks was about 25 percent. Today, that number is 70 percent. There are likely entire blocks within the patch without a married father watching over the boys on that block. This is a recipe for chaos.
More frightening still, the out of wedlock rates for both whites and Hispanics is higher than it was for blacks when Moynihan wrote his report. Yet no one of Moynihan’s stature dares to sound the alarm.
To further stifle the discussion, our progressive friends have made it almost as taboo to speak about family structure as they have about race. Today, all families our “special,” and as the five shooting incidents attest, families within the patch suffer the consequences of that special reality every day.
Hat tip to Tony’s Kansas City.