Baltimore experiencing “a new type of violence”

Violence on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland has been a problem for a very long time and we’ve covered it here extensively. The annual murder count has been slowly but steadily rising for the past decade or more. You literally have a better chance of living the day out on the streets of Kabul. But there has been one notable shift in the violent crime statistics that is perhaps even more alarming. Both the people being shot and the ones doing the shooting are growing increasingly younger on average. This led Lee Sanderlin of the Baltimore Sun to declare that Charm City is experiencing “a new type of violence.”

Those 19 and under in Baltimore are being killed and shot in 2023 at a pace not seen in at least a decade, according to a new Baltimore Sun analysis of police data. There have been so many victims that it’s the equivalent of one being shot about every two days and one being killed every week…

The shootings happen all over the city: At the Inner Harbor, at parties, at bus stops, at restaurants. Shots ring out near schools and at home.

The victims are almost always students or recent graduates. Sometimes they have jobs. Sometimes they’re athletes or artists. All of them are someone’s kid.

There’s no doubt that the numbers are stark. As of the first week of July, there had been 28 “young people” (aged 19 or younger) killed in Baltimore and another 91 who were shot. At the same time, the total number of murders and shootings was down slightly from the same period in the previous year. That means that young people killing and being killed make up an even larger percentage of the total. The number of minors (under the age of 18) who have been arrested during the same period more than tripled from the same months in 2019.

So the trends demonstrate that more and more young people are involved. But is this really a “new type of violence?” I would argue that it’s the same “type” of violence that has plagued Baltimore for decades. It’s gang violence, though the author appears hesitant to apply the label. And the gangs in many cities have been recruiting new members at younger and younger ages, so these trends, while alarming, should have been wholly predictable.

The gangs see great value in recruiting boys in their early teens and putting them out on the streets to “work.” They know that if they wind up getting caught, the liberal policies in nearly all of the large, blue cities will see them back out on the streets in no time. And the older gang leaders can shake them down for the profits they produce without risking arrest themselves.

Sanderlin focuses much of his attention on the number of guns there are on the streets in Baltimore. While that’s certainly part of the problem, it’s worth noting that there isn’t a single gun shop operating anywhere in the city. Maryland already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. But more gun laws don’t do anything about gun violence precisely because gang members don’t pay attention to those laws and they buy their weapons on the black or gray markets. None of those gang bangers are canceling their plans for the evening because they noticed a “gun-free zone” sign on the way to their next robbery.

Mayor Brandon Scott has attempted to curb the violence by instituting another curfew for young people over the summer. But when gang members don’t pay attention to gun control laws, do you really think they’re going to go home when curfew time rolls around? On top of that, even the Baltimore Sun grudgingly admits that the data shows that curfews don’t reduce crime rates.

The people who are making the most noise about this and proposing solutions continue to focus on gun control and “more services” for young people in the community. More money has been flushed into those efforts than can be tallied and yet the problem persists. What none of them, including the Mayor want to talk about is the need to reinvigorate the police and get them out on the streets in force. Start rounding up gang members of all ages and locking them up for a good long time. Let them know there is a price to be paid for that “lifestyle” and the cost will be steep. And if they decide to start shooting at the cops, they likely won’t live to see the inside of a cell. But that all sounds “too mean” so nobody is going to do it.