They only march for white kids

One reason I am cynical about the children's crusade to get rid of hunting rifles (aka "assault rifles") is that they miss the real gun shot victim epidemic: an epidemic of inner city violence that has been going on for years

We had plenty of such shootings when I was a medical student/intern/resident in the late 1960'/early 1970s, so it's not exactly a new problem.

and most of these murders are not with "assault rifles", but with handguns.

So, fancy school kids: Do the lives of poor people lives matter?

If so, you should be defending the "stop and frisk" programs that made NYCity safe under Mayor Guilliani, and maybe even enforcing gun crimes including illegal gun possession.

the irony is that when an innocent guy is stopped fand frisked when he is doing nothing, it causes anger in the community. Voila, "black lives matter" appears and the result is fewer arrests of bad guys, and the murder rate actually goes up.

Sigh.

But anyway, here are the statistics:

CDC website:

and where these murders occur might surprise you: not just states with urban areas but the deep south.

Every one of these victims had families who loved him, or who tried to save him in a culture of violence.

 This 2013 article in the Washington Post tells a poignant story of one victim

He had a full-time job that he enjoyed and a deepening religious faith; he was close to earning a high school diploma and excited to be an expectant father....

Year after year, young black males make up the bulk of the slain, most of them shot in poor or working-class neighborhoods, as David was.

In 2012, more than 90 percent of the dead were African Americans and nearly seven in 10 were younger than 35. The city’s homicide rate has gone way down – the annual body count dropped from a record high of 482 in 1991 to a half-century low of 88 last year – but the casualties don’t change.

Like David, many of the fallen loitered in the danger zone, in the vicinity of the killers and the killed, always in the shadows of trouble. Victims who aren’t perceived as innocent tend to draw scant public notice or sympathy, and the shooting of David Robinson appalled the civic conscience only briefly, owing to the dismal particulars of the crime: He had died in a gunfight after being robbed of his new Nike sneakers.

Sigh.

Read the whole thing to get a glimpse of one "statistic", about his family who cares for him, about the pastors and teachers and counselers who tried to help him, and his inner rage that made him prone to get into fights.

Sigh.

and another WaPo article notes that only one third of these crimes result in conviction.

Sigh.