If you can get out of these hellish, violence-ridden cities, do so immediately.
Philadelphia has recorded its 500th homicide this year, surpassing a bleak milestone for the second year in a row as the city's gun violence epidemic continues at an unrelenting pace, leaving devastating loss and trauma in its wake.
While the total number of homicides recorded so far this year is slightly lower than last year's record-breaking total, it's a loss of human life the city has only twice recorded in its known history, and matches the record of 500 killings set in 1990, at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic.
The crack epidemic was a long time ago, but long-time Philadelphia residents aren't likely to forget it: At its height, the city's murder rate was four times that of the national murder rate.
Crack usage was so strong there that a reference to it even showed up in the background of a Bruce Springsteen music video:
Those days are over, thankfully.
But that's what's most insane: The city isn't in the grip of a debilitating, brutal drug epidemic, and yet the murder rate is still skyrocketing to those levels. Philly also has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation and has been run by Democrats for decades.
There are some obvious explanations for what happened here, though don't expect the official narrative to acknowledge it:
Philadelphia has been plagued by gun violence for decades, but a spike in shootings began in spring 2020, when the coronavirus epidemic upended the city's social and economic safety nets, and has remained persistent ever since, reaching heights unseen in recent memory. Experts have said it could take years to fully understand what triggered the uptick, which has been seen nationwide.
Now you can call me a lunatic here, but I'm kind of thinking that a devastating economic shutdown, widespread school closures, a climate of medical fear and paranoia, the resulting impoverishment, and then the following several months of deranged racial hysteria, rioting, looting and violence...
