I wonder how long it will take....

Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.

Overall, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.

You don't often see the press point this out.  Most murders are black-on-black.  Young, black men murdering other young, black men.  I've written on this before and until we take this on, and then act on the precursors to the problem and put a stop to them we will never see a solution.

The precursor is the drug war and an eviscerated manufacturing section of our economy that offers few good jobs for those who are not "rocket scientists."

But there is an economy that offers riches and "street cred."  It's drug peddling.  Drug peddling that our government itself is involved in, including explicit permission, it is alleged, for various Mexican cartels. 

Let's face reality -- guns are expensive and so is ammunition.  Very expensive, when you don't have a good job.  They are turned into tools, status symbols, means of "expression" like gold grills in kids' teeth, the latter of which we have among high schoolers these days.

We're never going to solve this problem with "more police, more interdiction, more stop-n-frisks, more evisceration of fundamental liberty interests."

We will stop it if and when we stop using the jack boot of government to enable 15 year old black youth the means by which they can afford a pistol, the ammunition to feed it and a reason to use it. 

But that requires that we start treating people like Eric Holder as the criminals that they are, holding them to account as accessories and co-conspirators to the drug running and gang shootings that take place because of our government policies on drugs and our explicit permission granted to certain cartels to run them. 

It means that we recognize that the government has no right to dictate what you do in the privacy of your own home, freeing up half or more of our prisons and expunging every drug-related (but not violence-related) record from our legal system so those individuals with no other than non-violent drug records are able to return to the productive workforce rather than be toilet-bowl cleaners in perpetuity.  It means treating drug addiction as a personal medical issue that comes with no right of government intercession until and unless one threatens to or does harm another, exactly as we do with alcohol.  It means returning to the roots of the Second Amendment, so that every law-abiding citizen can be armed, wherever and whenever they want, for the explicit purpose of not being an unarmed victim. And it means locking up violent offenders, whether they be robbers, rapists or murderers until they are no longer a threat -- and never, ever giving them more than one "second chance."

And finally, it means that we have to stop pretending that shipping our manufacturing labor offshore to what amount to slave camps in foreign nations, where they poison the air, water and land, abuse the population with the help of those governments and then move on as soon as it becomes unprofitable is either sustainable or wise in terms of what it means for either them or us and our people -- because it is simply a fact that not everyone is a rocket scientist, and we need good, decent, honest jobs to be available for people of all levels of personal ability.

We're not ready to do any of that, and until we are, this problem is not solvable.