Way back when I still had a cable sub and still watched television, I was watching an episode of Red Eye, the late night Fox News show, and the topic was crime. One of the guests was a black libertarian, who said something along the lines of, “In order to have a sensible discussion about crime, the first thing we have to do is put aside the issue of race.” All of the nice white people on the panel fell all over themselves agreeing with the black, of course, mostly because they were grateful that he let them off the hook.

My recollection of my own reaction was to wonder why they would bother talking about crime at all, if they are not going to consider the primary element. After all, net out black crime from the statistics and crime is not an issue we bother discussing. Sure, Hispanic crime rates are significantly higher than white crime rates, but they pale in comparison to black crime figures. The only people worried about white crime are white liberals, who like to tell each other scary stories around the fire pit about their trip to Walmart.

People on our side of the great divide tend to think the people in charge deliberately obfuscate on the race issue, because of nefarious motives. It’s tempting and there is no doubt that we are ruled by sociopaths, who enjoy lying to us about everything, not just crime. Still, a lot of people have simply lost the ability to talk about race. They have become so fearful of the issue that it has taken on magical qualities. Just as Jews are prohibited from speaking the name of God, most white people fear saying “black.”

This weird New York Times op-ed reminds me of that.

When they staged a “die-in” at Stroger Hospital in Chicago earlier this year, Delmonte Johnson and his friends — who together formed GoodKids MadCity, a group dedicated to ending violence in urban communities — had a straightforward request. They wanted what their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers already seemed to have: freedom from the oppressive fear of being gunned down in their own neighborhoods.

Mr. Johnson, a 19-year-old who loved to sing and dance, who was an athlete and a budding social activist, will not get to see that vision realized. He was shot and killed Wednesday after playing basketball near his home.Mr. Johnson’s death was tragic and unnecessary and enraging. It was also the sort of death that’s become far too common in America, and in particular in Mr. Johnson’s hometown, where more than 2,000 people have been shot so far this year, nearly 400 of them fatally. While mass shootings involving high-powered guns and high death tolls have claimed an outsize portion of the nation’s collective grief — and its headlines — street shootings like the one that killed Delmonte Johnson are far more common.Mr. Johnson, who lost several of his own friends to gun violence, knew that fact all too well. His own advocacy emerged in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February with the hope that some of the attention captured by that massacre might be cast toward communities like his — communities that are underserved, overlooked and routinely plagued by gun violence. “We have been screaming for gun control for the longest time,” says Carlil Pittman, a friend of Mr. Johnson’s who co-founded GoodKids MadCity. “But it’s not until it hits other communities that people pay attention. And then they respond with harsher laws that criminalize black and brown kids.”

As everyone knows, guns stalk the streets of our city. For some reason, the government just let guns walk in over the border, unmolested. In fact, they have programs to help guns come in to the country and gain residency. It’s as if the government wants guns to come here and kill people of color. If you did not know better, you would think that the people in charge of government care more about guns than American citizens. When will people wake up and realize that we need a big wall on the border to keep guns out of the country?

All kidding aside, you have to wonder how it is even possible to write about “gun violence” with a straight face. To a sober minded person, it seems impossible for anyone to believe such nonsense. That’s why so many in 2A community think it is deliberate and well considered lie. A multi-generational conspiracy sounds more plausible than people thinking guns magically cause black people to shoot one another. Sadly, that is what the people who write this stuff think. They think blacks are compelled to violence by guns.

The murder problem in Chicago is a problem easily understood with a bit of math and a little bit of race realism. Put a lot of black people in an area and they will start shooting at each other. Chicago has a lot of black people, so it has a lot of murders. The city is roughly 32% black, 32% white and the rest Hispanic, Asian and a mystery. Of the 405 homicides this year, as of this writing, 330 of the victims have been black. Just 26 have been white. Just 48 have been Hispanic, who are over 25% of the population.

Now, it is possible that there are gangs of white supremacists roaming the streets killing black people in all black neighborhoods. It’s possible that these white supremacists are so skilled that no one has ever seen them. It’s also possible that a gang of leprechauns are terrorizing the black neighborhoods. All things are possible if you wish hard enough, but the most probable answer here is that the victim rates reflect the crime rate. That is, 75% of the crime is being committed by 30% of the population, the black population.

Again, sober minded people understand this. The trouble is, we are not ruled by sober minded people, at least with regards to race. They really do believe that race is a social construct and that astronomical black crimes rates are a symptom of social inequality, racism and poverty. Rather than Old Scratch tempting the villagers into sin, there is now this mystery force called “whiteness” that is like swamp gas, rising from the America’s long racist past. In other words, black crime is a spiritual problem, not a practical one.