The city of Philadelphia has been put under a national microscope after a report from The Philadelphia Inquirer indicated that "nearly eight people on average were shot every day" during the 60-plus-day window between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
In the report, the Inquirer wrote: "Last year, more than 560 people were killed in homicides — the overwhelming majority by guns — and another 1,800 were wounded by bullets. It was the city's most violent year ever. ... This year's pace has been worse."
For that window between the two holidays, the Inquirer asserted the rate of "nearly eight people" being shot every day is twice the rate of five years ago; and the victim rate for women and children within the city limits has reached all-time highs.
The Inquirer piece runs similar to Breitbart News' gun-related death tally for 2021 — along with the homicide rates for 2020 in Philadelphia (499) and 2019 (more than 350).
In an August piece, NBC News wrote: "Philadelphia is on pace to have its deadliest year as there have been more than 300 gun-related deaths in 2022."
And on the Fourth of July, shortly after two Philadelphia police officers were wounded in a shooting, Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, reflected on the city's penchant for gun violence in recent years.
"I'm concerned every single day," Kenney said while addressing the gun violence, ABC 6 reported. "There's not an event or a day where I don't lay on my back and look at the ceiling and worry about stuff.
"Everything we have in the city over the last seven years, I worry about. I don't enjoy Fourth of July, I don't enjoy the Democratic National Convention, I didn't enjoy the NFL Draft. I'm waiting for something bad to happen all the time. I'll be happy when I'm not here, when I'm not mayor, and I can enjoy some stuff."
Later on, Kenney said,:"It was a chilled back day, beautiful weather. But we live in America where we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everybody they can carry a gun wherever they want.
"I was in Canada two weeks ago and never thought about a gun. The only people I knew who had guns in Canada were police officers. ... That's the way it should be here."
In terms of crystallizing the rash of gun violence in Philadelphia, the Inquirer also wrote:
"To capture just a glimpse of the summer's epidemic and document its unrelenting toll, Inquirer journalists in early August visited the scene of every shooting in a single weekend in nearly real-time. In the weeks that followed, they attended funerals, spoke with survivors as they sought to heal, visited with neighbors afraid to leave their homes, and tried to understand why the shootings occurred.
"Their reporting presents a microcosm of the violence many Philadelphians endure every single day, and what’s driving it: people using guns to resolve trivial disagreements; only one in four shootings resulting in charges; unsolved shootings festering and leading to threats of retaliation; neighborhood groups beefing over social media; and untold grieving families and shooting survivors facing searing trauma in the aftermath.
"And yet that weekend's gun violence was cruelly average. ... [For that weekend], 20 people were shot."
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