What the hell is going on in our nation's major cities? It seems there is some new outrage from a major urban center almost daily; riots, arson, murders -- all too often involving innocent victims, all too often going unpunished.
Now we see what appears to be a random, unprovoked double murder in Los Angeles.
A young Los Angeles couple was unexpectedly shot and killed while sitting in their parked vehicle with their 1-year-old child on Labor Day, police say.
In a press release from the Los Angeles Police Department, authorities revealed that 21-year-old Carlos Loera and 18-year-old Ashley Guzman were gunned down by a suspect at around 6:30 p.m. Monday in Harbor City, a neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Authorities said that Harbor City area officers responded to an "ambulance shooting" call.
When the officers arrived, they found a male victim, later identified as Loera, and a female victim, later identified as Guzman, both suffering from gunshot wounds.
Both victims died of their wounds. But it gets worse. There was a child involved, and the child was also shot, although - mercifully - the child survived.
Los Angeles Fire Department officials confirmed that the young father had died from gunshot wounds at the scene.
Paramedics transferred the mother to a local hospital, where she later died from her gunshot injuries, police said.
Police say that a further investigation revealed that their 1-year-old child also suffered gunshot wounds while sitting in the back of the parents' parked vehicle. Police did not share the gender or the name of the child.
It's unclear whether the infant was shot deliberately, or just accidentally, in what can only be deemed brutally callous disregard. Meanwhile, the LAPD is still looking for the murderer. As of this writing, there's no known motive for the killing, but Loera and Guzman would appear at first glance to have been chosen at random; the story is mute on whether there was any sign of robbery.
In a just world, the perpetrator here would be hunted down like a rabid animal, jailed until his trial, and if found guilty, executed. But it's unclear as to whether we live in a just world any longer, at least not in our major cities.
What's very ironic about this is that even some people on the urban left are starting to acknowledge what is happening, as my colleague Brandon Morse recently pointed out. But agreeing that something is happening doesn't fix the problem; for that, one has to address the causes of events like another of my colleagues, Bonchie, describes in New York City.
In the non-punditry side of my career, I've spent many years teaching engineers and quality control professionals how to do cause analysis, and in all candor, I'm pretty good at it. Some rules I describe for cause analysis are that a tool cannot be a cause; an act requires an actor. Also, a root cause is always found at the point where a person or a group of people make a decision.
Were I to conduct a root cause analysis here, one of the first cause/effect chains I’d look hard at is the ‘urban policy’ path. We’ve seen these results time and again, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and many other places. But I’d also look hard at the educational pathway. Our big-city schools are failing, horribly, with some of them cranking out only single-digit percentages of graduates that are proficient in math and written English. That can’t help.
Add in the inexplicable growth of a toxic, brutal, misogynistic urban “thug” culture, and you have a recipe for trouble.
One example of a case where an ‘urban policy’ pathway has worked, of course, is easy to find: New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In the 90s, New York was one of the safest major cities in the world, and that happened when Giuliani set the policy of vigorously pursuing career criminals and showing no tolerance towards petty acts of vandalism, theft, and hooliganism that can lead to more serious acts.
Our major cities are melting down. I’m not sanguine about things turning around any time soon; Chicago just suffered four years of incompetent leftist leadership by an incompetent mayor and reacted by kicking her out of office and electing an even more incompetent leftist, on the theory that if ‘progressive’ policies don’t work, then one just needs to ‘progressive’ harder.
What's clear is that something has to change. Our cities are well on their way to self-immolation; the murders of Carlos Loera and Ashley Guzman, while horrific, are also yet another symptom of the festering sore at the heart of our nation's urban centers. Unfortunately, these problems won't be solved until the voters in those cities stop putting the same lunatics back in charge of the asylums.
