If you haven’t heard, our fair city has been gripped with something of a violent crime wave this month. A couple of days ago, there were 15 shootings in 24 hours. We’ve seen a rash of robberies, homicides, and murders in the last couple weeks; Baltimore’s on pace to murder our way to another record year.

Last night it came to my street; two armed men tried to rob the woman who runs the corner grocery store. Apparently they tried to snatch her purse, and when she resisted, they launched a shot over her head. I saw the bullet hole in the wall of the house behind the victim’s car. Pretty wild. Bullets flying in anger 50 feet from my house.

There have been the predictable calls to “get guns off the streets”. Yeah, that’s working great, isn’t it? You hear the calls to disarm the bad guys…but strangely never any practical suggestions or policies that might achieve that end. The anti-gun lobby echoes that sentiment, naturally–but they don’t seem to have any ideas that don’t involve disarming the law abiding while they’re at it. .50BMG bans? Assault weapons bans that include all semiauto pistols? Magazine capacity limits? Ammo purchase limits? Yeah, right. Kinda like making heroin illegal prevented 10% of our city’s population from slipping into addiction…

Had a nice talk with a deputy major in the Baltimore PD last night after a Citizens on Patrol walk; he was solidly in our camp. He agreed that the greatest hypocrisy in all this was that Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Dixon and all the other urban politicians traveled with armed escorts, but that private citizens were forcibly disarmed and had to face the crime wave empty handed.

Bet you won’t hear the Brady Campaign or Ceasefire Maryland acknowledge police brass that don’t parrot their garbage.