Jason Stockley

Source: St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department

Barking through a loudspeaker to a startled crowd that protesters had disrupted at a food festival called Taste St. Louis, social worker and would-be politician Cori Bush—a black woman with huge teeth—summarized the rioters’ message:

The message is simple: stop killing us. Black folks say, stop killing us….We didn’t come out to overtake or overthrow anything….We came out because we want you to know black lives matter.

Oh, really? All of them, or just the ones that die at the hands of white cops under impossibly complicated circumstances?

Let’s rise above the self-immolating moral hysteria and deal for a moment with some facts.

• Forbes magazine rated St. Louis the second-most dangerous large American city. One can only wonder what St. Louis and Detroit have in common.

• As of this writing, in 2017 there have been 135 black murder victims in St. Louis compared to eight white murder victims. All 96 known murder suspects are black.

• In 2016, an estimated 309 black people were killed by police in America. I could not find stats on exactly how many were killed by white officers, although according to stats, black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot blacks than white cops are.

• Every year in America, about twice as many whites are killed by blacks than the inverse, despite the huge numerical advantage whites currently have. Factoring in the numerical disparities, a white person is 11 times more likely to be murdered by a black person than the inverse.

• Since about 90% of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks, and since in 2015 there were slightly more than 7,000 black homicide victims in the USA, about 6,300 blacks are killed every year by other blacks. This is more than 20 times the number of blacks killed by police of all colors every year. This is nearly twice the total number of blacks lynched from 1882-1968—and it happens every year.

• Blacks abort about 140,000 fetuses yearly—about 450 times the number of blacks who die at the hands of police of all colors every year.

What were you saying about “Black Lives Matter” again?

The only lesson one can learn from all this is that one should never let facts get in the way of a good riot.