Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats make a big deal about firearm deaths being up in order to push gun-grabbing, background checks, ammo control, lawsuits against gun manufacturers, and gun control, presumably to stop it.

But a closer look at the statistics tells another story.

According to the University of Houston's Professor Craig Pirrong, who writes the Streetwise Professor blog:

The increase in gun homicides documented in the Emory University study is attributable almost exclusively to one factor: a nearly 60 percent increase in homicide fatalities among black men. Not over a period of many years — but in a little over one year.

And what year was that? 2020. And what happened in 2020? The death of George Floyd, and the subsequent revelation that black lives especially matter.

Yes, but not in the way intended. Not by a long shot. That death and revelation brought in its train myriad consequences. Defund the police. The war on cash bail and the release of numerous criminals. The demoralization of police, who were instructed explicitly and implicitly that arresting black male offenders was a career risk, and the subsequent surrender of the streets to the thugs. And on and on. (The release of many from jail because of COVID didn't help either.)

This is as close to a natural experiment as can exist in social science. An exogenous shock — the death of one man — leads to a tectonic shift in law enforcement, especially with regards to a particular demographic. The result?: a hyperbolic increase in homicide rates in that demographic.

He runs a chart showing an absolutely exponential rise in firearm deaths of black men, with much smaller upticks in deaths of Hispanic and white men, the latter attributed to suicide in the original Wall Street Journal report that is linked (subscription only).

The deaths, he argues, are due not ultimately to the existence of firearms, but to "a particular social pathology enabled by a social psychosis that reached epidemic proportions in 2020," and he calls the data "irrefutable."

So it seems that all the Black Lives Matter protests, which I have noted (here) were most enthusiastically embraced by white women, who with others outnumbered blacks six to one at the BLM protests, were really all about mansions for the organizers — and now higher death rates from firearms for black men. 

Those are the victims hardest hit, and by a monstrous margin.  And that's what those protests brought to them.

It's as if these virtue-signaling, sanctimonious, and self-abasing white women leading these protests, who drew expressions of contempt from black leaders such as BET chairman Robert Johnson, were actually trying to pick off black people just as their Klan forebears once did, even as they claimed to champion black people.

As they protested and called for police defunding — a very unpopular cause among black voters, by the way — they projected their white-women reality, that they can probably live without police, given that none of them owns or uses or has an interest in a firearm, onto black people, who must deal with the consequences of emptied prisons and criminals on the loose in marginalized neighborhoods.  A lot of innocent people have died in these shootings, yet the ruling orthodoxy, embraced by these white women, and assorted Black Lives Matter huckster radicals, continues to call for ending cash bail and throttling the police, with no concern for the consequences for black men.

Those deaths are now on these do-gooders, and the press that enabled them.  Where's the press with this new incontrovertible data now?  As usual, asleep at the switch. 

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Photo montage by Monica Showalter with use of screen shots from shareable YouTube videos, from Bloomberg Markets and Finance, Clevver News, NBC New York 4, Evening Standard, ABC7 New York, and WCCO Minneapolis.