Mark Penn writes at FoxNews.com about a major problem plaguing America’s largest cities.
Nearly 100,000 people died last year in violence-related deaths. It wasn’t in Gaza or Ukraine. It was here in the United States. Deaths from opioids like fentanyl and murders totaled just under 100,000 — down from the year before. The war is right here in America.
These numbers are families ripped apart; children lost; communities unsafe. And these overall statistics sugarcoat the areas with the highest numbers lost, which are five and 10 times the national average. This is not about politics, but about American lives.
The denial of this reality is one of the great scandals of our time and why so little was done to stop it until now. Every life is precious, and it’s big news when a deranged individual shoots up a church, but the equivalent of that is happening multiple times a day in many places, and it seems to be hidden from the public consciousness.
The governor of Illinois said that they had crime under control and didn’t need any federal help. Nearly 800 people were murdered last year in Cook County. Another 1,000 died of drug overdoses. That’s about five people every day. Nothing to see here. Cook County may not have the highest crime rate (that’s reserved for St. Louis, which has the highest murder rate of any major city), but it has the highest number of deaths per year.
President Donald Trump has taken some strong measures on closing the border, threatening China and other countries over fentanyl and taking over policing Washington D.C. He has gone right at trying to end the hidden war killing so many, right here.
And the early signs are that his methods are shaking things up and are working to attack problems that under the Biden administration had largely been allowed to fester. The focus on policy was to ignore the border and make everything about racial equality and climate change. Numbers may have come down since the post-pandemic surge, but they are still way too high.
