What Would the Murder Rate in Baltimore be Without the Johns Hopkins Trauma Center Stunting Evolution?

$10. The latest multiple homicide and shooting in Baltimore was over $10 [Pigtown shooting stemmed from dispute over $10, Baltimore Sun, 8-21-13].

Ten Dollars.

Standing in the way of evolution in a city (Baltimore) where black criminals gladly perform nature's job

That’s what life is worth a 64 percent black city (28 percent white), where there have been twenty shootings in an 80-hour time span. [Fatal Pigtown shooting brings city count to 20 in 80 hours: Suspect in custody; two others taken to area hospitals, Baltimore Sun, 8-21-13]:

An infant child was found next to her dying mother just before dawn Tuesday after police say a man broke into a Pigtown home, killed a young couple and shot two others — a grisly scene that brought to 20 the number of people shot in the city in a span of 80 hours.

Police said they had charged 35-year-old Melville Mason, who they said was caught trying to escape the home. The arrest came as officials sought to address concerns about spiking crime amid a violent summer and a recent outburst of street robberies throughout the city.

 Not even the prospect of getting a free laptop in exchange for your firearm (a program called “Stop Shooting, Start Coding”) could stem the rising tide of black mayhem castigating all the citizens of Baltimore; a city where electronic doors and bulletproof plexiglass guard store owners from their primarily black customer-base [Liquor store owner kills gunman in W. Baltimore, Baltimore Sun, 12-18-1990].

Black crime in Baltimore (and incredibly high murder rates) was the primary reason law-abiding citizens vacated the city, where immigrant traders erected bunkers to ply their capitalistic ventures in a Mahogany War-Zone [Trade Barriers Community: From behind the protective glass, Korean-American grocers Ki and Sung Yi cast a wary eye on crime in the city., Baltimore Sun, 2-8-1997]:

In their corner grocery in East Baltimore, Ki Nam Yi and his wife, Sung Cha Yi, measure out their 13-hour days in small sales of soda pop and potato chips, white bread and homemade iced tea, candy and cigarettes.

The first-floor windows of the worn old rowhouse at the corner of Luzerne Avenue and Preston Street are boarded up. The overhead sign still says Green's Grocery; in the early '60s, a couple of guys named Isadore and Ruben Green owned the store, and nobody's bothered to change the sign since. A variety groceries and confectioneries have occupied this corner for at least 50 years.

In their windowless store, the Yis work behind a locked door and Plexiglas shielding that gives the shop the atmosphere of a bunker or a guard post, a checkpoint on some hostile border.

The Yis deal with their customers through rotating Plexiglas windows, like monks withdrawn to a cloistered monastery, getting paid before handing over an order.

Behind their murky Plexiglas they seem watery and indistinct as creatures in an aquarium. Beyond the barriers, their customers seem equally remote and shadowy.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to how commerce is done in a black metropolis -- behind plexiglass. 

Baltimore's murder rate would be much, much higher, were it not for the incredibly talented trauma surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which stands in the way of the evolutionary zeal black people possess to voluntarily cull their own population

David Simon's 1991 book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (which chronicles his following Baltimore homicide detectives for one year) sees him make a hilarious admission regarding why murder rates have declined in Baltimore. 

Remember, this is where a Baltimore where U.S. Military surgeons are trained before war-zone deployments,  and you'll get the joke Simon inadvertently tells in Homicide:

But for the rest of the homicide unit, it’s business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit’s institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state’s shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve.

On Friday afternoons, the nightshift detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders-88041, 88042, 88043-and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: Hell, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor fuck would change his name, lock himself in his basement, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.

Of course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight shift, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible.

 "City seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible," is a beautiful way to surmise the black-on-black (and black-on-anyone) violence destroying Baltimore.

 Though the New York Times would have you believe Malt Liquor was the reason private citizens are hiring private security to protect themselves from the ravishment of spontaneous blackness [Beers Implicated in Emergency Room Visits, New York Times, 8-19-2013]:

The study, carried out over the course of a year at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, found that five beer brands were consumed most often by people who ended up in the emergency room. They were Budweiser, Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and Bud Light.

Three of the brands are malt liquors, which typically contain more alcohol than regular beer. Four malt liquors accounted for nearly half of the beer consumption by emergency room patients, even though they account for less than 3 percent of beer consumption in the general population.

Previous studies have found that alcohol frequently plays a role in emergency room admissions, especially those stemming from car accidents, falls, homicides and drownings, said the lead author of the study, David H. Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The new study, published in the journal Substance Use and Misuse, is the first to look at whether certain brands or types of liquor are overrepresented.

Dr. Jernigan said that the breakdown of liquor consumption in the study may be particular to Baltimore, and that he and his colleagues are hoping to study other cities as well. The findings could have policy implications, potentially influencing labeling requirements and marketing for higher-alcohol beers, Dr. Jernigan said.

Dr. Jernigan, the reason liquor stores in Baltimore are protected by plexiglass windows is so customers can't kill employees over a $10 bottle of vodka or a $10 12-pack of malt liquor.

You keep talking about American Exceptionalism, please.

Please.

And Baltimore would continue to die, courtesy of blacks willing to kill one another over $10.