When the Inquirer is bad, it is horrid....

While I was quite pleased with yesterday's editorials, today's Philadelphia Inquirer features a morally indignant editorial which the website lists (incorrectly IMO) under the category of "top stories." Headlined "Silence is the enemy of justice -- 'No Snitchin' ' is part of a wide moral breakdown," the "story" not only blames guns for crime, but the writer apparently thinks there's something very wrong with charging suspects under the Felony Murder rule:

In broad daylight, at least three people fire 40 shots in front of 20 witnesses, killing a mother trying to protect her children on a narrow little street in Southwest Philadelphia. And nobody sees a thing?

In North Philly, a shell-shocked mom tries to point out the person she thinks shot her teenage son and people in the crowd warn her she'd better not say anything or "we'll get you, bitch." And she doesn't say a thing.

The message is clear. No snitching. Or else.

Here in Philadelphia, where the blood drain totals 104 victims, most of them black, we've got public mourning down to a science. Somebody's shot, and up springs a teddy-bear memorial on a chalk outline even before the person is pronounced dead. Marches and candlelight vigils follow.

But when it comes to performing the most basic of civic duties - reporting a crime to the police - we don't know nothing, ain't seen nothing, ain't heard nothing.

Young black men in "No Snitchin' " T-shirts are playing a real-life game of Mortal Kombat with no regard for who is caught in the crossfire, and our silence is perpetrating the mayhem.

Which is why I find the next paragraph so incomprehensible:

But what's most shameful is that on Tuesday, the young mother Jovonne Stelly, victim No. 95, was buried. Of all things, Stelly's brother and husband have been charged with her murder because they pulled out guns and fired. Neighbors say the men were trying to protect Stelly. Whether that's true or not is anybody's guess because the third shooter is nowhere to be found. And nobody's talking.

As to the felony murder rule, it's pretty simple:

if a killing occurs during the course of a commission of a felony, all accomplices in the felony are chargeable with murder.

As the writer says, "Of all things!"

Reading through the rest of this profoundly illogical editorial that the Inquirer calls a story, I began to anticipate another moral lecture from Penn professor Elijah Anderson on the "code of the street." (Anderson, btw, has attempted to inject race into the gun debate.)

I read on, and sure enough, I was right. It's Anderson's "code of the street" -- although there's a new twist. There was once a global village, but it has been ruined:

There was a time when a certain kind of snitching was expected. If your neighbors caught you doing something wrong, you'd better believe they'd report back to your parents before your foot hit the doorstep. That was how the village was maintained.

But nowadays the global village is suffering a moral breakdown. Suburban kids won't dime out friends using drugs, corporate and government whistle-blowers usually pay a price, doctors won't tell on each other, and, in a bit of twisted irony, cops begging neighborhood folks to snitch would be the last to break their own code of silence.

In the inner city, where almost half of hireable black men are unemployed, years of segregation, alienation and abuse foster a deep mistrust of authority. An unspoken commandment prevails as folks fend for themselves in an underground economy, trading and bartering by their own rules: You didn't put your business in the street so don't put other folks' business out there, either.

"If you snitch, you buy into the white man's system," a system that "has been so systemically against you," says Penn sociologist Elijah Anderson, who lays it out in his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City.

FWIW, I have tried to address the problem of the no snitch culture, and the no snitch movement. I don't think it's accurate to call it "the code of the street," so much as a criminal campaign in which criminals have imposed their standards on the people they terrorize:

Stop Snitchin' refers to a controversial campaign used by criminals to frighten people with information from reporting their activities to the police.

I couldn't help notice that today's piece concludes by encouraging people to report crime, but with a rather peculiar twist:

Time for change
Janean Williams, mother of a 7-year-old, says the price of silence is too high. Like so many of her neighbors, Williams inherited the house she grew up in. She loves her neighborhood, she says, and is willing to fight for it. If that means telling what she sees, so be it.

"When are people gonna stop being scared?" Williams, 32, asks. "I pay too much in taxes to be scared."

"You get to the point where you become tired. I don't want to live in fear."

There are ways we can anonymously report a crime. Call 215-546-TIPS or report a gun at 215-683-GUNS.

You'd think the reporter editorial writer would at least bother to point out that the latter tip line was established for the purpose of reporting illegal guns:

Citizens are encouraged to call the 24-hour/seven-day-a-week G.R.R.I. P. command center at 215-683-GUNS (215-683-4867) to report persons that are in possession of an illegal firearm or people trafficking in the sales of weapons.

You'd think someone in the Inquirer hierarchy could have seen fit to add the word "illegal."

So as a public service to Inquirer readers, I'll add a reminder.

PLEASE NOTE: The Philadelphia Police Department's G.R.R.I.P. line is there for reporting illegal guns and illegal gun trafficking.

Sheesh.

(You'd almost think the Inquirer wanted the police to confiscate guns from law abiding citizens.)