'Tired of the Gunshots': Terrified Black Residents Fleeing Crime-Ridden Democrat-Run Cities

(John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune via AP)

Among the many hypocrisies of the Democrat Party and its mainstream media sock puppets, the exploitation of mass shootings as an excuse to demand further restrictions on law-abiding gun owners, while virtually ignoring black-on-black homicides in Democrat-run cities arguably stands at the top.

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In other words, mass shootings by alleged white supremacists toting so-called weapons of war (scary-looking AR-15s), in the disingenuous (lying) minds of the gun-grabbing left provide just cause to chip away — one bite at a time — at the Second Amendment.

Just one problem.

The U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday revealed black residents are leaving crime-riddled, Democrat-run cities in the North and West that have a historically high black population, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Oakland, and fleeing to suburban and high-growth areas to escape violent crime by moving to safer neighborhoods.

“I was tired of the gunshots, the sirens,” said Mary Hall-Rayford, a retired teacher who moved from Detroit to neighboring Eastpointe, Michigan, in 2012, who also told the Wall Street Journal: “Eastpointe is a nice little city.”

Ms. Hall-Rayford is just one example of a remarkable turnabout:

The outflow marks a reversal of the Great Migration that began in the early 20th century as millions of Black Americans left the South looking for more economic opportunities and to flee racial violence. Much of the current shift is driven by younger, college-educated Black people who are relocating from northern and western places to the South, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The new census estimates show other cities included in the county-level data, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, saw the number of non-Hispanic Black residents decline more steeply than their overall population in the last measured year, which runs through mid-2022. This comes as many cities saw their numbers broadly shrink because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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South Philadelphia resident Khary Minor said nearly 5 percent of his barbershop customers have left the Democrat-run city since the pandemic began and crime dramatically increased. He’s planning to relocate to suburban Darby, Pennsylvania.

Better school district, nicer neighborhood, there’s not people out on every corner.

While terrified residents fleeing crime-ridden neighborhoods is a good thing for those who leave, the migration leaves violent crime areas exposed to even more precarious conditions.

Justin Bibb, mayor of Cleveland suburb Mt. Pleasant, said left-behind neighborhoods and businesses suffer when presumably law-abiding citizens leave.

The majority [of businesses] were Black-owned, and unfortunately, they went out of business.

So let’s think about this for a minute.

It’s reasonable to assume that Democrat politicians — white, black, and every color in between — are fully aware of exactly what Mayor Bibb said. Yet, as to the bloody streets of Chicago’s Southside, St. Louis, Baltimore, Houston, Cleveland — the list goes on — where is the outcry from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Congressional Democrats? CNN, MNSBC, and America’s largest left-wing rags? Crickets.

And why? As I said at the top, the brutal reality flies in the face of Democrat narratives about everything from white supremacy to so-called gun violence to the demand to curtail gun ownership among law-abiding Americans. Therefore, such statistics must be ignored, discredited, or bald-face lied about.

While urban blacks haven’t suburbanized at the same rate as the overall population, the black population in metro-area suburbs has risen from 33 percent to 44 percent over the last two decades. Over the same period, the percentage of blacks in central cities declined from 53 percent to 47 percent. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that as murder and other violent crime continues unabated in affected cities, the number of black citizens who fear for their lives and the lives of their children will continue to increase.

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Real estate agent Amber Noble, a managing broker for Keller Williams Main Line in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has helped black clients sell houses before relocating to Atlanta. “People call it the black mecca of the world,” she said, adding that most people leaving Philadelphia say they are seeking better schools, as well.

The National Education Association was unavailable for comment.

Meanwhile, the black population of Oakland has been declining for decades. And new census estimates show a decline of 2.3 percent in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, between mid-2021 and mid-2022. Carolyn Johnson, chief executive of the Black Cultural Zone, a community-development organization in Oakland, is concerned that black people leaving crime-ridden neighborhoods “saps the political power of Black residents within the city.”

Black people deserve to stay in the places that they held down when it wasn’t fun.

I agree with Ms. Johnson — albeit likely for different reasons.

Law-abiding citizens of all colors, races, and beliefs deserve to live in areas of their choice, but when they choose to leave out of necessity because of violence, including the murder of innocent people, the Democrat Party and its lapdog media ignore their plight — or blame systemic racism for every bit of it.

Hell, since Kamala Harris has an uncanny knack for discovering the root causes of everything from the never-ending invasion of America by illegal aliens to the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (the jokes sometimes write themselves), why not have the word salad queen roll up her cackling sleeves and get to work figuring out black-on-black violent crime? [Yeah, no— that’ll never happen.]

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Additional damning facts abound in the latest Census Bureau release, but the ugly little non-secret secret in the Democrat Party and other left-wing organizations is, quite frankly, they don’t give a damn.

Even worse, as I suggested, the reality is not rocket science, and obscenely, the left’s narrative requires lie after lie, which only further hurts the very people about whom hypocritical Democrats claim to care. Nonsense.

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