The Democrats' plan to shift the blame for inner-city mayhem from their own self-destructive policies to guns in general, and the AR-15 in particular, reached something of a high-water mark on Saturday.

At the Missouri variant of the so-called "March for Our Lives Rally," Kansas City's ambitious young mayor, Quinton Lucas, fired away with a comment so false in so many ways that even deposed San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin would have been embarrassed to utter it.

Said Lucas for the ages, "I feel like in Missouri these days, if you cross the state line, they say, 'Welcome. Here's an AR-15. Good luck.'"  Knowing Kansas City as well as I do — I live in one of its more liberal neighborhoods — I almost choked on my arugula when reading this.  Lucas, I suspect, is banking on the Kansas City Star's paywall to protect sensible people from calling him out on this nonsense.

Sensible people long ago ceased to subscribe to the once-essential Star.  Today, it reads as though it were composed by the rainbow coalition at the local, not-very-good community college.  It is that biased, that bad.

That said, at the end of each year, the Star provides a useful service.  It names every homicide victim in the metropolitan area and describes the manner of his/her/zher death.  In 2021, Kansas, Missouri witnessed 157 homicides, down from 182 in the record-breaking 2020.  None of the deaths in 2021, as far as I could tell, involved an AR-15.  There were no mass shootings that year.

The extra-murderous 2020 was the year Lucas took a knee with the largely peaceful protesters then in the process of fatally wounding the city's famed Country Club Plaza.  Lucas joined them in chanting, "No justice, no peace."

Lucas appears to have intended his foolish comment as a slap against the historically Republican state of Kansas, an infield pop-up away from Barstow, the pricey prep school Lucas attended on the appropriately named State Line Road.  Immediately across the street from Barstow is the largely white, generally prosperous Johnson County, now more populous and powerful than the city that spawned it.

If Lucas intended Kansas as his target, he has a point.  There are a lot of AR-15s in Johnson County.  Most of my suburban friends own at least one.  It is a useful, efficient weapon, which is why it is so popular.  I was kind of wishing I owned one when the largely peaceful protesters marched to within a block of my house in 2020.  I think I may be the only gun-owner on my block in any case.

Despite the prevalence of these guns, Johnson County recorded five homicides in 2021, four if we exclude the justified police shooting of Nashville, Tennessee resident Darren Dejuan Chandler in a local hotel.  All four of the other victims were shot up close, one with a shotgun.

Johnson County is home to about 610,000 people.  Kansas City, Missouri has a population of 508,000.  If my math is right, in 2021, a Kansas City resident was 47 times more likely to be murdered than a resident of Johnson County, despite all the fearsome AR-15s in Johnson County.  Something other than guns is clearly at play here, but Lucas dare not mention root causes if he is to remain in good standing with his fellow progressives.

Now, if we get more "granular" — I hate that word, who invented it? — a KC resident was seven times more likely to get killed by something other than a gun than a Johnson County resident was to be killed by a gun.  In fact, a KC resident was almost twice as likely to be stabbed to death as a Johnson County resident was to be shot.

In the three months before Lucas's dangerously misleading comment, the Kansas City area experienced two frightening school incidents.  In April, a 14-year-old kid was stabbed to death by a fellow student at a middle school in Lucas's Kansas City.

A month before that, in Johnson County, an 18-year-old black student named Jaylon Desean Elmore brought an untraceable "ghost gun" to school.  When confronted by the school resource officer and the principal, both white, Elmore shot and wounded them both.  The SRO returned fire, wounding Elmore and ending the threat.

Not liking this narrative, the Star ran an editorial with the churlish headline "Wait for the Olathe East Investigation to label heroes."  The Star followed that with articles headlined, "Star fights for affidavits in Olathe East school shooting case" and another, "Could Olathe East have handled the school shooting better?"

For the past sixty years, Democrats have been busily working to destroy the black community, beginning with family-killing welfare policies and culminating recently with a suicidal "defund the police" movement.  To cover their tracks, they periodically shift the blame to the tools guaranteed by the one amendment that protects America from Democrats and their lethal minions.

The media are as much to blame as the Dems.  They could halve the murder rate within a few years if they just started telling the truth and stopped enabling their Democratic partners in crime.

To learn more, see www.cashill.com.

Image: Maryland govpics