Gun-related Deaths Rising, Sky Falling

Happy New Year! We were only a few minutes into it when the first Seattle gun violence of 2007 happened at Skyway Park Bowl and Casino (which is actually in Renton, but whatever). A pregnant woman, a woman and a man were all shot just minutes after midnight at the bowling alley and taken to Harborview. The P-I doesn't list a motive.

So it took five minutes for someone to get shot in the area and one day for the Post Intelligencer to publish a "Homicides on rise in Seattle" article:

Last year marked the city's highest number of homicides in three years and reflected an upward trend in violent crime nationwide that police chiefs and criminologists are trying to interpret.

The increasing number of homicides has ended a steady decline in violent crime that so many large American cities, including Seattle, enjoyed during the past decade. Nationally, the number of murders increased 1.4 percent over the same period in 2005, FBI statistics show.

Come on, P-I. There were 29 gun-related homicides in Seattle in 2006 and 24 in 2005. Kyle Huff killed six people plus himself in March which was an absolutely horrifying tragedy, but it's probably a stretch to consider it as statistically representative of a trend. Let's say Kyle had killed only himself on that day. Then only 23 people would have died of gunshot wounds in 2006 which would have been lower than last year's total. That's not what happened, but neither is rising gang violence, and lumping Huff in with your more everyday gun deaths to tie Seattle to a national trend isn't very honest.

In general the P-I's attempt to cast itself as a West coast New York Post by trumpeting sensational stories about rising gang violence and hopped up crane operators has been something less than a success, and to us it feels like they don't want it bad enough. They're like that computer nerd from high school who played clarinet in the band but suddenly came back from a summer break trying out for the basketball team and playing alto clarinet or something. It's not going to take. He really wants to get the girl, but, well, he is what he is. He'll get laid in a freshman dorm after seducing someone with his Professor Longhair CDs and move on. The P-I, well, it's up in the air.