The Times takes a look at Philly's soaring murder rate, and blames gun control laws that have stayed the same even as shootings have gone up. In an exceptionally dishonest bit, the piece opens:

In a hospital emergency room, a young man winces as doctors try to determine how badly he has been injured.

His name is Karim Williams, he is 27, and he is this city’s latest shooting victim. He says he was hit around 12:30 a.m. by a shot fired while he was walking from his girlfriend’s car into a bar.

…

In some ways, Mr. Williams is a typical patient at the trauma unit: young, mildly intoxicated and apparently with no idea why he was shot.

It's not until the 16th paragraph that Williams is mentioned again, when we're told that our unlucky victim "was looking for work after a past in which he served jail time for crimes including car theft and drug dealing." Our out of work ex-con's claim of being randomly shot is never held up to any questioning, though.

Rather, he's used to offer a resonant opinion on what's causing the problem: "'You’ve got to have jobs for the people that need them,' [Williams] said from his gurney. 'You have to keep people occupied. Without jobs, all you can do is resort to violence.'"

Having steered shy of Williams' background also means the article is unable to get to the heart of the matter—the extent to which these shootings result from high-crime pockets the police have been both unable and unwilling to go after, which in turn leads to still more crime, and a culture of lawlessness that's just brutal for the civilians who live in these areas.

Instead, the Times offers only two equally half-baked explanations for why the murder rate was up 22% from 2004-2006, and is on the rise again this year—lax state gun control laws state law compels the city to abide by, and poverty.

We wrote at some length about crime in Philly last week—suffice that a city with more murders than New York City and a sixth the population, and a mayor and police commissioner who prefer to blame the rise from 288 killings in 2002 to 406 last year on state laws and environmental causes they're powerless to change, is in bad need of a new direction.

The good news is that in the first Democratic mayoral debate on Saturday [video here], several of the candidates took a far more honest look at crime than the Times, or Mayor Street, has proven capable of taking.