Oct 4, 2022 3 min read

“Three shot at Kennywood.” “Man shot in McKeesport.” “One man fatally shot, one wounded in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.” “Vehicles struck by gunfire in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood.” “Two juveniles shot in Pittsburgh’s Sheraden.”

Those are the headlines from one weekend’s violence in the Pittsburgh area.

Just one weekend.

Why? What is prompting so much gun violence in the area?

It is not something that has just erupted as kids have gone back to school. Over the summer, crime on the South Side prompted outcry from businesses begging for laws to be enforced. At least one shop closed, with the Fudge Farm saying it couldn’t ask its young staff to risk their lives for a job selling candy.

It isn’t restricted to the Pittsburgh city limits, although as the densest population in the area, it does lead the way.

But what is most important to recognize is that one or two victims here and there – over and over again – is a simple but terrible math problem over time.

To date in 2022, there have been 76 homicides involving guns in Allegheny County, according to the latest reports from the county.

But that’s not quite true.

The last victim on the list was Dante Jones on Sept. 9, who was shot multiple times in his car at a Penn Hills gas station. It does not include anything in the more than two weeks since, including Warnell Boyd, 46, who was found Saturday in the doorway of a Bedford Avenue home in the Hill District.

But even beyond the time frame, the list is woefully incomplete because it measures only a specific kind of victim. There are more casualties than it can count.

It also doesn’t include the other victims – the ones who didn’t die but suffered gunshot wounds. It doesn’t include others noted in the reports of violent confrontations. Robert Dietrich, 78, of Kennedy is noted for his June 17 homicide but not his neighbor, Charles Collins, who shot and killed himself after killing Dietrich.

It doesn’t include the grieving and broken family members who might not have scars but are victims nonetheless.

It doesn’t include the property owners whose neighborhoods are ripped apart by bullets. It doesn’t include the other business owners – the ones still keeping their doors open and trying to attract customers when every weekend looks a lot like that list of horrible headlines.

It is in the aftermath of a shooting like the one that scattered bullets around a North Side Airbnb house party on Easter weekend or the Tree of Life mass shooting in Squirrel Hill that people talk about problems and solutions.

The real problem is that we don’t adequately address the pileup of bodies and victims over time in an epidemic of violence that cannot be prevented with vaccines or masks. It is not a daily, weekly, steady conversation that acknowledges how many people we lose to the tragedy of gun crimes that have become as endemic as the common cold.