The 'Ferguson Effect' is killing 59 people … a week

According to recently released FBI statistics, there were 17,250 murders in the U.S. in 2016. That is 3,086 more than in 2014.

There have been 59 confirmed dead in Las Vegas. Largely as a result of the "Ferguson Effect," 59 more people a week were killed in 2016 than in 2014. Do the math. It is ironically precise.

The nihilists on the left are keen on talking about Las Vegas, at least as long as motives remain unknown, but they cannot bring themselves to speak honestly about Ferguson and its after effects.

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on," said Winston Churchill, and rarely has a lie confirmed this thesis more lethally than the lie that came out of Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, on Aug. 9, 2014.

The lie was encoded in four words, "Hands up, don't shoot." It was consciously created and insidiously spread. That lie has led to thousands of deaths, many more injuries and now the hemorrhaging of fans from the National Football League.

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"The anti-police frenzy since the Ferguson tragedy has caused a crime disaster in the black neighborhoods of America," says political scientist Ernest Evans.

The recently released FBI statistics would seem to bear out his contention. From 2006 to 2014, the number of homicides in the United States declined steadily year by year save for a minor blip in 2012.

That trend resulted in 3,000 fewer murders in 2014 than in 2006. After August 2014, that trend abruptly reversed. In 2015, murders rose at their fastest pace in a quarter century. In 2016, there were 17,250 murders in the U.S., as mentioned, 3,086 more than in 2014.

Among the black population, the results were more dramatic. As a result largely of the Ferguson Effect, nearly 1,800 more African-Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014.

Although a Democrat himself, Dr. Evans comes down hard on his colleagues.

"I think that the situation is clear," Evans writes. "Clinton and her allies in the media and the Democratic Party and the liberal-left seized on the Ferguson tragedy of Aug. 9, 2014, to create a wedge issue that they hoped would energize the black vote for her in 2016."

Evans continues, "What this cynical, self-serving exploitation of the Ferguson and related tragedies did was set off a crime disaster in virtually every black neighborhood in America."

In 2016, St. Louis had the highest murder rate in the country. Midway through 2017, St. Louis retained that dubious honor.

Close behind St. Louis was Baltimore, which had its own equally distorted, media-inflamed, Ferguson-like incident in 2015.

It was in St. Louis, too, that the NFL was first dragged into the controversy. On Nov. 30, 2014, five players on the then St. Louis Rams entered the field with their hands in the air "in a nod to the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson."

In November 2015, the Ferguson fallout spread to the University of Missouri with well-documented consequences, none of them good.

In August 2016, the eighth year of the Obama presidency, the Patient Zero of the NFL protest movement, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, announced, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."

He added, "There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

Kaepernick was partly right. There were bodies in the street, but he and his allies were the ones putting them there.

As crime authority Heather Mac Donald observes, "Police officers are backing off of proactive policing in black neighborhoods thanks to the false narrative that police officers are infected with homicidal bias."

As Mac Donald notes, although 12 percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by cops, only 4 percent of black homicide victims are killed by cops. In fact, there is "zero" evidence police officers are targeting blacks and massive evidence they are not.

Word to the media: You don't have to take away guns to reduce crime. All you have to do is tell the truth.