“Um.... momma always told me, play with fire - get burnt. If you worship a corrupt materialistic greed-driven Tony Montana pseudo-culture hard enough, you usually end up eating a bullet or wearing an orange jumpsuit. Rightly so. If you want to be ‘street’ or gangsta, accept the consequences. This was no burglary...”

Comment posted on my blog about Washington Redskins football player Sean Taylor’s murder by, “chock full o’ nails!” on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 4:34 PM.

This is the way most people feel when they hear that a young black man was murdered. He had it coming. In Richmond, if you read that a young black male was murdered in Mosby Court, chances are the average person, regardless of color, is going to assume that the victim was complicit in his own demise.

Worst of all, many times they are right.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American males between the ages of 15 to 24. To put that into perspective, more young black males are murdered every year (7,421 African-American males were murdered in 2006) on our streets than the total (officially reported) number of American soldiers killed in the 5 plus years of the Iraq war (as of this writing, 3,882 and counting). Though the African-American community makes up just 12% of the nation’s population, black males make up 40% of our prison population in the United States. The unemployment rate for young African-American men is over twice the rate for young white, Hispanic and Asian men. Not surprisingly, after reading those statistics, it’s easy to understand why African-American males have a life expectancy of only 66.1 years, compared to the national average of 73.6 years for all men.

Sean Taylor should not have become a statistic. The 24-year old budding superstar was an elite member of the National Football League with more fame and fortune then he could shake a stick at. He achieved a level of success that can only be obtained through hard work and determined diligence. Taylor wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth either. He, in the great American tradition of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, spent countless weeks, months and years honing his body and brain to be the fearsome gridiron warrior that he became. Much has been made of his troubles on and off the field, but, from all accounts to those closest to him, he was a changed man and not the thug the media sometimes portrayed him to be. A dotting proud father of an 18-month old girl engaged to his high school sweetheart, Taylor was at the threshold of his and his family’s life.

Now, he is food for the worms.

The four young men (Venjah Hunter, 20; Eric Rivera, 17; and Charles Wardlow, 18. Jason Mitchell, 19) arrested in the murder of Sean Taylor have been charged with unpremeditated murder, armed burglary and home invasion with a firearm or another deadly weapon. “They were not targeting Sean Taylor,” Miami-Dade Police director Robert Parker said during a news conference Friday at the Miami-Dade Police Department. “Let me make this clear, they were certainly not planning to go there (to Taylor’s residence) to kill anyone. They were expecting a residence that was not occupied. Their obvious motive was to go there and steal the contents of the house.”

And that’s the sickening part. They had no intention of killing the beloved football star; they just wanted to steal his shit. The same tragic stupidity was evident Saturday night in Hanover County when Dermon Lee “Trey” Brown, a 17-year-old junior and a member of the John Marshall High School basketball team, was shot and died from his wounds early Sunday morning. The shooting occurred after an argument had closed down the party he was attending and, according to police reports, it was then a young man wearing a white hooded jacket decided to open fire on the people milling around on the street.

It just doesn’t get any dumber than that.

The heroic idiocy of young black males with trigger fingers is blamed in part on hip-hop culture. Despite the social and economic reasons that play significant roles in the disturbing slaughter of African-American males, rap music and its culture are deemed as the cause of this problem instead of the symptom. In September, Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton introduced a resolution to implore the city’s youths to pull up their trousers. Ordinances passed in towns in Louisiana and Georgia levy fines for the wearing saggy trousers, while Atlanta is weighing a proposed ban on exposed bra straps, thongs and low-slung pants that reveal underwear. Two years ago, the Virginia Senate defeated a saggy pants ban passed by the House, but not before it became an international embarrassment, said David Hudson Jr., a legal scholar at the Nashville-based First Amendment Center. “I’m not sure what it really serves,” Hudson said of the recent legislation that seeks to criminalize (mostly young black) American’s fashion choices. “They should solve some real problems.”

Like the debate about illegal immigration or why the terrorists hate us, no one asks the hard questions as to why young black males are murdering one another. Instead of working for educational and economic equality for African-American males or finding out how all those drugs and guns get in their hands in the first place (they don’t get there by themselves), politicians busy themselves with legislation aimed at making people pull up their pants. Ultimately, despite the many odds stacked against them, it’s up to young black males to stop killing one another.

Judging by the daily murder count, they have made their decision.

Can you hear me laughing? Good…

This is the most simplistic, earth-shatteringly ignorant thing I have ever read in my life.