Okay, this has gotten ridiculous.

The murder of two men found in a car in West Louisville now brings this year's homicide total to 19. I have never experienced or been aware of this many homicides this early in the calendar year.

I brought Narrow The Gap! on the scene to provide the good people of Louisville and particularly the beautiful ones of West Louisville so that folks could be and stay informed on “the good in the hood.” What I mean is that I often heard the complaints from some that “nobody is doing anything to help” the people in the West End and they would ask “where are the programs?”

We have to ask ourselves some hard questions. As we look at this, we should also consider that we have been asking ourselves the wrong question.

I have taken it as my responsibility at narrowthegap.org to share with the people all of the work and programming taking place throughout the neighborhoods of West Louisville. I am doing all that I can to trumpet your efforts as reporter, part-time cheerleader and support. The work that you sisters and brothers are putting in are in the hope of preventing future crimes and deaths, but not doing so much for the violence that is happening NOW.

To stop crime and deaths in the present takes the courage to report bad offenders and heavy law enforcement. My website and none of the community’s programs are going to stop a brother with murder on his mind from robbing some people over some amount of contraband and/or money.

I have said it before and I will say it again: you want to stop the killing? Stop the killers. How do you get serious about stopping the killers? Recognize that everyone is not going to be saved, and if they are going to choose paths of darkness, they are not beyond God's redemption, but for society's survival and any hope of breathing life back into our wrecked neighborhoods, they have to go. We can no longer afford to aid and abet reckless criminal activity and murderers.

In the longer view of statistical analysis, this bad year might just be a statistical anomaly...an outlier. Won't know for another 5-10 years.

In the moment, it's a real bad look, because it presents the evidence of a lot a people falling apart all over our poor and Black-majority neighborhoods.

Beloved community, it comes down to this: people are going to have to find a way to help slow down and stop the high violence, and that's going to mean turning a few very dangerous people in...Or otherwise, the government (whether local, state or federal) will come in and do it for us...and we are not going to like the way they're going to come in and the way that they will do it.

Black people are setting themselves up for a "shoot first and ask questions later" slaughter from our enemies. Or, we can look at like the criminal populations of people who are Black are going to make it very bad for all of the rest of us.

When these people start getting treated like and engaged like the military does with insurgents and terrorists, it will seriously be a perilous time. Let us not let our work and effort to heal and rebuild West Louisville to be compromised or stopped. Let us get off our knees and take more active roles in stopping the killing in measurable, tangible ways.