A 12-year-old boy was shot and killed in a shooting in Knoxville Saturday night after a “anti-gun violence” basketball tournament.

Add his small body to the sacrificial pile at the Alter of Failed Culture.

A 12-year-old at Bearden Middle School was shot and killed in a gang-related shooting in Knoxville Saturday night, according to police. Jajuan Hubert Latham was struck in the head by a gunshot while sitting in the back of his father’s SUV at Danny Mayfield park just before 10 p.m. The father was not injured in the shooting. During a press conference Sunday, Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch condemned the recent gang-related violence. “The violence has got to stop, this can’t go on. We do not need to bury anymore children,” Rausch said. “It’s my gang is better than your gang. That makes no sense to me.They’re cowards. A coward shoots blindly at a crowd.”

That’s not entirely true, according to the police force itself.

According to the preliminary investigation, a gathering by a large number of people was being held at Mayfield Park when shooting erupted between the party attendees, and occupants of two vehicles that were driving by the park. Multiple shell casings of various caliber weapons were recovered at the scene.

The people in the vehicles weren’t “shooting blindly.” They’re guilty of poor marksmanship and not caring at all about hitting innocent bystanders, but that doesn’t mean the thugs didn’t have a specific target or group of targets. There is a very high likelihood that this was a shooting between gangs. There are also indications that the people in the car weren’t the only ones firing. The good citizens of the community who went to this “anti-gun violence” tournament opened fire as well. Heck, they may have fired first.

Therein lies the problem.

The majority of homicides of young black males in the United States are far from random acts of violence, but are instead typically linked to gang-related activity. While I can’t easily find national data to support my thesis (not on an under-caffeinated Monday morning on the East coast after a week of training in the Southwest, at least), we all know where the “bad part of town” is where we live. We also know that’s where violent crime tends to occur, and that the majority of those shootings and stabbings are related to gang activity, typically over territory, perceived slights, and the narcotics trade.

Democrat politicians dishonestly assert that we have a “gun problem” in the United States because it’s much easier to blame problems on an inanimate object than deal with the reality that decades of Democrat social engineering have utterly and consistently failed to manufacture prosperity in certain communities.

If we magically made all 325+ million firearms in the United States disappear overnight, criminal violence in these communities would not change significantly, only the mechanism of injury would change. This is a violent culture problem, not a tool problem.

Hillary Clinton and other politicians continue to lie to the American people, asserting that inanimate objects are responsible for the actions of people.

Until they are willing to address culture problems they’d rather ignore to attack scapegoats, we can expect the violence in this cultures to continue to grow, despite laws they push that only disarm those who no inclination to commit crimes.