This is what the top of the Drudge Report looks like right now, at 7:30 PM on a Thursday.

The body count continues to grow in Baltimore, with a 31-year-old mother and a seven-year-old boy becoming the 37th and 38th murder victims of May today. It hasn’t been this bloody in Baltimore since November 1999, during the Clinton Presidency, and we still have several more days remaining in the month.

Arrests have now declined by more than half as police strike a defensive posture, having been thrown to the wolves by a city government pandering to the criminal underclass who elected them over the still-unexplained death of Freddie Gray.

Officers are reported to be swarmed by hostile mobs if they dare respond to calls, in a city that is on the brink of a full failure of civility. Therefore, they tread cautiously, and only with support. Their presence has concentrated. Criminals have notice the gaps, and are swarming them like gnats to a seeping wound.

“I’m afraid to go outside,” said Antoinette Perrine, whose brother was shot down three weeks ago on a basketball court near her home in the Harlem Park neighborhood of West Baltimore. Ever since, she has barricaded her door and added metal slabs inside her windows to deflect gunfire. “It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside,” Perrine said. “People wake up with shots through their windows. Police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.” West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them, leaving some neighborhoods like the Wild West without a lawman around. “Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was chased down. “People feel as though they can do things and get away with it. I see people walking with guns almost every single day, because they know the police aren’t pulling them up like they used to.”

It’s almost amusing.

Many of the same people who called the police murderers and monsters and accused them of a long string of abuses just weeks ago, are suddenly finding out what happens when they succeed in driving the police out of their neighborhoods.

The good people and petty criminals alike are suddenly discovering what it feels like when Johnny Law isn’t there to protect them from psychopaths and sociopaths that roam the streets.

Put bluntly, they have the communities that they deserve.

Anti-gun Democrats elected by these nimrods have all but disarmed the law-abiding in Maryland. An absurd “may issue” permitting scheme ensures that it is nearly impossible for an average citizen to obtain a concealed carry permit to defend himself or herself outside the home, ensuring that the only people on the streets these days with guns are criminals.

Even in your home, Maryland’s anti-gun, anti-self-defense Democrats have made it almost impossible to defend your family. This is the insane state that charged US Air Force Tech Sgt. Matt Pinkerton with Second Degree Murder for not calling 911 while he and his guests were being charged by a home invader (It finally took the intervention of a judge to throw the charges out before the case went to trial).

Baltimore’s residents in specific and Maryland residents in general are seeing what happens when you trade essential liberties for the illusion of temporary safety.

It’s not looking like such a good trade now, is it?