Is inner city gun violence a form of societal genocide?

The gun violence carnage infesting America's inner cities came home to me personally when someone I knew was gunned down driving in Chicago's Austin community December 2. He was Chicago murder victim No. 702, a lifelong community activist and pillar of his west suburban community with ties to Chicago's West Side that put him in the gunsights of shooters unknown, and likely never to be. His was probably a random death little noted by those who didn't know him.

What we do know is our sick society allows millions of guns, generating billions in profits, both legal and illegal, proliferated by soulless creatures oblivious to the bloodbath their enabling, to wreck this carnage upon our inner cities. These death merchants have bought off most of the 535 members of Congress, most of the 50 governors and most of state legislatures on their path to blood money to live the high life while America's rotting, neglected inner cities have become real life shooting galleries.

Outside those innumerable fire fire zones, the insensitive and the racist point the finger at the desperately poor and forgotten, claiming it's all their fault, as if those shut out from the American dream have any ability to stem the violence plaguing their communities. The President, the Congress, the governors, the state legislatures have done nothing to address the epidemic of violence resulting from a cruel and heartless political culture that serves the gun and ammo merchants instead of their must vulnerable citizens.

Is this a form of societal genocide? The answer is an unequivocal...YES.