What Explains Baltimore?

Jason Riley writes for The Wall Street Journal and is black, we've cited his work before. Today he writes about the troubles in Baltimore, thankfully not behind the paywall. Riley begins with a question:

If the Ferguson protesters were responding to a majority-black town being oppressively run by a white minority—which is the implicit argument of the Justice Department and the explicit argument of the liberal commentariat—what explains Baltimore?

Might the bigger problem be racial disparities in antisocial behavior, not the composition of law-enforcement agencies?

The violent-crime rate in Baltimore is more than triple the national average, and the murder rate is more than six times higher. As of April, city murders are 20% ahead of the number killed through the first three months of last year. But neither Mayor Rawlings-Blake nor (City Council President) Mr. Young needs any lectures from the media on Baltimore crime. The mayor lost a 20-year-old cousin to gun violence two years ago. And earlier this month Mr. Young’s 37-year-old nephew died from a gunshot wound to his head. Even the families of black elites in a city run by black elites can’t escape this pathology.

A hundred and fifty years ago gun violence was the hallmark of the Wild West - the American frontier. Today it is the hallmark of our inner cities, Chicago being a particularly egregious example.