A teenage girl was just killed after wielding a knife against another girl in Ohio. No, I’m not talking about Ma’Khia Bryant, the Columbus girl killed by a cop after she evidently tried to stab another unarmed girl to death, an instance inexplicably referred to by leftists such as Valerie Jarrett as a “knife fight.” No, 13-year-old Nyaira Givens was stabbed to death by another 13-year-old girl, who is due in court next week for murder.
On the heels of the justice finally served to Derek Chauvin in the form of multiple murder convictions, the Left searched for its new mascot of cops gone wild and settled that very same night on the saddening but necessary killing of Bryant. White House press secretary Jen Psaki lamented the shooting as evidence that police violence “disproportionately impacts black and Latino people,” an obvious falsehood given the fact that the cop in question was evidently protecting another black girl. But both the deaths of Bryant and Givens do point out a much bigger and tragic reality: The kids are not all right, and pandemic-era tyranny is likely a major cause.
Violent crime has exploded over the past year, with murders reaching the highest rate since the ’90s despite homicides plummeting in other nations. And even given the limited data on juvenile crime and homicides for 2020, the stories of kids, even girls, gone wild are astounding.
Hearings regarding a new teen car theft bill now have to be held in Connecticut, where juvenile arrests rose 23% from 2019 to 2020. The police in Washington, D.C., created a Carjacking Task Force in response to a sharp uptick in carjackings by youth even before two teenage girls not even old enough to drive killed UberEats driver Mohammad Anwar while hijacking the Pakistani immigrant with a Taser.
“I can just say that when you have people out of school with a lot more time on their hands, I think that’s a large part of it,” Montgomery County Detective Sgt. Rob Grims said in February. Across all of Maryland, juvenile robberies also increased from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020.
And we know why. The schools are closed, and unlike adults who have had significant others throughout the entire pandemic and vaccinations now, kids, who should be playing sports and going to choir, and teens, who should be going on dates and getting their first jobs, remain isolated, locked behind a Zoom screen for the sham of distance learning.
Even if you’re a “privileged” kid in a nice house with good parents and plenty of entertainment or even a learning pod for some socialization, the past year has proven abominable for youth mental health. And if you’re the sort of foster kid with a biological mom whose first instinct after your killing is to give a composed television interview? Well, then, you might just wind up like Bryant. Her teachers weren’t there. Her biological parents weren’t there, and clearly, her community wasn’t there. Only the cop was there by the time he had to kill her to save another girl’s life.
If you were lucky enough to have reached adulthood before this godforsaken pandemic, you probably reflect on adolescence as an endlessly busy time. Debate club and SAT classes and parties and dates bookended classes with teachers who asked how you were doing and (fortunately) warned you if you missed one class too many. Kids these days literally have too much time, and those with already broken social support systems, such as Bryant, lost their last bulwark of adult guidance buffering them from lawlessness and the law. Her death and every other death caused by or imposed on minors up to no good because of a vacuum of community are tragedies. If only we forced the teachers unions and tyrants keeping the schools closed to reopen, we could prevent another.
