There was a BMW SUV parked outside the house, the earnest reporter told us on the radio earlier this week, following the shooting of more than 20 people, and the killing of two at a Toronto party.

But surely the reasons for urban shootings are poverty, lack of air-conditioning, too few basketball courts, racism and a history of oppression.

Whoops, scrap the last reference, because if we mention race, the people out there to whom we lie on a constant basis will realize that gun crime is often the result of black gangsters fighting over drug turf, respect, or simply because they've nothing better to do.

Not that we're always even told the ethnicity of the criminals, sometimes resulting in the ludicrous, Kafkaesque scenario where the police give out descriptions of dangerous people they want to arrest, but are often too politically intimidated to be specific about their colour.

It's the racism of lowered expectations, in that white people know who the gangsters are because they're not fools, and black people know because they are so often the direct victims of these sociopathic cretins.

It's a scene replicated internationally, and even if we ignore the American example ­- where there genuinely is a history of discrimination and the phenomenon of a multi-generational underclass - the problem is entirely obvious. In Britain, for example, there are specific black crime units in every major city. Not, presumably, because everybody is obsessed with catching Conrad Black.

Many of the officers in these outfits are black, and they might just know a little more about who the killers are than white politicians terrified of speaking truth to liberal power, more than Sally Social Worker with her degree in gender studies, or Bobby Bolshevik, who blames everything on anything other than the real causes.

It's partly about self-regard. Too many teenage girls in the black community have so little of it that they are obsessed with becoming "baby mamas." What's love got to do with it? Sod all! Forget love, it's hardly even about sex. It's plastic self-esteem through pseudo-parenting, while the man's self-esteem is defined by the very opposite. He is hardly on the scene at all, and she likes is that way. Of course some of these girls grow to be mature and responsible mothers, but far from all.

If you have several children by various fathers, and if those children are never given any sense of boundary or limitation, if the ostensible mothers party rather than work, and then if they're told by suburban whites that they're victims rather than perpetrators, it's no wonder we have what we do.

Combine this with an attitude that despises authority, a police force led by people seemingly more concerned with appearances than arrests, the pop culture glorification of a rancid sub-culture, and politicians who know even less than they care, and we have disaster.

There has always been ethnic crime, but "civilians" were not targeted, and fleshy profit triumphed over moral and personal anarchy. I'm so damned tired of kids dying while adults are lying.

A great man had a dream, but many who have followed him have made the world a nightmare.