At 7:37 a.m. on Thursday morning the Irish Times arrived in my email feed with the unsettling server line, “Irish chef shot dead after altercation outside his restaurant in Kansas.”

This was the lead story, not of the American edition of the Irish Times, but of its international edition (the teaser for which should have placed the murder in Missouri). 

The headline of the actual article was more accurate and more specific: “Two teenagers arrested after Irish chef shot dead outside his restaurant in Kansas City.”

The subhead added detail: “Shaun Brady, originally from Nenagh, was shot in car park outside his restaurant after trying to intervene in suspected car theft.”

In years past, I might have first learned about the murder by grabbing the Kansas City Star off my front lawn and reading the sad story within. But I don’t get the paper anymore. Hardly anyone does. Over time, the paper betrayed its readership by abandoning news gathering for propaganda, and so the readers abandoned the paper.

In years past, I also watched the local nightly news, but no longer do. The newscasters, although not as aggressively woke as the Star’s, shy from presenting any story or any angle that might evoke “outrage” from the various interest groups so eager to take offense. 

So, for local news, when I feel the need to catch up, I turn to the area’s most trusted source, Tony’s Kansas City, a one-man blog allegedly run from the basement of Tony’s mom’s house.

That I and others in this metropolitan area of nearly 2 million depend on a one-man blog – even if run from some place other than his mom’s basement – is not a sign of communal health.

Nonetheless, Tony Botello writes what other people are thinking.

“This horrific killing is tragic and shocking,” he writes, “but the brutal slaying was preceded by outcry, warnings and public meetings from residents of Brookside & Waldo which pleaded with police & politicos in the midst of worsening car break-ins, robberies and assorted property crime.”

On a personal note, I live about a mile from the site of the murder in Brookside, as agreeable a neighborhood as you will find in urban America. About three years ago, however, I learned from outgoing KCPD Chief Rick Smith that not everyone found Brookside as agreeable as I do.

Among the issues that troubled Smith was the hostility his officers received in certain neighborhoods. I thought he meant the largely black neighborhoods on Kansas City’s east side. No, he quickly corrected me, “They welcome us.” They understood, he explained, the need for police protection.

The neighborhood he cited as most hostile was my own beloved Brookside, a neighborhood that is roughly 95 percent white and 70 percent Democratic. “They see us as the enemy,” he said. 

Brooksiders could afford their own liberal fantasies about law and order as long as the mayhem stayed on the east side. So, year after year, they elected increasingly liberal mayors and district attorneys, and boasted of their disdain for guns. 

Without a common forum to discuss the increase in crime and its creep westward, Mayor Quinton Lucas would routinely blame guns and a supposedly gun-crazy Republican Missouri Legislature for Kansas City’s horrific murder rate – and get away with it everywhere, except on Tony’s blog. 

Although the Irish Times reporter didn’t immediately editorialize about guns, he did observe, “There have been just more than 100 murders in Kansas City so far this year, while in 2023, some 182 people were killed, an all-time-high.” 

The editorials will come soon enough. They might note that in 2023, Kansas City’s homicide rate was 30 times higher than that of Ireland. That is true enough, but they will overlook the fact that Ireland’s homicide rate in 2023 was still 2.5 times higher than that of Overland Park, a neighboring city of 200,000 across the state line in Kansas.

Lucas doesn’t have to look across the pond for a model. He need only look across State Line Road.

Kansas has roughly the same gun laws as Kansas City, but Johnson County in 2023 had a Republican district attorney and a Republican sheriff, and Overland Park had a nonpartisan mayor. Plus, Kansas residents are much more likely to own guns than are my liberal neighbors in Brookside.

The young Visigoths preying on Brookside have caught on to just how vulnerable we’ve left ourselves.

Were there a common forum we might just be able to talk this out, but we haven’t. So we will mourn Shaun Brady’s death, make some noise about the mayhem, and elect still another woke county prosecutor in November.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.