The danger with a status quo is that it “normalizes” the prevailing situation. It makes one think the abnormal is somehow “normal.” That’s particularly problematic when the status quo is the result of decades of “defining deviancy down,” as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed over 30 years ago when he commented on our toleration of dysfunction.

Let’s examine Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate. The nation’s capital saw 274 murders in 2023. How you look at that number may decide what you call an “emergency.” 2023 was a peak year for DC killings. From 2020-22, the murder rate hovered around 200 before spiking. In 2024 it went down to 187.

Statistics can always be contorted to “prove” what one wants. Yes, murders are down over the high of 2023. And, based on that decline, critics of President Donald Trump’s federalization of the DC National Guard disparage his rationale for the takeover. According to Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, there’s no “emergency” justifying the President’s action. Murder is down! But 274 murders per year — the peak figure — means one killing every 31 hours, i.e., a dead human being in a little under a day-and-a-half, every day-and-a-half. Even at 187 murders, that means one killing every 46 hours, i.e., a dead human being every other day.

If a dead human being every other day is not an “emergency,” what is it? Is it “normal?” Statistically average? Par for the course? Good enough for government?

Is the fact that some people consider murder every other day just the status quo indicative of our social proclivity to define deviancy downwards? Is it a symptom — a disturbing symptom — of the relative accommodations we have made to a “culture of death”? Has that culture become so imbued that we calculate a murder every other day in the capital of the United States a statistical normality that need elicit no special or different reaction from “same old drill as usual, boys!”

If a murder in a nation’s capital every other day is not an “emergency,” please tell me what you think would constitute an “emergency.”

Politically, I support the President’s decision, but I am writing about this issue to raise the question beyond the political fray. In classical Catholic moral theology, there are four sins “crying to heaven for vengeance” — murder, sodomy, oppression of the widow and orphan, and defrauding the worker of his wages. The first of them is murder. It even gets its own explicit Commandment. The sins crying to heaven for vengeance ought to elicit a particular repugnance for their heinous nature. That they don’t — that we can even consider murder a statistical blip — tells me our sense of moral turpitude has grown dull.

That numbing also seems to include the Church, when our primary discussion about murder today is refracted through the lens of “rehabilitation” and “criminal justice reform” while the concept of punishment as exemplary — a full-throated, legitimate social repudiation of the crime and its perpetrator — almost never gets mentioned. That’s not vengeance; it’s about society declaring “this kind of deed cannot be countenanced!” People have forgotten what St. Thomas wrote about the public authority vindicating justice (II-II, 108, 1). Do we need to differentiate the sinner from the sin? Yes. But when the sinner freely chooses evil, he makes the sin his.

The FBI preliminarily pegged murders across the United States in 2024 at 16,700. Yes, it’s a decline from 2021’s peak of 22,536, but it’s still almost 17,000 dead people. Instead of killing the whole City of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, we set our sights downwards: on the whole of Clemson, South Carolina. But maybe those places aren’t well enough known to matter.

A basic assumption of political philosophy, Catholic and other, is that society exists to ensure people can enjoy their most basic rights, starting with life. As the non-Catholic Thomas Hobbes saw it, society is an amalgam of individuals pursuing their own interests. Left unchecked, such a situation would lead to one king of the hill and lots of dead people on its slopes. For Hobbes, that was the justification for authoritarian sovereigns: the vast majority of potentially dead people cede their sovereignty to the king so he can check the worst tendencies of the few and strongest to ensure everybody can at least survive to go about their self(ish) interests. Obviously, this is not the Catholic vision of society, but there is one element of truth here: societies exist to protect peoples’ most basic rights, starting with life.

Again, the statisticians will tell us homicides nationally are levelling off from their 1960s-90s highs — though they haven’t reached their postwar lows. And yes, your chances of getting murdered in Rogers, Connecticut, are likely as low as they were when my dad and aunts wandered the local road picking blueberries in the 1920s. But I’m betting Memphis, Baltimore, and Detroit — cities that today outrank DC in annual murder rates — were a lot safer then.

We can take the statistician’s approach and identify trends, averages, and norms to get a more “nuanced” (USA Today’s word) view of Trump’s “emergency.” Or we can look past numerical obfuscations and ask ourselves: in what “normal” society should a murder every other day pass as an accounting rounding error?

Speaking about abortion, a prescient California Medicine editorial of September 1970 recognized that two competing ethics were in play: a “sanctity of life” ethic being shown off stage and a “quality of life” ethic that had not yet been fully embraced. Is it mere coincidence that our embrace of abortion-on-demand coincided with an historical peak in national murder rates? There were 1,037,000 estimated abortions in 2024; that’s an abortion roughly every 30 seconds. Two per minute. A silent pandemic. (See here.) Is it mere coincidence that, after 50 years of Roe, we have otherwise serious people including death as an item in the doctor’s bag? That a former state governor (Ralph Northam of Virginia) apparently thought it uncontroversial that a newborn third-trimester abortion survivor’s continued life should be the subject of “a discussion… between the physicians and the mother” with no apparent a priori expectation the baby would be kept alive?

I guess in that kind of society, a postnatal murder every other day is also the subject for a discussion between talking heads in the mass media as to whether it’s an “emergency.” MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas told us he was more worried about “my children’s freedom to breathe… in a world where climate change policy is nonexistent.” The consequences of sending them on the DC Metro late in the evening might realistically be more threatening than climate Armageddon, but I guess this is just the secular equivalent of a “seamless garment” of priorities on the part of the cosseted living behind secure doors and walls.

And let’s be clear, especially for those who will cite Catholic social thought. Our “preferential love for the poor” ought to make us realize that it’s Washington’s poorest — those in its more depressed wards — that disproportionately bear the brunt of murder and other violent crime. Real “love for the poor” would be ensuring their parts of Washington are safe — where, every week, three run the risk of being dead. Real “love for the poor” would be ensuring the poor in every American urban center are safe. That is not the case and is apparent to anybody with eyes to see.

I fear, however, that Our Lord’s words in Mt 13:14-15 are apropos to our cultural downward definition of deviancy (and lack of talk about conversion):

For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.