Black people make up nearly 50 percent of homicide victims in the United States, according to a Justice Department study. The vast majority of these homicides are black-on-black, and they happen every single day, although Oakland's recent high profile case has recently (and briefly) brought the issue to the national news.

The study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics also found that from 2001 to 2005, more than nine out of 10 black murder victims were killed by other blacks, and three out of four were slain with a gun. Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the population, were victims in 15 percent of nonfatal violent crimes.

The new findings underscore the enduring problem of crime that plagues many African American communities, even during a period when the incidence of violent crime dropped or held steady overall, according to criminologists and other experts.

The "good news" is that black victimization rates are down in proportion to victimization rates for whites. I can't see anything good about either the number of black people whose lives are cut short or the number of black people flooding our prisons for committing the crimes. Meanwhile, an update on our "black leaders:" the NAACP has buried the n-word from coast to coast and Al Sharpton has successfully criticized TMZ for making up the word "roboho."

[WP]