“Maintaining one’s status and credibility and honor, if you will, within that peer community is literally a matter of life and death. And that’s coupled with a very harsh reality, which is the mental calculation of those who live in that strata that it is more dangerous to get caught without their gun than to get caught with their gun.” So said Milwaukee’s police chief, Edward A. Flynn in an effort to explain his city’s climbing murder rate. And he’s not the only one looking for an explanation. The numbers are, for the first time in a while, rising in many major American cities.