Short Take: Thoughts on Iryna Zarutska's Murder and Trump's Guard Deployments
We need to look at the greater cost of allowing violent crime.
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by Rod D. Martin
September 10, 2025
Further thoughts on Iryna's murder, and Trump's National Guard deployments.
With regard to Iryna's killing, one friend of mine said that she was angry that the media has refused to cover the story, and that if the races of killer and victim had been reversed, it's all we'd hear about. Another friend said he disagreed.
I wrote:
I think what ______ is saying is captured in the meme I'm posting with this comment. Obviously lots of people — black and white — get killed without any attention at all, and sometimes that's especially unjust. But her point consists in the information in the meme:
Number of articles in the New York Times:
George Floyd - 5,897
Trayvon Martin - 1,190
Iryna Zarutska - 0
There is very clearly, shall we say, a lack of interest in her story. And aside from the fact that she was white, that is most likely because it shows the utter failure of the police, the (Soros) district attorney, and the judges in Charlotte, North Carolina.
So let me shift field just a bit. The greater injustice is not the attention received by any specific victim but that there are any victims at all. I am, as I have always been, aghast at the big city governments that preside over kill zones in which poor (but not only poor) people of all races live in constant fear that they will be robbed, raped, or killed. 54 people were shot in Chicago over Labor Day weekend alone. It is abominable.
Let's focus just on our poor neighbors, and particularly our poor black neighbors. How are they ever going to participate in the American Dream, how are they ever going to have a chance at a better life, how are they ever going to give their children a better life than they had, when they are constantly terrorized by callous criminals — some organized, some not — whom government will do literally NOTHING to stop?
I don't love that President Trump has deployed the National Guard in D.C., any more than I love that we had to fight Japan after Pearl Harbor. But I get it. It's the same authority and the same predicate as Eisenhower deploying the Guard to protect the Little Rock Nine at Central High. If just nine boys and girls deserved that protection, how much more so millions?
But the reason I don't love it is because it shouldn't be necessary. Those troops don't even have authority to arrest, and yet in two weeks, the war zone of Washington had only one murder and saw its violent crime rate drop in half. That tells me, and everyone else, that all the murders and violence before were needless, that the city government could have controlled it and chose not to. And that's about as great an injustice as anyone could imagine, not least because it’s an injustice that rarely if ever affects the elites making those decisions.
The first of our unalienable rights is life. If government can't protect our lives, why do we even have it at all? No one can enjoy liberty or the pursuit of happiness without life. It's the most basic function of all.
This is why eradicating the Klan mattered. This is why escorting the Little Rock Nine into Central High — and then staying long enough to make it stick — mattered.
It's also why Iryna matters, and why the violence in Chicago matters.
Violence is not always colorblind, but it affects everyone. Who knows that Iryna might not have become a Senator? Who knows that some black child killed in New Orleans might not have become the next Elon Musk or Thomas Edison? But even if he didn't, he might have been the next good father, or the next serving deacon, or the next math teacher who inspired the next Thomas Edison. We'll never know, though, because our lavishly expensive government couldn't be bothered to keep him alive.
That's the real disgrace in all of this. And that's what we must change, for absolutely everyone. Enough.
