NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was killed in the line of duty earlier this week, and the life story of the career criminal who murdered him was all too predictable.

The police had gone looking for Tyrone Howard at least 10 times since Sept. 1, when, investigators believe, he rode up to a rival just after midnight and shot him. But 10 times he eluded them.

When officers finally did encounter Mr. Howard on Tuesday night, fleeing from the scene of another shooting in the same Upper Manhattan housing project, he was armed, the police said.

He was riding a stolen bike and concealing a .40-caliber handgun, the police said. As two plainclothes officers approached, he wheeled around, dropped the bike and fired one shot into the forehead of one of the officers, Randolph Holder, the police said.

“It was quick,” a senior police official said. “He swung around, on the bike path; he was on the bike and he just jumped off and ‘Boom.’ Quick. No words.”

…

The fatal shooting, the fourth of a New York City officer in 10 months, was an outgrowth of what officials called one of the city’s most intractable law enforcement challenges — the persistent violence stemming from so-called crews, small bands of young men often allied with a particular housing project or neighborhood and locked in frequently bloody rivalries.

Mr. Howard, 30, was charged with first-degree murder and robbery. At a packed arraignment in Lower Manhattan late Wednesday night, a judge ordered that Mr. Howard be held in jail without bail. Well over 100 police officers attended the hearing, as did members of Officer Holder’s family. At times people shouted obscenities at the defendant.

Mr. Howard was believed to be among those sowing violence across a pocket of East Harlem, several men whose images and gang affiliations hang in police precinct roll-call rooms and whose faces are known to anticrime unit officers, like Officer Holder, 33, whose assignment includes confronting the most violent criminals.

Indeed, one of the ways Mr. Howard knew the officer approaching him on a darkened pathway of F.D.R. Drive — besides by the silver shield dangling from his neck — was that they had encountered each other before, the police said. Mr. Howard had 23 arrests as an adult, including one in connection with a shootout in June 2009 on a basketball court in the East River Houses that wounded two bystanders: an 11-year-old boy and a 77-year-old man. (The case did not go forward, officials said, because prosecutors were unable to present any witnesses who could identify Mr. Howard.)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again and again until the inescapable reality sets in: we do not have a “gun violence” problem in the United States. We never have. Firearms have been a part of our society since before there was even a concept of “Americans.” They are tools.

What we have is a thug culture problem.

“Gun violence” is a myth.

What we have is a thug violence problem that accounts for roughly half the homicides in the United States, and yet no one is willing to address it. Indeed, President Obama tacitly supports this thug culture against law and order and basic civility itself, siding with drug abusers and attempted cop-killers, sending Administration officials to their funerals, treating them as martyrs instead of the violent members of thug culture that they were.

Radical left-wing Democrats need the gun violence myth.

The gun violence myth is a convenient scapegoat that allows them to blame an inanimate object, and avoid the failures of the mistakes they’ve made in attempting to influence culture with policy over the past century.

Radical left-wing Democrats like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their supporters, need to blame gun violence to avoid the consequences of the failed, hyper-violent subculture that is the predictable result of their failed social engineering.

These Democrats need to blame gun violence to avoid admitting that their policies encouraging the migration of criminal aliens attracts a new underclass that brings with it the most violent of central American criminal cartels.

Though it isn’t politically correct to point out reality, the simple fact remains that majority of criminal homicides committed in the United States in any given year can be disproportionately traced to young minority males who are members of gangs, and who are typically involved in drug dealing. Tyrone Howard is just one common thug among many.

Sadly, we have a political class in this nation unwilling to address, much less rectify the problem.

Democrats make one excuse after another for thug culture, and indeed celebrate it it through popular culture, including television, movies, and especially music.

Republicans, more terrified of being called racist than of doing the right thing, attempt to ignore the issue as much as possible.

Here’s the reality.

As long as “gangstas” and “thug life” are celebrated in music and on-screen, and politicians validate violent former drug dealers, we’re going to have a thug culture problem.

Let’s have the integrity and the honor to have that difficult conversation, instead of passing it down to another generation.