A site called NewsNation published a report today about the ongoing trend of carjackings which have spiked in cities across the country over the past couple years.

A pastor gunned down in a carjacking outside her home in Memphis. A thief runs up a driveway with a weapon drawn in New Orleans. An Atlanta mother of three, tossed out of her car and run over with it — all captured on her own Ring camera.

Carjacking trends can be tough to track, as they sometimes get mixed in with other crime statistics such as auto theft, which increased by more than 16% in 2021. But over the last two years, there has been a noticeable uptick in carjackings nationwide...

Chicago — a city with 40 cops on a carjacking task force —had more than 1,900 last year. That number is the most in the country and the most in the Windy City in decades…

And some of the perpetrators are shockingly young.

The pastor killed in Memphis was shot by a 15-year-old. In D.C, a 14-year-old was arrested for jacking six vehicles and trying to take a seventh.

If you look for these stories you’ll find they are happening everywhere. Here’s one that happened in Chicago yesterday involving a 13-year-old suspect:

A 13-year-old boy allegedly carjacked a woman working as a delivery driver Wednesday while two small children were in her car…

The teen struck the woman with the car as he fled the scene, police said. A few moments later, he exited the car while it was still in motion, crashing the car blocks away.

The 13-year-old was charged with felony vehicular carjacking and aggravated used of a deadly weapon.

The kids in the car, aged 4 and 7 were unharmed fortunately. Earlier this month in Chicago police arrested an 11-year-old for an attempted carjacking.

This isn’t the first time a media organization has noticed the trend. Back in March the NY Times published a story which suggested the rise in carjacking may have become a kind of fad with young teens during the pandemic. In most cases, the teens are taking the cars for joy rides and to post videos showing their exploits on Tik Tok or other social media sites. In other words, this is at least partly about bored kids trying to look cool.

“The internet just took over,” one 16-year-old boy at E.L. Haynes said. “Everybody tried to go viral, doing stupid stuff.”

The boy, who like other classmates did not want to be named, said that in the early days of the pandemic, he had heard that guys on the street were stealing cars to bring in some money. Then young people started doing it, he said, at first jumping into cars that were left idling and unattended and just driving around. Videos of these rides around the city started showing up on social media.

Before long, “carjacking became a sport,” said one community organizer. “A big bandwagon,” said another.

But readers of the Times’ article also pointed to another factor that may be partly driving this: The suspects in these cases often get away with it. Even if they are caught, because they are so young the worst they are often facing is a few years in a juvenile facility.

Ultimately, teens looking for excitement only explains this trend if you believe it’s normal for teens to threaten, steal and sometimes murder people for the fun of it. Where are the parents of these children? Are they really completely unaware of what their own kids are doing?

I’ll close this out with one more carjacking story which happened at the end of last month in Baltimore. In this case the woman refused to get out of the car despite two men with guns threatening her. She’s very lucky to be alive: