On the day after five bodies were found in a house on Chi’s South Side, in the Chatham neighborhood, once with Avalon considered a high-middle to upper-middle class area, Shante Bradford, 30,

a machine operator who leaves for work at 4 a.m., said the neighborhood is so bad he worries about getting robbed each morning when he goes to his car parked on the street.

“It’s really nothing. Death is nothing,” said Bradford, who lives a half-block from the crime scene.

Antoine Edwards, also 30,

an auto mechanic and father of three, said he doesn’t allow his kids to play outside. Instead, when he can, he takes them to places like restaurants or the movies. 

The bodies were found three hours after an anti-violence group CeaseFire and others announced

a plan to flood violent “hot spots” in the city with residents and outreach workers on weekend nights throughout the summer.

One of those who met for the announcement, Rev. Robin Hood (!), said he was expecting “able-bodied people who can to stand up” to the violence-prone to come forth 

Another, Tio Hardiman, said CeaseFire

will attempt to train residents to . . . resolve . . . conflicts and will ask adult men in high-risk neighborhoods . . . to mentor one child on their block.

He blamed the “mind set of these young people” and dismissed gun-law change as helping things.  “They’ve already got all the guns they need,” he said.

For this quite well-reported story, the Trib used three by-lined reporters and writers and six more reporter-contributors.

Meanwhile, on the op-ed page, Trib columnist Steve Chapman made quick work of gun laws, citing police Supt. Jody Weis’s call for a crackdown on assault guns.  Chapman calls this “the moral equivalent of a placebo” but not as good, since placebos “sometimes help.”

“There are just too many weapons here,” he declared at a Sunday news conference. “Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?”

We don’t, Chapman reminds the superintendent, not in Chicago.  Moreover,

The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.

And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: One.

Anyhow, when assault guns were banned federally 1994–2004,

nationwide, the number of murders committed with rifles and shotguns began falling three years before the law was enacted.

It’s true those gun homicides also fell while the law was in effect.

But “stabbing deaths fell even faster, as did murders involving crowbars, baseball bats and other blunt objects.”  Indeed,

[t]he so-called assault weapons, contrary to what you might assume, were no more powerful or lethal than other, permitted guns.

He adds the clincher argument against gun bans:

[C]riminals, the people most likely to commit violent crimes, were completely unaffected by the ban—for the simple reason that they are not allowed to buy or own guns of any kind.

All you need is a little cause-and-effect reasoning.  It’s a terrible thing that takes from the blather of various political and blatherskites when all they want is to mobilize lots of people for bus rides and marches and give them a feeling they are doing something.  Now there’s a placebo for you.