Mayordaley II lacks confidence in citizens’ ability to defend themselves when the police are still on the way:
The mayor said he would vigorously defend Chicago’s gun ordinance despite the Supreme Court’s ruling and feels the decision will make it far more difficult to protect law-abiding citizens. (AP)
No surprise here, but did you hear Big O. welcomes the decision, affirming individual right in the matter?
Apart from that, what about the damn hat?
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.
Tom Roeser talked to “a top level authority on police attitudes” and got an earful for Chicago Daily Observer about law enforcement in Chicago under the new superintendent:
Jody Weis’ appointment…an FBI agent who never wore a uniform nor patrolled a beat…signaled a mayoral disapproval of the department that is ruining morale. [The source] contrasted this with the record of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who stood by his department and beat off civil libertarians who tried to super-enforce infractions that hobbled the New York police.
He calls it a “soft revolt.”
“When the mayor and the police superintendent are more interested in pacifying the ACLU than in keeping down crime and going the extra mile for prevention, it’s bound to happen.”
Giuliani cleaned up NYC and lessened the cop-shooting of blacks, claiming as “the most fundamental of civil rights . . . the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety.” He is quoted by Stephen Malanga in City Journal.
“Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” he explained. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”
NY Times and ACLU howled, and leftist commentators continue to try to debunk his claims. His top cop plowed ahead:
His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street.
Not complaining to state legislators to pass yet more unenforced and unforceable laws in a Prohibition-revisited effort to throttle honest citizens while don’t-give-a-hoot gangsters thrive — the Daley-Weis response.
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67 percent, from 1,960 in Dinkins’s last year to 640 in Giuliani’s last year.
Blacks were among those who profited most from Giuliani-Bratton policies, as detailed by Deroy Murdock:
Take Brooklyn’s largely black 75th Precinct, New York’s toughest. In 1993, 110 of its residents were murdered. In 1998, homicides dropped to 37. Through June 20, 12 people were killed, compared to 19 a year ago.
Between 1993 and 1998, homicides in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct tumbled 62%, from 26 to 10. In Harlem’s 28th Precinct, murders plummeted from 35 to eight, a 77% plunge.
The New York Post estimated what would have happened had crime galloped at its dismal pre-Giuliani pace. Sixty-four more Asians, 308 more whites, 1,842 more Hispanics and 2,299 more blacks would have been murdered.
In contrast with aggressive policing much bemoaned by liberals, Weis bemoans the situation:
“There are just too many weapons here,” Weis said Sunday. “Too many guns, too many gangs.”
The question is, what do Daley and Weis intend to do about it?
Once more into the breach, my boys and girls, once more! It’s gather-the-troops time for a workday protest rally in the Loop about guns because of shooting deaths on the South Side. Father Pfleger and Saint Sabina (pray for us) to the rescue!
We are asking people to join us once again at the State of Illinois
Building on Tuesday, April 1st, from 11:00 am to noon. We will gather every time a child is killed in this city at the door of our state
government to demand common sense gun laws. If you can join us, or need to ride the bus from Saint Sabina, call the church at
773-483-4300. Please help us stop this madness!
That’s from an emailed announcement. But look what’s happening: a pro forma (once again) protest (yawn) in front of the state building but nothing at the building across the street, where the mayor works. Nothing at cop headquarters at 35th & Michigan (much closer to the St. Sabina neighborhood), where the people work who are primarily responsible for keeping people from getting shot.
By such meaningless photo-op demonstrations, the anger of the community is siphoned off. Father Pfleger leads his flock astray, by 35 blocks in this case, to the Loop and not Cop HQ, where the new commissioner has bright, headline-grabbing ideas about weight control for policemen and SUVs instead of beefed-up Ford Victorias.
We have just received word that another of our school students was shot and killed at Simeon High School [officially, Career Academy, former Chicago Vocational School, CVS]
says the emailed announcement. Was shot and killed by whom? By some bad, twisted people whom it is whose business to prevent from shooting people? Or to catch after the fact? Compstat helped in NYC under Guiliani. Won’t work in Chicago?
Look: Madame deFarge knitted while the tumbrels rolled on their way to the guillotine, Maybe if gang-bangers were submitted to some such humiliation (short of decapitation), there would be less shooting. Crackdown on gangs, anyone?
But would that fly with the families of gang-bangers, some of whom could well be joining the St. Sabina protest in favor of stricter gun laws?
How about a crackdown on street crime, Mr. Weis? Would he dare to use such language, diverting attention from impersonal laws and focusing on perpetrators? Would the mayor join in, or would he rather rage also in favor of gun control or scold nameless parents? He’s not their uncle, he’s their elected official.
Is there something sad and mysterious about this release from St. Sabina Church?
March 13, 2008 Vince Clark – 773.483.4300
ANOTHER C.P.S. STUDENT DIES
RALLY AT STATE OF ILLINOIS BUILDINGOn Wednesday, another Chicago Public School student, Channon Taylor, died. Channon [age 18] was shot Saturday afternoon in the 1800 block of South Lawndale and died Wednesday. On Friday, March 14, as was promised, Rev. Michael Pfleger and Chicago Public Schools will lead a rally from
11 a.m. to 12 p.m. at The State of Illinois Building, located at 100 West Randolph.Rev. Pfleger said, “Every time a child [!] dies we will put it in the face of state government and demand ‘Common Sense Gun Laws!’”
Please invite anyone to attend.
Why sad? Why mysterious? Besides the obvious reasons about kids being shot down on the street?
It’s that city and neighborhood leadership, in this case religious, clings so tenaciously to a legislative straw as the solution to their problems. [Candidate Obama wants no part of it, by the way.]
Is it too much to ask for evidence of correlation between tighter gun control and reduced killing? Or of successful enforcement of the laws we have or might have?
Newspapers don’t discuss this. Who does?
These people do, for what’s it’s worth — here and here and here — to pick the first three sites shown by Google when you type “gun control.”
If you have dared in your heart of hearts to wonder what if a student had plugged the maniac on stage at NIU with his legally concealed Luger, Ruger, or what-not, know that you are not alone:
Even before a gunman killed five people and injured several others in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a small but growing movement had been under way at universities and state legislatures to allow students, faculty and staff to carry guns on campus.
Twelve states are considering bills that would allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns at public universities. The efforts were sparked by the Virginia Tech massacre last April.
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, an Internet-based organization with 11,000 members in its Facebook group, is calling attention to the issue with a protest from April 21 to 25, a week after the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16.
Are we really satisfied with our policy of restricting weapons? Or is NIU another instance of its abject failure?
Update: Reader D. notes this in the above linked story:
Samaha [whose younger sister, Reema, was killed at Virginia Tech] says guns on campus are a risk in an environment where young people drink and fight and are not always able to control their emotions.
I think the way to get around this possibility is to temporarily “deputize” certain students who pass a rigid test. And maybe there should be some prohibition about drinking for those allowed to conceal carry.In both these college cases, it seems the shooter came in blazing — but the reloading part would have been a good moment to get him.Also not knowing how many or who the “deputies” are on a campus, just public knowledge that they are there, might cause a gunman to choose a different campus.AND, the “deputy” would have to be presumed acting in the line of duty if he unloads on the shooter, so the family doesn’t sue him/her for unlawful use of a weapon, etc. after the fact.The rest of the students have to respect the fact the deputy is there to protect [them], and not try to “out” him or steal his weapon for a joke, or provoke him, or pretend to be a terrorist, etc. as we know class clowns are wont to do, especially after a 12-pack.It would give some peace of mind to students on certain campuses and might even draw attendance to such colleges. All in all, it is devastating to parents who thought all they had to worry about was pregnancy or drunk driving.
When was the last time you read a newspaper story about handgun possession leading to saving the stalker-threatened life of a lone woman trapped in her house?
Here’s the 911 recording of such an incident of last Nov. 17 in Hessville, Indiana, near Hammond.
* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.
At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”
Right here, Bud.
* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.
Is she more unique than other principals?
* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.
The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.
* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?
On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed. The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.
Oops. I mentioned Chi Trib reporting Father Pfleger at the anti-gun shop demonstration and that the story said nothing of his calling for someone to “snuff” the shop-owner. Then I read the Newsbusters report and something hit me.
The Chicago Tribune at least mentioned that Pfleger was at the rally, but does not report his comments at all. All the Trib said was that, “Michael Pfleger encouraged the crowd to push for stricter gun laws.” And that he, “vowed that the rally was just the beginning and that civil disobedience was possible.”
So, why the blackout of the “Father’s” outrageous comments?
It’s that bowdlerizing what he said, censoring it, cleaning it up to defuse it. “Encouraged the crowd”? That’s sickening, that the reporter and editor collude to keep Pfleger from looking bad. Damnable, even objectionable.
Chi Trib softens and blurs. It’s their corporate atmosphere. Execrable. Hey, it’s even inappropriate, which is one of the worst things you can say (and get away with it) about anything these days.
It’s a truly dull newspaper, I am deciding. Open it up over coffee, and the heads are generic, the stories tired and unimaginative. Attempts at livening things up come across as sophomoric.
Father Pfleger pulled a Henry II, as in the Thomas a Becket case, calling out, “Who will rid me of this troublesome gun store owner?” and Trib glossed it over.
Henry’s knights went out and slew the troublesome priest in the sanctuary, as we know. God knows what’s next from this clerical mouth that roars.
More on Father Pfleger and the threat to “snuff” the gun shop owner from the Illinois State Rifle Association:
ISRA: Chicago Priest Calls for Murder of Gun Shop Owner
Egad.
More interesting for this blog with its emphasis on Chi Trib and Sun-Times is that you can’t find any reference to the threat on either site.
Now we know the NRA and other ‘RAs are not our kind of people and have long been understood by mainstream illuminati to be beyond the pale.
And we know Chi Trib is regularly late with local news and that S-T is busy with (sob!) stories — did not cover the gun shop protest, for that matter.
However, if Father P.
exhorted the crowd to “drag” shop owner, John Riggio, from his shop “like a rat” and “snuff” him,
adding to his recommended hit list legislators who vote the wrong way, as this RA says, there may be something here, if only to give this RA dog his day.
OR the noosepapers are ignoring this in hopes that few know Fr. P. fingered the shop owner and few will have heard their marching orders.
Blithe Spirit 