“People who know both cities say there are some significant differences in policing, especially around the issue of guns,” Ford Fessenden and Haeyooun Park write at nytimes.com. “The homicide rate in Chicago is just a little higher than in New York when guns aren’t involved. But when it comes to shootings, both fatal and not, Chicago stands out, suggesting a level of armed interaction that isn’t happening in New York.” In other words, more guns, more murder! Here’s how the Times sees it . . .
Chicago has a reputation for strict gun laws, and gun rights advocates often point to it as proof that gun regulation doesn’t reduce violence. But its laws aren’t what they used to be: Federal courts struck down its ban on handgun ownership in 2010, and its ban on gun sales in 2014. And a New York Times analysis showed guns were easily available from nearby jurisdictions, especially Indiana.
As John McEnroe used to say, you’ve got to be kidding me. The reason that Chicago is home to a “62 percent increase in homicides,” that “through mid-May, 216 people have been killed,” and “shootings also are up 60 percent,” is the McDonald decision? The Supreme Court ruling that allowed Chicago citizens to keep and bear arms after a criminal background check?
As for Mssrs. Fessenden and Park’s suggestion that Chicago’s “gun violence” has something to with the 2014 federal ruling striking down the city’s ban on gun stores within city limits, here’s an important data point: there are no gun stores in Chicago. Not one. And just in case the writers are worried that there isn’t enough commerce stifling gun control law in that regard, wikipedia.org reminds us that . . .
On June 25, 2014, the city council passed a new law, allowing gun stores but restricting them to certain limited areas of the city, requiring that all gun sales be videotaped, and limiting buyers to one gun per 30-day period. Store owners must make their records available to the police, and employees must be trained to identify possible straw purchasers.
All of which completely undermines the Times’ subhead declaration that Guns Are a Key Difference. Which is not to say Mr. Fessenden and Park don’t get some things right, however inadvertently and tangentially.
And Chicago is more lenient about illegal handguns than New York, prescribing a one-year minimum for possession versus three and a half years in New York. An attempt to match the New York law in 2013 was rejected by the Illinois legislature out of concern for skyrocketing incarceration rates for young black men.
Chicago’s revolving door judicial system certainly has some ‘splainin’ to do when it comes to gangland murders — which is exactly what we’re talking about. (Some say the gangs are part of the City’s political structure, protecting them from prosecution, but I couldn’t possibly comment.) As for a solution to Chiraq’s gang-related murder fest, the Times’ statism is showing.
New York also hired a lot more police officers in response to the crime of the 1990s, and, during its stop-and-frisk era of the 2000s, steeply increased gun enforcement. Recent studies, including one that looked at increased police presence in London after a terrorist attack, have suggested more police might mean less crime, said Jens Ludwig, the director of Crime Lab at the University of Chicago, which studies crime in both Chicago and New York.
Chicago’s Police Department, overwhelmed, can respond only to the most serious problems, leaving citizens to feel responsible for their own security, he said.
“Might.” Nice. And I know what you’re thinking: the “problem” of Chicago residents “feeling” (it’s all about feelings) responsible for their own security is an argument for widespread legal gun ownership. For more guns. Check out how Fessenden and Park spin that.
“Everyone has to establish deterrence on a retail basis,” [Ludwig] said. “People carry guns in public because other people are carrying guns. It’s literally an arms race, a vicious cycle. There are lots of indications that New York City, by taking guns more seriously and hiring more officers, has gotten a lot of guns off the streets, creating a virtuous cycle.”
“Lots of indications.” Nice. But here’s the important fact: we’re talking about criminals. This “arms race” is amongst thugs, drug dealers, felons, gang members or a combination thereof. A fact the article finally confronts.
Gangs figure in many homicides in New York as well, but recent polls by The New York Times suggest that the gang problem may be worse in Chicago.
Ya think? The rest of the article compares Chicago’s racial segregation with New York City’s, intimating that racism creates “gun violence.” And once again suggests that Chicago’s “murder problem” isn’t the result of criminal endeavor.
Racially segregated minority neighborhoods have a long history of multiple adversities, such as poverty, joblessness, environmental toxins and inadequate housing, Professor Sampson said. In these places, people tend to be more cynical about the law and distrust police, “heightening the risk that conflictual encounters will erupt in violence.”
So gangland killers are downtrodden folks whose homicidal violence is the result of their cynicism about the law and distrust of law enforcement. Who in their right mind is buying what they’re selling?
Surprisingly, the authors don’t conclude their pseudo-scientific examination of Chicago’s murder rate by calling for more gun control. I guess they figured they sorted that out at the top of the article (in case readers couldn’t make it all the way to the end). In any case, this article once again proves that the New York Times’ motto should be: “All the facts that fit our agenda, and none that don’t.”
Chicago does not have a gun problem, it has a gang problem and if the liberals who have run that city for the last hundred years suddenly decided to round up a couple hundred known repeat-offending gang members, they could drop their murder rate substantially.
But what fun would that be?
And besides, it would be letting a crisis go to waste. Better to keep the citizens terrified and blame it on the guns. Because, you know, “gun violence”.
When I think of that lefty-loon Newspeak I always want to ask because I am concerned:
Are the guns OK?
Some of you may recall the TV show “Hill Street Blues” from 1981-1987 which, while they never came right out and said so, was filmed in Chicago. Even then the police in the show were condescending to the local gang leaders rather than antagonizing them by finding ways to put them in prison. In one episode they even had a conference in the police station to arrange a truce while the POTUS visited!
Fictional show, yes, but largely based on the realities of life in Chicago.
Or, perhaps stated differently, Chicago has a problem of criminal humans who were raised with no positve morals or values regarding treatment fellow humans and how to be positive members of society, and whom do not respect the rule of law. So, unless we have less of those evil individuals in society, things will get worse.
Personal responsibilty for ones self and the rearing of those children one elects to conceive is the only solution. Things do not seem like they could possibly improve the way we are currently headed as a society. So sad.
So, your recommending the “pre-crime” solution. Under what pretense to you “round them up”. I agree with out about the fact that if a select number of individuals were removed, the murder rate would really go down, but I also don’t like the idea of suspending the Constitution.
There’s no need to suspend the constitution, but on the other hand it is ridiculous to have laws that are only applied in an “arbitrary and capricious” fashion. On the one hand, you have known bad actors that are habitual violent criminals and instead of the locking them up so that they can no longer be habitual violent criminals, you run them through a revolving door process and in the meantime between prison sentences they terrorize the community in which they live. On the other hand, a single mother working two jobs to support her two children is a concealed carry permit holder and unless she happens to get national attention, she runs the risk of spending three years in prison because she took a wrong turn into New Jersey. That is completely unacceptable and it is enabled by the corrupt political system within many failed democratically-controlled (or are they in fact gang controlled?) metropolitan areas across the country.
In other words, we do not need new laws – gun laws or otherwise – what we need is consistent enforcement of existing law insuring equal justice where hardened criminals are kept away from the rest of us.
Yes, even if they had a “bad childhood” In a “disadvantaged neighborhood.”
The problem in Chicago is you have to have good leadership for any community To be able to function and work. Without proper leadership all you have is a cesspool of criminals and good people being taken advantage by these criminals. What they really need is a mayor that’s got a set of cojones and clean up that infested gang Warfare Zone that they call Chicago It’s safer to walk down the streets of Afghanistan than the streets of Chicago. And that is ridiculous.
I’ll post this again because I think it has some relevance. The NYT used the same “arms race” shtick when the NYPD was switching to semi-autos. Also, the Times actually would admit that crime was coming from criminals back then. Crazy huh?
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/31/nyregion/gun-of-choice-for-police-officers-runs-into-fierce-opposition.html?pagewanted=all
Baltimore has gun laws about as strict as NY. It’s not the guns. It does have something to do with policing and with demographics. It has something to do with the way the gangs work and drugs are sold.
…and how much codependency there is between the police/government structures and the gangs
The difference between Chicago and New York politicians is Chriqua representatives actively seek, and gang leaders direct subordinates to vote them in office.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/173804/chicago-politicians-solicit-support-gangs-daniel-greenfield
Chicago Politicians have no vested interest in stopping gang murders in their districts. Gang members secure their employment.
Correct! The politicians in Chiraq are more interested in manufacturing lower crime data than they are about stopping crime.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2015/Chicago-crime-stats/
The NYT will be taken by surprise as the NYC crime rate begins to escalate due to a combination of the Ferguson Effect and the return to the social conditions of the 1980s.
Yup. To speed up the process, the city council just decriminalized pissing and drinking in public.
Well, you can’t do one without the other.
Pissing ON the public
FIFY
Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance – Google that one up from Chicagomag.com
The fact that gang and politician cooperation is so blatant, such an accepted part of governing Chicago – this article makes for an interesting read.
Chicago has had an oversize gang problem at least since Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. How many of the current shootings were done by permit or FOID card holders? I am sure the answer is none.
You mean the era when the cops were ‘bought’ and plainly sided with various syndicates? And thugs “dressed as police officers” peacefully led into a basement then gunned down a group of Capone’s rivals, who were in a position to know said thugs’ faces? I maintain that the simpler explanation is that a corrupt police force was working hand in hand with Capone to eliminate their outgoing business partners, and that the 1934 NFA was directly spawned from this shameful betrayal. Implausible? Look to Mexico, and the cartel/police collusion.
“And Chicago is more lenient about illegal handguns than New York, prescribing a one-year minimum for possession versus three and a half years in New York. An attempt to match the New York law in 2013 was rejected by the Illinois legislature out of concern for skyrocketing incarceration rates for young black men.”
If this doesn’t prove that gun control isn’t about preventing crime and violence then I don’t know what will.
I like it when they blame Chicago’s violent crime on supposed “lax” gun laws in neighboring Indiana. However, they fail to mention that it’s against federal law for a resident of one state to buy a handgun in another state cor immediate possession; that is, without transferring through a federal firearms licensee in the buyer’s home state. So Indiana’s laws have nothing to do with it, as federal law and Illinois law govern an FFL operating in Illinois. Anything outside of that is already illegal.
Furthermore, if lax Indiana laws are driving violent crime rates in Chicago, then why aren’t they driving violent crime rates in the rest of Illinois which, outside of Chicago, is not a bloodfest? Why aren’t Indiana’s own violent crime rates comparable or even in excess of Chicago’s when, after all, Indiana is operating under Indiana law? Riddle me that, Batman.
The liberal industry of excuse making and blame shifting, all for the purpose of rights snatching, is exhausting.
The sickening truth is that urban governments truly believe mankind is evil, and that once sufficiently concentrated in cities, must be strictly controlled & domesticated for his own well-being. I don’t agree on the intrinsic aspect, but it is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You have it backward. Urban governments believe Men are Good, but have been corrupted by Society. Therefore, to return Men to their uncorrupted state, onerous laws must be passed. Men, being Good, will obey these laws. When all laws are obeyed by all Men, Society will have been transformed and will no longer be a corrupting force to Men. Read Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, recognizes that Men are sinful creatures, and that Society can only reflect its members. Rousseau has never been able to explain how Society, being composed of only Good, can have been corrupted.
You can’t fix stupid.
“Racially segregated minority neighborhoods have a long history of multiple adversities”
We need to do something about Chicago’s Jim Crow laws! This matter should’ve been straightened out 50 years ago! They need to do away with laws forcing minorities to live in certain areas! /sarc
Dead gangbangers on the streets of Chicago isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Let the bastards kill each other, wholesale and in great numbers, and the problem will eventually rectify itself.
Yes, but can we at least offer them some basic gun safety and marksmanship classes, so they stop killing little kids and uninvolved bystanders? If a gangbanger wants to kill a rival shithead, I have no problem with that. It’s the people caught in the virtually-unaimed crossfire that concern me.
Honestly, their aim is pretty good Most of the people killed by a wide margin are gang bangers. It only makes the news when they do hit an bystander
Not true. I have over 500 employees here in chicago, and have been to 2 funerals for their children this year, both innocent bystanders.
That is anecdotal, but I can assure you, LOTS of innocents are killed here, and the news makes no note of it. Innocence isn’t the detail the news revolves around, it is the ethnicity of the shooter and victims. If the shooter is black, it is society’s fault. If the shooter is white, then lax gun control laws are to blame.
Until these impoverished areas get their family structures straight, there is no fix, and the cycle will continue. Regardless of what laws are passed to limit me, or keep 800 walmart jobs out, or whatever. Laws can’t fix the problem, only morals and effort.
Deceptive liberals must blame the gun because they cannot examine the shooters and how their Marxist program has always made thing worse. These idiots think that banning guns in Indiana will keep them out of the hands of criminals in Chiraq. Well, drugs are banned in the US and these same criminals seem to have no problem getting drugs from South America to Chiraq. (And of course, they lobby for open borders to change the country’s demographics to reaemble that of those doing all the killing.)
Democrats in particular have lost whatever shred of credibility they had back in the 90s when they cared more about law abiding citizens than criminals. The Democrats would rather sacrifice innocent law abiding citizens than give in to gun rights and let people defend themselves.
People in Chicago need to give up on the Democratic Party that always fails them.
That is never going to happen. There is no way that all the public workers pensions will be protected if Republicans come into power, and they know it.
NYC murder numbers will start to rise as soon as the forced judicial/Blasio termination of NYC “stop and frisk” law begins to take effect—NYC numbers were always lower because of the peaceful Guilani/Bloomberg years of strict crime control. DMD
I have to admit the whole Constitution thing kind of sucks for gang control in urban centers. But the alternative can really really suck.
“People carry guns in public because CRIMINALS are carrying guns.”
There fixed it. I don’t carry because there are other legal carriers of firearms, I carry because the justice/immigration system is a complete f’ing joke(s) and there are dangerous people out on the street with, and without, guns.
Sounds like good bird cage liner.
One of the dumbest arguments the anti-gun crowd has for gun control is gang violence. We all know criminals don’t respect the law, the moment they ban guns completely someone is going to start manufacturing Glock knock offs in their basement from scratch and selling them on the street corner with their crack. Requires less than $10k in equipment and not much in the way of specialized knowledge.
Repeal all publics off places (arround 23 groups) in illinois “carry” law and legalize open carry and enjoy how safe chicago can be for to be chicaqo.
Repeat then white constitunal carry.
Most of it is gang members shooting other gang members, How is that going to help?
I have a CCW and I am in the city all the time. I would love to get the prohibited zones removed.
But I also know that i will not do squat to keep the gang members from shooting at each other. What it may do is allow others to resist becoming gang members, but for that we are going to need to drop the age down from 21.
“environmental toxins” such as all that lead in the air?
MAO-A 2R
These dumb liberals also forget that interstate transfer of handguns without an FFL is already a felony.
The suburbs have more guns per person than the city of Chicago has, yet there are relatively few killings in the burbs.
It’s not the guns. It is the people.
So the violence is caused by guns and every other factor other than actual criminal activity. I’ve already heard that song:
Dear, dear, dear kindly Sergeant Krupke you gotta understand
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke that gets us out of hand
Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks
Golly Moses, naturally we’re punks
Gee, Officer Krupke we’re very upset
We never had the love that every child oughta get
We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood
Deep down inside us there is good
There is good, there is good
There is good, there is untapped good
Like inside the worst of us is good
Oh, look at that good, good baby
That’s a nice baby actually, yeah
Oh, that’s a touchin’ good story
Oh well, lemme tell it to the world
Just tell it to the judge
Ooh yeah, judge, that’s a good idea, stop
Dear kindly judge, your honor, my parents treat me rough
With all their marijuana they won’t give me a puff
They didn’t wanna have me but somehow I was had
Leapin’ lizards, that’s why I’m so bad
Right, Officer Krupke you’re really a square
This boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care
It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed
He’s psychologically disturbed
I’m disturbed
We’re disturbed, we’re disturbed
We’re the most disturbed
Like we’re psychologically disturbed
Hear ye, hear ye, in the opinion on this court
This child is depraved on account
He ain’t had a normal home
Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived
My father’s a bastard, my ma’s an S.O.B
My grandpa’s always plastered, my grandma pushes tea
My sister wears a mustache, my brother wears a dress
Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess
Yes, Officer Krupke you’re really a slob
This boy don’t need a doctor just a good honest job
Society’s played him a terrible trick
And sociologically he’s sick
I am sick
We are sick, we are sick
We are sick, sick, sick,
Like we’re sociologically sick, oh yeah
In my opinion this child don’t need to have his head shrunk at all
Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease
Hey, I got a social disease
So take him to a social worker
Dear kindly, social worker, they say go earn a buck
Like be a soda jerker which means like be a schmuck
It’s not I’m antisocial, I’m only anti-work
Gloryosky, that’s why I’m a jerk
Officer Krupke, you’ve done it again
This boy don’t need a job, he needs a year in the pen
It ain’t just a question of misunderstood
Deep down inside him he’s no good
I’m no good
We’re no good, we’re no good
We’re no earthly good
Like the best of us is no damn good
The trouble is he’s crazy, the trouble is he drinks
The trouble is he’s lazy, the trouble is he stinks
The trouble is he’s growing, the trouble is he’s grown
Krupke, we got troubles of our own
Gee, Officer Krupke we’re down on our knees
‘Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease
Gee, Officer Krupke what are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you
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