Reverend Jackson speaks! We can but humbly listen.

He Is Watching.

Because of course the ‘gun lobby’ is the source of all ‘gun violence’ – especially that in Chicago. As he will now proceed to show us, I presume.

Each Monday in Chicago, we gird ourselves for the most recent score. Not on how well the Bears, Bulls or Blackhawks, Cubs or White Sox have fared, but on how many new victims of guns have been racked up. Two weekends ago, three were killed with 17 other shooting victims, according to CBS News.

Is this the same Chicago that has at least among the most stringent gun control laws in the nation? And – coincidentally, I’m sure – the most ‘gun violence?’ To the point where the weekend casualties in Chicago have become a statistic some Americans follow almost as closely as football scores? That Chicago?

What we have here is a national security emergency. There is national mourning for the victims of the mass killing at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But Chicago is experiencing an Umpqua almost every week.

Too many illegal guns are in circulation, from handguns to military assault rifles. These guns are powerful enough not only to shoot up churches and schools but to bring down airplanes.

Wait, wait.

Where the hell are Chicagoans getting all these wonderful toys? I want to know why we, the downtrodden ruralites of the Southwest High Desert, are being denied military assault rifles and antiaircraft weapons when they’re freely available to Chicagoans. I cry Discrimination! (Also, I’ve got a bone to pick with at least one Great Horned Owl, and some AA arty might come in handy.)

Too many legal guns are in the wrong hands. Too many young men use guns rather than reason to settle disputes, bullets rather than accomplishment to establish their manhood.

Who are you, Reverend Jackson, to decide what are the ‘wrong hands?’ Legal is either legal or it isn’t. As to the other, you may be right. What does it have to do with the ‘gun lobby,’ though?

President Obama has spoken out forcefully against gun violence, but his proposed reforms have been dead on arrival in the Congress, unable even to come to a vote.

His most recent comments have despaired that yet another slaughter brings no action.

Please – really, I’d love to hear it – specify in detail which of President Obama’s proposed ‘reforms’ would have even the slightest effect on Chicago’s murder rate?

It is time to increase both the heat and the light. President Obama should convene a White House Conference on Gun Violence. That commission should detail reforms needed to begin to address the epidemic of gun violence, and call the nation to action. The reforms can’t be limited to closing gun show loopholes or other gun law reforms. The Department of Homeland Security should be there, detailing the threat posed by the spread of guns designed for the military, not for hunters.

[BUZZ] Hunters? Are we back to ‘we don’t want to take away your hunting guns?’ And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, how many Chicago murders are carried out with ‘guns designed for the military?’ I’ve got a feeling that if you really want to blame gun manufacturers and the ‘lobby,’ your real beef is with Gaston Glock. But please! Do feel free to correct me where I’m misinformed.

We need to crack down on illegal gun ownership, with harsh penalties for repeat offenders. We should be jailing those who traffic in illegal guns, while reducing sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Not seeing what those two things have to do with each other, though I don’t disagree with the second. As to the first, has the CPD not been cracking down on illegal gun ownership for decades? You said earlier “The Chicago police recover about 7,000 illegal guns annually – more than any other city.” And yet there you are, up to your knees in blood. Harsh penalties haven’t helped, but harsher ones will? Really?

There should be a push to revive the ban on assault weapons once more. It is ridiculous that weapons designed for war are spread across American streets.

See, now I know you’re not being serious. It’s been done, on a national scale. It had no effect. Why not? For one, those aren’t the guns that are being used – by those people who are actually causing the problem.

But the murder spike represents more than simply too many guns. The violence stems from the growing misery of too few jobs, too many guns and too little hope.

Is only the second of those caused by the ‘gun lobby?” Or all three?

Any sensible plan against the spike in murders and shootings will include jobs for the young, increases in the minimum wage, guaranteed paid family leave days and more. The culture of drugs and guns has to be challenged with an economy of jobs and opportunity.

Reverend Jackson, you’re older and no doubt wiser than me. So please, help me find my way. How can the federal government, or any government, provide jobs for the young by heaping even more crippling regulation on the businesses that make jobs? Increasing mandated wages past the point where the jobs are of any use to the businesses eliminates jobs, as do mandated benefits.

And what! Please! Does any of this have to do with the ‘gun lobby?’ Is there an immoral hiring freeze at the NRA?

The Black Lives Matter Movement has raised awareness of the violence in our cities, focusing on the horror of African-Americans threatened by the very police who are charged with protecting them. But the spike of murders and shootings comes not from the actions of the police but from the actions of residents.

Yes! Yes, it does. And I am not one of them, nor is Wayne LaPierre. But your point – remember your point? – is defeating the ‘gun lobby.’ Which is not causing the misery of the citizens of Chicago or any other city.

Citizens in many cities want a crackdown on the trafficking and carrying of guns.

There’s a name for that rhetorical fallacy. Never having studied debate, I don’t recall what it is. But it’s a fallacy nonetheless. You don’t get to say “people want.” Which people? Who? Show me a fact or two to back up that assertion.

But many cities find themselves preempted by state legislatures.

Who are voted into office by…

The gun lobby has systematically pushed to get state legislatures to block municipal reforms. That has to be exposed and challenged.

Ah! Now at last we come to it. Thank you.

Please. I sit upright and attentive. Expose and challenge the means and methods by which the ‘gun lobby’ has blocked municipal reforms through state legislatures.

Waiting…

It is too easy to be cynical, to suggest that the gun lobby always wins, or to dismiss gun control as inadequate. As the spike in murders continues, we witness a true national security crisis.

No, no, no! Let us reason together as men, Reverend Jackson. You and me, old men, experienced in the world. You don’t get to just declare a crisis. I dismiss gun control, not as inadequate but as an infringement irrelevant to the problem you have stated. And only a person as steeped in Chicago politics as you are could possibly know that as well as you already do. There is no infringement on gun rights that has not been tried to extremes in the city of Chicago, supposedly in an effort to curb ‘gun violence.’ Yet there are the guns, and there is the violence. The violence against which you have spoken is not being committed by the peaceable citizens of Chicago, who are the only ones likely to obey your new laws. Making gun purchases more obtrusive and annoying – or even legally impossible – for peaceable citizens will not affect that one iota, and you know it.

Change will meet fierce resistance.

Yes. Yes, it will. (And the rest is just concluding blather.) In fact further ‘change’ will be met with absolute unyielding refusal. Something I would think you of all people, Reverend, would applaud if you had an honest particle in your soul. Which I doubt.

The end of the matter, everything having been said, is no. Not only no. Hell no. It’s been tried, every sort of infringement you can name has been done on a large scale, and your streets run with blood. Stop blaming the ones who aren’t doing it.

You get no more.