Aw, screw it. I’ll go for snark. Chicago clearly needs more aggressive gun control.
The number of [2016] shooting victims in Chicago stood at 2,514 Thursday morning. At this time last year, 1,725 people had been shot. The city has not seen this level of gun violence since the 1990s, a trend the Police Department has blamed on lax gun laws [in places other than Chicago, presumably] and feuding gang factions.
Over eight hours from Wednesday evening through early Thursday, three people were killed and at least 10 others were wounded in the city.
Okay: The place where I live is located in at least one of the poorest counties in the entire United States – accounts differ as to whether it’s the poorest county. There are some real sad lowlifes here, and there’s some real pathology: Meth and other hard drugs, burglary, domestic violence, even an occasional really senseless murder.
We don’t have anything remotely like Chicago’s endemic violence. Day or night you can walk down a sidewalk in security. And that’s certainly not for lack of guns. On any given moment of any day if you visit the only food market in the town nearest where I live you’re virtually certain to see at least one openly-carried handgun. And most people prefer to carry concealed – if you’re around people, you’re very close to a loaded gun. It’s all perfectly legal and at least grudgingly accepted by pretty much everybody. We may not have many shiny cars per capita, but we’ve got lots of guns. And not locked in safes in basements, either.
The city of Chicago virtually bans handgun ownership, let alone carrying, for everybody except cops and influential bigwigs. If any part of gungrabber logic held true, then compared to my home a day on the south side of Chicago ought to look like the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Dancing in the street. Happy naked children. Pretty girls with flowers in their hair.
Instead it’s a hellhole. Why? Ask any gun banner and you’ll get a short answer: Because guns.
But that makes no sense. And what’s more they know it, because otherwise why have they so consistently written Chicago’s genuinely horrifying ‘gun violence’ out of their narrative? They love to talk about the evils of “non-college-educated white males” – you can call us rednecks, we don’t mind – but they act like Chicago gangbangers don’t exist at all.
There’s something wrong with that picture.
