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Rahm Needs Wyatt Earp?

Mike

Well-known member
Might be that giving everyone a gun will result in no one left standing to perpetrate these drive by shootings, etc? This is almost a daily thing in Chicago. Clearly, gun laws ain't working. It's their culture.

By Peter Nickeas

Chicago Tribune reporter

4:06 a.m. CDT, August 24, 2012
Nineteen people were shot in attacks across the South and West sides between about 5:20 p.m. Thursday and 1:30 a.m. Friday - including 13 people during a single 30-minute period - according to the Chicago Police Department.

The shootings peaked between about 9:15 and 9:45 p.m. Thursday when 13 people were shot, including eight in a single incident at 79th Street and Essex Avenue about 9:30 p.m.

Police are still trying to sort out that shooting, the second of three incidents that left multiple people wounded since 8 p.m.

As of 4 a.m., none of the 19 people shot had died.

The first reported shooting Thursday afternoon left four people wounded in the Little Village neighborhood about 5:20 p.m.

Two more were wounded in the Ida B. Wells / Darrow Homes neighborhood about 8:10 p.m., police said. Two men – 27 and 33 – were shot in the 600 block of East 37th Street and taken to the University of Chicago Hospitals, Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Ron Gaines said. The younger man was shot in the head and the other in the right arm, Gaines said.

The eight people shot at 79th Street and Essex Avenue were wounded in a drive-by about 9:15 p.m., police said. The ages of the people shot ranged from 14 to 28. Seven were male.

About 9:30, two men were shot in their arms in the 2900 block of West 39th Place in the Brighton Park neighborhood. It's not clear what hospital they were taken to, Gaines said. They were wounded in a drive-by attack, police said.

And about 15 minutes later, a 24-year-old man was shot in the leg and taken to Jackson Park Hospital from the 7200 block of South Jeffery Boulevard, Gaines said. He was treated and released. The man told police he was talking on his phone when he heard a single shot and realized he was wounded.

Just after midnight, a 17-year-old was shot in the back and taken to Stroger Hospital in serious condition, police said. He was walking in the 7100 block of South Vincennes Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood when someone inside a passing vehicle opened fire, police said.

Another 17-year-old was shot after 1:30 a.m. Friday in the 3500 block of West Grenshaw Street in the Homan Square neighborhood. He's in good condition at Mount Sinai Hospital. Someone walked to him and started shooting, police said.
 

Texan

Well-known member
Chicago.jpg


by Frank Miniter

The truth behind Chicago’s surging murder rate, the gang wars and the 7-year-old girl gunned down at a snow cone stand isn’t something the mayor or police chief want people to know. Instead, city officials are blaming freer America for the violence. Nevertheless, it’s time we acknowledge the facts. The good people of Chicago deserve to live and raise their children in a safe city.

This is a case where the First Amendment is needed to help restore the Second. To understand how, we must first candidly recognize the casualties of Chicago’s current policies. Between Jan. 1 and June 27, 2012, a staggering 250 people were killed in Chicago—that’s almost enough to fill several standard-size buses. That’s 38 percent more homicides than occurred over the same period in 2011, at a time when most cities have declining murder rates. It’s also the highest number Chicago has reached during the first half of the year since 2003, which had 601 homicides for the entire year, according to the Chicago Police Department.

There are real faces and stories behind these horrific statistics. To see a map of locations complete with details about the people killed, log on to http://homicides.redeyechicago.com/.

Now consider the two main public officials in charge: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. Emanuel and McCarthy let it be known that they speak every morning after they read police reports detailing the murders that occurred the night before. They want to be perceived as leaders of the community who care and are working to reduce the bloodshed. They don’t want residents to realize ideology is preventing their mayor and police chief from empowering people to take control of the level of safety in their own communities.

Emanuel was formerly White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama. He served as senior advisor to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998 and as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 until he resigned in 2009 to take his position in the Obama administration. He won the mayoral election in Chicago on Feb. 22, 2011.

Emanuel has a lifetime “F” rating from the NRA. Last spring, Emanuel tried and failed to create a statewide gun registry of gun owners. Though Illinois remains the only state in the nation that does not allow residents to carry concealed firearms, that’s not enough gun control for Emanuel. In fact, last June, after U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan called a section of Chicago’s gun laws “unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” Emanuel said at a news conference: “The reason we have gun laws—the reason I’m trying to also pass tougher gun laws down in Springfield—is because it’s an essential complement to your overall crime strategy.”

As for McCarthy, according to the Chicago Tribune, he “has struggled with criticism that he’s brought an arrogant ‘New York-knows-best’ attitude and is too cozy with Emanuel.”

McCarthy came from Newark, N.J., where he was police director. Before working in Newark, McCarthy was a beat officer in New York City who rose to deputy commissioner. That’s a hardnosed resumé, but McCarthy might have gotten the appointment because of his politics. He shares Emanuel’s fervor for gun control.

Last June, McCarthy addressed the congregation at St. Sabina’s Church in Chicago, home of Michael Pfleger, the controversial priest and Obama supporter. In 2007, Pfleger led a mob of 1,000 supporters to block the entrance of Chuck’s Gun Shop and Range in the suburb of Riverdale, Ill., and threatened to “snuff out” John Riggio, the store’s owner, as well as “legislators who are against our gun laws.”

At St. Sabina’s, McCarthy told parishioners that the “Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and segregation” that occurred in the South were “government-sponsored racism.” That’s true. But then he said today’s federal gun laws are also “government-sponsored racism.” He explained that wild claim by stating, “I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of African-American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers … are killing black and brown children.”

So McCarthy’s solution to reduce violent crime is to use the government to take away an individual right—protected by the Second Amendment of our Bill of Rights—from law-abiding citizens everywhere, yet he doesn’t see the parallel between this statist position and the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws he called “government-sponsored racism”? Black Codes and Jim Crow laws once disarmed and disenfranchised people on the basis of race. These were government sponsored, just as the current restrictions preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms for their protection are government sponsored.

McCarthy also told the congregation, “The NRA does not like me, and I’m okay with that.”

This is where the First Amendment can restore the Second. Most of the inner-city parishioners cheered McCarthy on. It seems that many of the law-abiding people of Chicago haven’t yet realized they’ve been turned into a class of victims, just as blacks once were in parts of the South. Emanuel and McCarthy don’t want them to know this.

They’d rather the residents of Chicago didn’t know that in McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion noted that “after the Civil War, many of the over 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army returned to the States of the old Confederacy, where systematic efforts were made to disarm them and other blacks. The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that ‘no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife. …”

Or that Justice Alito went on to write: “Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves. In the first session of the 39th Congress, Senator (Henry) Wilson told his colleagues: ‘In Mississippi, rebel State forces, men who were in the rebel armies, are traversing the State, visiting the freedmen, disarming them, perpetrating murders and outrages upon them; and the same things are done in other sections of the country.’”

That’s the real history that might make honest people in Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods realize they’re barred from defending themselves, just as Southern blacks once were.

A few, thankfully, are learning such facts. Otis McDonald is an important example.

The Court Case’s Aftermath

McDonald’s story should inspire Chicago’s residents.

In April 2008, McDonald, a retired maintenance engineer, agreed to serve as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Chicago’s handgun ban. McDonald is the child of black Louisiana sharecroppers. He was 17 years old when he borrowed $18 from his mother and set off for Chicago in 1951. He was just one of millions of African Americans who fled the South during the “Great Migration.”

McDonald settled in Chicago’s Morgan Park neighborhood. At the time, the neighborhood was bustling and relatively safe. In the ensuing years he married, raised eight children and spent a career working at the University of Chicago, where he started as a janitor and worked his way up to become a maintenance engineer. But by the time he retired in 1997, the neighborhood had been lost to gangs. McDonald told the Chicago Tribune, “I know every day that I come out in the streets, the youngsters will shoot me as quick as they will a policeman.”

According to police reports, McDonald’s house was burglarized three times in the 1980s and early ’90s. On one occasion, three young men surrounded McDonald’s car and threatened to “off” him.

McDonald decided to become involved in the gun-rights movement in 2005, when Mayor Richard Daley was pushing a statewide ban on “assault weapons.” McDonald was concerned that his shotgun might be outlawed under the proposed ban, so he started attending gun-rights rallies. The connections he made at those events led to his inclusion in the class-action lawsuit against the city of Chicago.

McDonald, a Democrat and longtime hunter, had by then been a married, law-abiding resident of Chicago for more than 50 years. He wasn’t an activist. He was a person trying to protect his family and live the American dream.

“I was feeling the poor blacks who years ago had their guns taken away from them and were killed as someone wished,” McDonald explained. “That was a long time ago, but I feel their spirit. That’s what I was feeling in the courtroom. … This lawsuit, I hope, will allow me to bring my handgun into the city legally. I only want a handgun in my house for my protection.”

McDonald understands what Police Superintendent McCarthy doesn’t: Gun control laws preventing him from bearing arms are comparable to the Black Codes, not today’s federal gun laws.

McDonald v. Chicago was decided 5-4 in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. The majority opinion didn’t pull its punches: “Founding-era legal commentators confirmed the importance of the right to early Americans. St. George Tucker, for example, described the right to keep and bear arms as ‘the true palladium of liberty’ and explained that prohibitions on the right would place liberty ‘on the brink of destruction.’”

The majority opinion also determined: “Those who were fearful that the new Federal Government would infringe traditional rights such as the right to keep and bear arms insisted on the adoption of the Bill of Rights as a condition for ratification of the Constitution.”

Despite the win, McDonald’s battle with the city of Chicago didn’t end with the ruling. To sidestep the Supreme Court decision, Chicago quickly passed a new ordinance. City officials called the new law “the strictest in the nation.”

As it turns out, it is perhaps the stupidest. The measure prohibited gun stores from opening in Chicago and it prevented gun owners from so much as stepping outside their homes with a handgun. It even prevented residents from using a firearm on their porches or in their garages.

That’s right, the law actually explained where you could and couldn’t defend your life—though precisely what a “porch” is under the law will have to be answered. Does screened-in count? How about windows with an air conditioner?

Since passing that ordinance in 2010, Chicago has been forced to allow residents to purchase handguns, although to do so residents must navigate onerous restrictions and pay fees. Many of those restrictions are now being challenged in NRA-supported litigation, currently pending before the U.S. district court in Chicago. Chicago residents still can’t carry handguns for personal protection. That, too, is being challenged in court. The city is resistant to getting out of the way of the constitutional freedom protected by the Bill of Rights. This, as you’ll see, is part of the reason for its high murder rate.

Why the Murder Rate is Rising

Neither Emanuel nor McCarthy will look into the fact that, as economist John Lott showed in his seminal book “More Guns, Less Crime,” violent crime rates tend to go down when more people are able to protect themselves with guns. This is intellectually lazy and dishonest of them; after all, they have a lot of recent examples and empirical studies from which to choose.

Just consider that in the 2008 Heller decision, the Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and gun lock requirements. When the Heller case was decided, Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty warned, “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.” Knowing that Chicago’s gun laws would soon face a similar legal challenge, Chicago Mayor Daley was also vocal—the day the Heller decision was handed down, he said he was “outraged” and claimed people “are going to take a gun and they are going to end their lives in a family dispute.”

Despite these predictions, the mayhem never arrived.

Murders in Washington, D.C., plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that fell to 23.5 per 100,000 people—Washington’s lowest since 1967. In fact, while other cities have also fared well recently, D.C.’s drop was several times greater than that for other similar-sized cities, determined Lott.

Washington, D.C., didn’t succumb to Wild West shootouts, and Chicago wouldn’t either.

Actually, Washington, D.C.’s drop in violent crime shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows how crime rates change after gun bans have been imposed. Washington’s murder rate rose from 12 percent above the average for the 50 most populous cities in 1976 to 35 percent above the average in 1986.

“Washington’s murder rate soared after its handgun ban went into effect in early 1977,” Lott determined. “There is only one year while the ban was in effect that the murder rate fell below the 1976 number and that happened many years later—in 1985.”

Similarly, Chicago’s murder rate also rose after the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld its ban on new handguns in 1982. Over the 19 years following the ban, there were only three years where the murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. As shown in Lott’s third-edition of “More Guns, Less Crime,” before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate was falling relative to the nine other largest cities, but after the ban Chicago’s murder rate rose relative to other cities.

Meanwhile, Lott’s findings that shall-issue laws (a “shall-issue” jurisdiction is one where a person must obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun, but where the granting of such permits is subject only to meeting established criteria) tend to reduce crime rates have been controversial with some in the media and in academia, but his analysis has been backed up by peer-reviewed studies.

A study by Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell that was published in Econ Journal Watch in January 2009 looked into Lott’s findings. It determined, “Many articles have been published finding that shall-issue laws reduce crime. Only one article, by Ayres and Donohue who employ a model that combines a dummy variable with a post-law trend, claims to find that shall-issue laws increase crime. However, the only way that they can produce the result that shall-issue laws increase crime is to confine the span of analysis to five years. We show, using their own estimates, that if they had extended their analysis by one more year, they would have concluded that these laws reduce crime.”

In the majority opinion for McDonald, the Supreme Court also morally indicted Chicago’s leaders. The opinion noted: “[The] number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq … 80 percent of the Chicago victims were black … If, as petitioners believe, their safety and the safety of other law-abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials.”

Despite all of the statistical examples and lives saved around the U.S., Emanuel and McCarthy still blame Chicago’s murder rate on less restrictive gun laws in other states. They don’t care that even the experiences of island nations that have banned handguns follow the same trend.

“When handgun bans were enacted in Ireland and Jamaica in 1972 and 1974, respectively, murder rates doubled over the following decade,” Lott reported. “And take the more recent example in England and Wales, where handguns were banned in 1997: deaths and injuries from gun crime more than doubled over the next seven years.”

I recently asked Lott what he would do about the high murder rate and high gun violence rate if he were mayor of Chicago.

“First of all, [I would] give law-abiding people the ability to protect themselves in public and in their homes,” he said.

Next, he noted that Chicago’s police department has shrunk. He would change that by cutting elsewhere to fund the hiring of new officers—he actually outlines this in his book Freedomnomics.

“Also, sources have told me McCarthy has broken up the police force’s gang units and moved officers around the city. This is a mistake as it takes years for them to get to know who the good and bad guys are on any given street.”

This includes the street where 7-year-old Heaven Sutton was gunned down last June while she sold candy and snow cones with her mother and other family members. Heaven had just gotten her hair done for an upcoming trip to Disney World.

The shots were fired by a gang member trying to kill a rival. The gang member lived, but Heaven didn’t.

Stopping gang violence and making city streets safe again is a complex and difficult job. But neither Emanuel nor McCarthy will consider getting out of the way of residents’ constitutional freedoms, thereby letting the people be equal citizens on their own streets.

Otis McDonald learned this. He became the lead plaintiff in the Chicago case because he simply wanted to exercise the same rights enjoyed by Emanuel and McCarthy.

If more people realize that more personal freedom would help solve the growing problem on Chicago’s murderous streets, then Chicago could follow the path of other American cities to lower violent crime rates.


http://www.nrapublications.org/index.php/14155/whats-behind-chicagos-murder-boom/
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Good read Texan, thanks

I wish I didn't get the feeling that Dems. are for "population control" of blacks. But when you investigate the history behind abortion and then articles like this, it makes you wonder.
 

gmacbeef

Well-known member
In my opinion Rahm is just as dangerous,if not more than Obama, he could care less about anyone or anything . He just looks evil.
 
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