Gun Control and the Liberal Mind

I have a group of friends who meet for breakfast every two weeks. We are all conservatives except for one man who is a liberal. My liberal friend, who says there are no gun control laws in Chicago, where he’s from, also believes that Major Hasan, who murdered 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood and shot 32 others, is not an Islamic terrorist. He also seems to believe that normal, heterosexual men sexually molest young boys, not homosexuals. That’s why, according to him, it is wrong for the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexual men from being Scout Leaders. I guess that’s why we keep him around: so we are reminded occasionally just how warped the liberal mind is.  He really is a nice guy, though, who volunteers his time to help others.

Why isn't gun control working in Chicago?

January 30, 2013 Washington Examiner

One week ago, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton performed with her high school band here in Washington at President Obama's inauguration. In addition to being a majorette, Pendleton was also an honor student and volleyball player who dreamed of visiting Paris this summer.

On Tuesday, she was shot dead in a public park two blocks from her high school and less than a mile from Obama's Kenwood home in Chicago. The shooting prompted White House spokesman Jay Carney to remark, "If we can save even one child's life, we have an obligation to try when it comes to the scourge of gun violence."

Pendleton was the 44th homicide victim in Chicago so far this year. That puts Chicago on pace to surpass last year's total of more than 500 murders. Chicago homicides have picked up dramatically in recent years and now outnumber killings in New York, which has three times Chicago's population. Meanwhile, in the Big Apple, fewer people were killed in 2012 than in any year since the 1960s. During a nine-day stretch this month, not a single New Yorker was murdered. Here in Washington, there have been only four murders so far in 2013. That's down 33 percent from the same period last year, when the city had the fewest killings in 50 years.

Despite the media's intense attention to mass shootings, homicides, violent crime and gun deaths are all decreasing nationally, according to the latest FBI statistics. But not in Chicago. So what is causing the unacceptable wave of gun violence in Chicago?

It's not because of lenient gun control laws. Chicago has the strongest gun control regime in the nation. Both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are completely banned in the city. And up until the 2010 Supreme Court decision that legalized them, handguns were banned too.

You can now get a permit to own a firearm in Chicago, but it requires firearms training, two separate background checks and a firearm owner's identification card. As a result of these burdensome and punitive measures, only 7,640 people currently hold a firearms permit in Chicago. But criminals couldn't care less about Chicago's gun laws. Chicago police seized 7,400 guns used in crimes in 2012 alone.

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in the U.S. Capitol titled "What Should America Do About Gun Violence?" Mass-shooting victim and former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords testified, as did National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre. But no one from the new murder capital of the United States, Chicago, was invited to testify.

If Senate Democrats continue to push for more gun control legislation while ignoring the failure of existing, similar gun control laws in the president's hometown, House Republicans should rectify the situation. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., should take C-SPAN's cameras on the road and hold a field hearing in one of the few American cities where gun violence is bad and getting worse. We suggest a title that gets right to the point: "Why Isn't Gun Control Working in Chicago?"

One question to address: If the real problem is that guns can be purchased in other jurisdictions, then why are America's other major cities seeing such huge declines in their murder rates, despite the fact that nearly all of them are near states with relatively lax gun laws?

If Democrats are truly interested in making Americans safer, and not just in passing feel-good laws that will do nothing to decrease gun violence, then they should welcome a closer look at what is going so horribly wrong in Obama's hometown.

Some Statistics on the Unreported War in America

• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.

• When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.

• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.