The Chicago Line

In terms of pure numbers, there have been more murders in Chicago this year, and in many previous years, than any other any American city. It comes as little relief that because of its large population, Chicago ranks anywhere between #10 and #30 (depending on which day and where you check the stats), in murder rate in this country, in other words the number of homicides in relation to the size of the population.     

One could argue because of that second statistic, Chicago is not the "murder capital" of the nation as it is so often referred. That's hardly a bragging right.

Some would diminish the significance of our increasing murder rate as it is concentrated in certain "bad" neighborhoods and not the entire city. High crime rates have historically been associated with areas of poverty combined with ethnic and racial segregation, unemployment, the breakdown of families, the predominance of street gangs and other factors. As the crime and murder rate in much of the city has remained fairly stable, it stands to reason that the murder rate in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago has skyrocketed, well out of proportion with the overall rate of the city as a whole.

Despite not living in a neighborhood with a particularly high murder rate, I don't find any comfort in that. On the contrary. This is my city and every murder, whether it be in affluent Lincoln Park, the economically challenged Englewood, or my neighborhood somewhere in between, Rogers Park, is an unspeakable tragedy.

There is no way to sugar-coat it, we cannot spin the situation to make it better, we are all affected by the horrific number of murders in our city.

Therefore, I'm not averse to Chicago's murder rate being openly and honestly discussed by those who have a legitimate concern for the wellbeing of this city and its inhabitants, preferably accompanied by some useful thoughts addressing the tragedy.

What I have no tolerance for are politicians and pundits who use violence in Chicago as a distraction from one of the pressing issues of our day, gun control. 

You hear the trope every time there is legitimate outrage after a mass shooting. Defenders of not doing anything to control the obscene availability of guns in this country will predictably drop the Chicago Line in order to "prove" that gun laws do nothing to prevent crime.

This is the Chicago Line: "Despite having the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago also has the highest murder rate."

Strictly speaking, neither of those points are accurate, but that's not a problem for me. If there were a legitimate argument for Chicago being an example of strict gun laws having little or no effect on crime, it would be a valid point.

But it's not a legitimate argument and therefore not valid. The bottom line is that in Chicago's case, the correlation between its relatively strict gun control laws and its high murder rate, is purely anecdotal, much like the tentative correlation many people make between vaccines and autism (a story for another day).

The problem with the correlation between Chicago (more appropriately Illinois) gun laws and the murder rate is quite simple. While Illinois gun laws are fairly strict by US standards (ranked eighth strictest in the nation), the laws in its neighboring states are anything but. Given that, it stands to reason that a state with strict gun laws being an island surrounded by states with lax guns laws is no more effective than a no peeing section in the middle of an open swimming pool. It turns out that well over half of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, the majority of those from Indiana, which is literally across the street from some parts of Chicago. 

The state of Illinois requires all gun purchases to be accompanied a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card on the part of a buyer, issued by the State Police which must be presented to the seller for verification at the time of purchase. That process alone takes a few days so you can't simply walk into a gun shop in this state and leave with a shiny new weapon. This FOID card can be rescinded any time its holder is considered a risk such as having committed a crime or determined to be mentally unstable.

None of this is true in Indiana or Wisconsin where almost anyone with absolutely no business having a gun can make the easy drive across state lines to buy one.

But the real problem with this nation's lax gun laws insofar as crime is concerned, is the that they enable guns to be manufactured at a staggering rate. I looked at one of my previous posts a decade old and recalled that ten years ago, there were as many guns as people in the United States. Today it is estimated that there are about twenty percent more guns than people in this country. That translates to (if my math is correct) roughly 80 million more guns in circulation today in this country than ten years ago.

Sure there are lots of responsible gun owners who take pains to prevent their firearms from getting into the wrong hands. But what happens when they sell those guns which are later re-sold or stolen? That's not to mention all the irresponsible gun owners out there.

Since guns are so plentiful in this city, one needn't bother making the trip to Indiana or Wisconsin, they can be had right here, mostly illegally of course. As the gun crowd rightfully points out, criminals aren't going to let a mere law prevent them from getting a gun. But if there weren't so many guns around in the first place, it wouldn't be so damned easy for criminals to get their hands on them. Sorry gun guys but this one is on you.

Another inconvenient fact debunking the correlation between Chicago's murder rate and gun control is that cities with comparable or higher murder rates than Chicago such as Birmingham, Little Rock, New Orleans and St. Louis are all in states with far more lenient gun restrictions than Illinois. In contrast, cities like Los Angeles and New York, both in states with stricter gun laws than Illinois, have far lower murder rates than Chicago.

Unfortunately there is a segment of our society who seems to be immune to reason and facts. That's why anti gun control politicians and pundits keep getting away with using the Chicago Line as their main line of defense in arguing the failure of gun control.

You may ask why Chicago is singled out as the gold standard of American murder and mayhem. Could it be that all those other cities are in solidly red states that typically oppose gun control? Oh I dunno, just a hunch.

The Chicago Line was a favorite of the exPOTUS who was fond of trashing the blue state of Illinois and especially Chicago, home of his predecessor and favorite target, Barak Obama. 

In a bit of horrendous timing, days after the mass shooting of fourth graders and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas, an NRA convention was scheduled to take place in Houston, 278 miles away. Many folks who planned to attend either as speakers or entertainers, cancelled their appearances out of respect for the dead and their families. Not the exPOTUS who danced a little gig at the end of his address to the crowd, after paying "homage" to the victims of Uvalde by mispronouncing most of their names. Also present at the gun-lovers' orgy in Houston was Texas senator Ted Cancún Cruz who predictably used the old reliable Chicago Line in his speech. Here is what he said: 

Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.

Which is interesting because in 2019, Cruz was excoriated by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot after he dropped the Chicago Line in slightly different words, after a particularly brutal holiday weekend in this city. It's bad enough to extol the virtues of guns by exploiting Chicago violence in reaction to a tragic weekend in the Windy City, but it's a whole other level of bad to use it in the wake of another town's tragedy.

Perhaps the most tasteless use of the Chicago Line to date came from Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference in Uvalde, the day after the shooting. You may remember it was Abbott who famously blamed windmills for the disastrous power grid failure last year after an unusual snap of cold weather in the Lone Star State. Never mind that wind power generates only a minuscule amount of Texas energy. 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this modern-day Don Quixote would bring up Chicago while blocks away, grieving parents were in the process of receiving the remains of their murdered children who had to be identified the night before by DNA samples as the bullets from a high powered military grade weapon ripped apart their bodies and destroyed their faces.

In order to assure his fellow gun toatin' Texans that he wasn't moved by the unspeakable tragedy that befell his constituents in Uvalde enough to keep weapons like the one used at Robb Elementary School out of the hands of people likely to use them against ten year olds, Abbott said this:

I hate to say this, there are more people that are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.

Perhaps he was bemoaning the fact that there aren't enough schools in Texas but I don't think so. Not giving him the benefit of the doubt on that one, his statement is so wrong on so many levels. 

Beyond the errors in logic, by comparing numbers of murder victims in Chicago and Texas, Abbott is treating human lives as if they were commodities. He may as well have been talking about spark plugs or widgets. 

Not only did Abbott receive the wrath of the Mayor of Chicago, but also that of Jay Pritzker, Governor of Illinois for his thoughtless remarks.

As pointed out by Mayor Lightfoot, worst of all, Abbott's statement downplays the tragedy he was on hand to address. Uvalde is a small town where practically everyone has a connection to at least one of the victims of the massacre. I'm guessing that not a soul in Uvalde was comforted by learning that a lot of people are murdered in Chicago too. 

But these gun-loving yahoos press on with their empty rhetoric about good guys with guns, people killing people, not guns, and about that hellhole, Chicago.

You don't hear Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott, both with presidential aspirations of their own calling Indianapolis, Tuscaloosa, Menphis or Baton Rouge murder hell holes, even though those cities have higher murder rates than Chicago. 

For them. Chicago is an easy target as this city's violent reputation as every Chicagoan who has ever traveled abroad knows, precedes it. Besides they have nothing to lose as neither of them have a snowball's chance in hell of winning Chicago or Illinois in a presidential election. 

As I said, if there were any credence to the Chicago Line, it would be fair game. But there is not, it is a simplistic logical fallacy, deliberately cherry picked by unscrupulous politicians and their masters, the gun lobby, to empower and enrich themselves off the blood of innocent children, and to further divide the American people. 

So we can expect to keep hearing the same old bullshit Chicago Line ad nauseam.

Not that it will make a bit of difference but to that I will quote our mayor while adding a few choice embellishments of my own:

If you don't give a rat's ass about this city or its people, keep our name out of your fucking mouth.

With all due respect. 

The Neighborhood

Last week on a balmy mid-October evening, I got home late after attending an event in the Loop. Shortly after I got off the train and began my walk home, I heard the sound of sirens coming from every direction. It was pretty clear to me what was going on when I noticed that the overwhelming majority of flashing lights headed my way were blue, not red. My suspicions were confirmed the next morning when I checked the news; someone had been shot.

Most of the police cars, an ambulance and a fire truck came to rest about two blocks from me. Other cop cars were patrolling the neighborhood in search of a perpetrator. Thinking back on it now, it was probably my safest walk home in the twelve years we've lived in our current home. Considering the pleasant weather, the streets were filled with people, many of whom headed in the direction of the incident. Perhaps twenty years ago I might have joined them out of curiosity, as I was a bit of an ambulance chaser back in the day. Now however, needing little to remind myself of my own mortality, I'm much less inclined to seek out the misery of other people.

Not so for my neighbors. I'd go so far as to say there was almost a festive atmosphere on the street as the excitement broke up the tedium of everyday life, or at least took people's minds off the Cubs who were at that very moment in the process of being eliminated form the playoffs.

There was nothing in my neighbors' reactions that would indicate anything bad or even all that unusual was taking place. The next day as I walked my regular route past the scene of the crime, leaves fell from trees, kids were on their way to school, and adults on their way to work headed to their cars or like me to the train. A large American flag hung from a flagpole in front of a tidy clapboard house which stood near the spot where the shooting took place. Halloween decorations, your typical pumpkins, ghosts and spider webs, adorned many other homes. There was no indication at all that anything bad happened the night before, no police tape, no dried blood or body outlines in the street, no TV crews or reporters scoping out the scene.

The sad fact is that shootings are not unusual events in this city. The news reports I saw the following day informed me this was one of three shootings in Chicago that day. Doing the math, that number is low. From a quick search of the web, so far this year there have been 2133 shootings in Chicago. Given that roughly 300 days have gone by in 2015, on an average day over seven people get shot in our fair city. Just for the sake of argument, 377 of those who got shot in Chicago this year died, while there were 43 non gun related homicides in the city in the same period.

From the news report I read, in this particular shooting, a man walked up to another man on the street and shot him in the chest. The victim was taken to the local hospital a few blocks down the street from our house. At last report, he was in serious condition. For all I know he could be back on the street looking for payback, as medical science is so amazing these days. Another sobering item in the report was the time of the crime, 8:12PM. I distinctly remember looking at my watch as I got off the train that evening. It was just short of 8:15, meaning that had I left the downtown event a few minutes earlier and caught the previous train, I very likely could have been walking by the scene as the crime was taking place.

But it was the sheer banality of the experience that troubled me the most, including my own attitude. By the time I got home and was embraced by my children, the whole experience was put on the back burner where it has been bubbling over for almost one week.

I don't particularly fear for my own safety in my neighborhood, but I certainly fear for the safety of my wife and kids who could someday find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. I fear for my neighborhood and the city I love dearly. And I fear my own attitude which shows little compassion for gang bangers who feel compelled to kill each other, or anyone else who happens to be in their way. After all they're still some poor mother's child, human beings just like the rest if us, despite the way they behave.

On the other hand, I'm sick and tired of the stupidity of guns and violence, of street gangs and teenagers having indiscriminant. unprotected sex and giving birth to children they have no intention of caring for. I'm tired of our society rejecting the idea of personal responsibility and blaming everyone and everything but criminals for their crimes.

As much as I love our life in the city, sometimes I wish I could take my family away, far away. This evening as I walked home from the train past the site of the shooting, it was raining and about twenty degrees cooler than last week. The goons who typically roam the neighborhood looking for trouble when the weather is nice were conspicuously absent. For some reason the crime rate goes down whenever the weather gets bad meaning things should temporarily be getting better.

I never thought I'd say this, but winter can't come soon enough.

Lots of questions, few answers

Try as we might to avoid the issue, we could all see it coming. A long, summer holiday weekend would certainly mean that the news would be filled with stories about people getting shot in Chicago. Like clockwork, the reports came in hour by hour, and when all was said and done, over this past Fourth of July weekend, 82 people were shot in this city, and 16 of them died. While the murder-per-capita numbers are higher in other cities, for the past few years more people in Chicago have been murdered than in any other city making this by some accounts, the murder capital of the country. This fact has not been lost in cities coast to coast as this article from the Los Angeles Times and this article from last year in the New York Times point out.

Not surprising, the spin doctors on both sides of the gun issue are having a field day with this one. The mayor and the police commissioner, along with advocates of gun control claim that there are far too many guns in this city and that the laws currently in place are not adequate to protect the men, women, and children of Chicago. The gun crowd claims that Chicago already has the toughest gun laws in the country, which is true, so obviously there is no correlation between gun laws and gun violence.

Since I'm not a person who necessarily believes in better life through legislation, I'm not so naive as to think that making new laws alone will make the problem of gun violence go away. I even believe there is some logic to the old and tired axiom toted out by the gun crowd every time some nut with a gun goes on a rampage, or a dismal new homicide record is set. Just as a $50,000 Steinway grand piano on the stage of a great concert hall would make no music without someone there to play it, a gun sitting in a drawer harms no one if it is left alone.

You can kill someone with a knife, a broken bottle, or an automobile, but no one is suggesting we ban those things. That much is true but so is this: a concert pianist can make music with a kazoo, a Jew's harp or an armpit but chances are, a piano would be much more effective.

In the end, these arguments are pointless; the relationship between guns and people is obvious. To put it simply, a gun is a tool for the expressed purpose of maiming and killing living creatures, including human beings. As such, it is a very effective tool.

For better or worse, our constitution guarantees our right to own guns, that much is certain. As long as I can remember, we've debated the extent to which the Founding Fathers intended that liberty to reach. The people with the most liberal (in the strictest definition of that term) interpretation of the Second Amendment have recently won victories giving us the freedom to do as we please with guns, rights that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

As I pointed out in a previous post, never in my wildest dreams did I expect to see "no guns allowed" signs posted in front of establishments all across the city. Those signs have become a reality here because the courts in their infinite wisdom have insisted that Illinois lift its restriction on carrying concealed weapons. Seemingly never satisfied, the signs have become a point of contention with the gun folks who claim they won't enter a business, library, or museum that displays one because criminals obviously would ignore the signs, and being out-gunned, law abiding citizens such as themselves would be put at a disadvantage.

Thirty years ago, the sale and possession of handguns was a widely debated topic and municipalities including Chicago, put laws on the books that prevented the sale and possession of the weapons whose only purpose was to kill people. As the courts have recently overturned those laws as unconstitutional, the stakes are much higher and we are now debating whether people should be allowed to purchase assault weapons whose only purpose is to kill several people at one time. The gun folks are winning that battle too.

Which leads me to believe that today, the lunatics are running the asylum.

Gun advocates spout out many arguments for their cause; most of them have enough holes to fill the Albert Hall. My favorite goes something like this:

Gun laws only prevent honest, law abiding citizens from owning and carrying firearms. The only way we can solve the problem of bad guys with guns is to put guns into the hands of the good guys.

In other words, contrary to the expressed statements of the mayor and the police superintendent of Chicago, no we don't have too many guns in this city, in fact we have too few. The logic behind the second sentence of this argument is that the bad guys would be so intimidated by the thought that the good guys might be packing heat, that they'd leave the good guys alone. But as we've seen in Chicago over the past several eons, the lion's share of gun violence here involves bad guys shooting at other bad guys. This could actually be a good thing in a pure Darwinian sense as theoretically, the bad guys would eventually kill each other off, leaving only good guys in our fair city. Unfortunately, most of the bad guys in our city turn out to be really bad shots, and more often than not, they miss their intended targets, i.e.: other bad guys, and hit good guys instead. One of those good guys was a Chicago Public School teacher named Betty Howard who was shot a few weeks ago while she sat inside a real estate office where she worked a second job. I'm not sure how having a gun in her possession at the time she was killed would have saved Ms. Howard who was caught unawares by the gunfight taking place outside her office, but I have no doubt that the gun crowd will come up with some explanation.

I also don't buy the idea that gun laws prevent "honest, law abiding citizens" from owning guns. The purchase, possession and the use of fireworks is strictly illegal in the State of Illinois, yet those laws don't prevent tens of thousands of otherwise law abiding folks from staging their own private Fourth of July fireworks displays, some with enough fire power to make a full scale re-enactment of the invasion of Omaha Beach look timid. Back in the day when owning and carrying handguns was illegal in this town, I knew people, otherwise decent, law abiding folks, who did just that.

Now of course, thanks to the courts, it's perfectly legal for those folks and just about anyone else to own a handgun in Chicago and carry a concealed weapon in Illinois. The courts have also thrown out Chicago's ban on gun shops although as yet, none have opened. Not to worry Chicagoans, you don't have to go very far to legally purchase a gun, just go across the street into Riverdale or another suburb that borders the city to stock your private arsenal. If you have a troublesome past and don't pass the perfunctory background check, you can always have a friend or relative buy one for you. If that's too much trouble, getting a gun illegally in this city is ridiculously easy and if by chance the police catch you, it's unlikely you'll get much more than a slap on the wrist. Watch out though, you still can't legally carry those guns openly in this state, but the way legislators and judges have been spreading their legs for the gun lobby these days, it should not be very long before we see thousands of Wyatt Earp wannabes walking around town sporting holsters and ammo from their belts.

Since guns don't do the actual killing, none of this should bother us, it's the people we need to worry about right?

I say that facetiously, but only slightly. The reality is that while guns are readily available all over the country, recurrent incidents of gun violence occur in very predictable places like Chicago. Taking that point further, the vast majority of gun violence in Chicago takes place in very specific parts of the city.

The communities that suffer the most from violence have a few other things in common: high rates of poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, single parent families, poor performing schools, few opportunities for advancement or escape. A great many people in the communities that experience high crime rates were themselves victims of violent crime, and/or had loved ones whose lives were destroyed by violence. In my mind, the most desperate and tragic consequence of the endless cycle of poverty and violence in these communities is the loss of hope for the future.

We can endlessly point fingers. Some people blame poverty and the lack of economic opportunity on racism. Others blame the government, welfare, and the poor people themselves. Perhaps the blame can be spread around equally, but the one issue I single out above the others is the dissolution of the family. Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote a few years ago, slightly altered from the original:

I don't have the answer for why people commit senseless crimes but I suspect that unlike many criminals, I had two parents who were devoted to me, let me know every day that I was important, blessed me with an enthusiastic faith in education and in the future, and especially taught me right from wrong, My parents came down on me as hard on the little things as the big ones, teaching me that it was just as wrong to steal a newspaper, (as I once had a penchant for doing), as it was to steal a Mercedes Benz. In short, they taught me that my integrity was the most valuable thing I had. Given my parents' scrupulous sense of values and ethics, the idea of intentionally causing harm to another human being never crossed my mind. My wife and I have tried hard to pass along those same values to our children.

I come from a privileged background, not because I am white, or because we had a little money in our pockets. I was privileged because I had two parents, a mother and a father who deeply cared about me, who spent quality time with me, and who taught me that if I worked hard enough, the sky was the limit. Now of course many people thrive despite having less than ideal circumstances in their childhood. But that is a much tougher road to travel, especially living in a community where bad circumstances are the rule not the exception.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that communities where the incidents of poverty and crime are the highest, are filled with children who were not privileged like I was. I think it's very clear that children, especially boys, need positive male role models, preferably their fathers. Too often the role models for young boys in this city are found in the streets. Communities consisting of generations of fatherless families are in my opinion, the greatest social ill facing our society today.

So what can we do?

I don't know how you can legislate families staying together. How can we insure that men who impregnate women take responsibility for themselves, their actions, and for the children they helped create? How on earth can we insist that people who bring children into this world and are incapable of caring for them, take the responsibility to find someone who can?  Or even, God forbid, how do we teach our children that maybe it's not such a bad idea after all to refrain from having sex at least until they are old enough to accept and deal with the consequences? The poverty, violence, inertia, lack of hope, respect, and personal responsibility in our city today I believe are not the disease, they are the symptoms.

Of course it's better to cure the disease than the symptom, but you have to start somewhere, and sometimes the best you can do is alleviate the symptoms first, then go after the root causes.

That brings us back to the guns. As we've seen, it is very difficult to legislate human behavior, but it's not all that hard to legislate guns, if only we had reasonable people on both sides willing to compromise.

The Second Amendment isn't going anywhere and with it, neither is our right to own guns. We seem to forget that along with any right we are guaranteed comes the implicit admonition that we use that freedom responsibly. No liberty guaranteed by our Constitution, not even the freedom of speech, is absolute. It seems the only people in our country who will fight to the death (usually someone else's), to make one particular liberty unconditional, are the extremist gun fanciers who cry foul at the mere mention of any reasonable form of controlling the sale, distribution and use of deadly weapons.

The drastic liberalization of gun laws in the past thirty years has resulted in a tremendous increase in the production and sale of guns in the United States. It is far easier to obtain a gun today than it was back then. As a consequence, more people are getting shot in Chicago than a generation ago. The only reason there are fewer deaths now than say 1974 when 970 people were murdered in this city, is because of advancements in medical technology. A police officer friend I just spoke with put it bluntly: many people who would have died from their wounds in 1974 are back on the streets today in a few weeks, reeking more havoc.

There are certainly responsible gun owners out there who pose little or no threat to society. There are many more who for whatever reason, have no business whatsoever being anywhere near a gun.

Pure and simple, why is it such a big deal to make it a little harder for those people to get one?

I just don't get it.