Slow News Month

Not much happening in the news lately.

Oh yeah, the attempt on the life of Donald Trump, almost forgot about that one.

So what did I learn from that?

Well first of all it's been a good opportunity to think about a few things regarding one of the great passions of my life, photography. 

You may have had the chance to see the amazing photograph of the exPOTUS shortly before he was grazed by a bullet, with the track of another bullet whizzing by him to his left (our right). We know this isn't the bullet about to hit him because the shooter was to his right (our left), meaning the bullet in the photograph had already passed him. In the amount of time it took to make the exposure, what we call the shutter speed, the bullet travelled a bit of a distance, meaning that it was not frozen still in the photograph, but rather was recorded as a blur, from its location at the beginning of the exposure, to its location at the end, and all points in between.

From looking at the photograph, I'd estimate the bullet covered about two feet during the exposure. Given that, one could presumably estimate the rate of speed per second of the bullet by multiplying those two feet, by the denominator (the bottom number) of the exposure time which is measured in fractions of a second. 

According to the photographer, Doug Mills of the New York Times, the photograph was shot at 1/8000 of a second. So multiplying two feet by 8000 gives us a velocity of 16,000 feet per second, about three miles. 

I wasn't up on the subject of bullet speeds before seeing the photograph, but that seemed way too fast. I looked it up and indeed it is. A bullet from the type of weapon used in the assassination attempt typically travels in the vicinity of 3,200 feet per second. 

So what gives, altered photograph? fake news? conspiracy?

Actually, there is quite a logical explanation for the distance bullet covered to appear greater in the photograph than it actually was. It has to do with the type of shutter on the camera that Mills used. The shutter is the part of a camera that opens up to allow light coming from the lens to fall upon the light sensitive material, be it film or in Mills' case, a digital sensor., that records the image  The shutters found on most modern cameras are known as focal plane shutters. Unlike leaf shutters which open from the center, focal plane shutters open from the side. They consist of two curtains, a leading curtain that opens up a window between the lens and the light sensitive material to make the exposure, and a trailing curtain traveling in the same direction that closes to end the exposure. After the picture is taken, the shutter has to be "cocked" to return the two curtains back to their original location before the exposure was made, so the process can be repeated. 

With slower shutter speeds, usually below 1/200 of a second, there is a gap of time when the entire "window" is open and the whole digital sensor (or piece of film) is exposed to light. Above those speeds however, the trailing curtain begins to end the exposure before the leading curtain is completely open, meaning there is never a time when the entire image is exposed at once. The faster the exposure, the smaller the gap of time there is between the opening of the leading curtain and the closing of the trailing curtain. 

By the time you get to 1/8000 of a second, the fastest exposure you'll generally find. the gap between the two curtains is very small, meaning only a very small slit of the image is exposed at any given time during the exposure.

Now the amount of time it takes for the two curtains to make their complete journey is usually quick enough to stop most motion like race cars, but not bullets*. Assuming the speed of the bullet was around 3,200 fps, in 1/8000 sec, the bullet would travel approximately 3 inches. Which means that if the shutter were moving in the opposite direction as the bullet (imagine yourself in a moving car observing another car traveling in the opposite direction) , there would have been a very small window of time for the bullet to reveal itself in front of the camera during the exposure and the resulting image would have seemingly compressed the trail of the bullet to less than the actual 3" covered by the bullet in 1/8000 second. Conversely, if the bullet and the shutter are traveling in the same direction (now imagine observing a car moving the same direction as your car but at a different speed), as appears to be the case here, there is more time than 1/8000 sec to track the bullet's trajectory. Therefore, we have the appearance of more distance covered during the exposure. 

Moral of the story, photographs lie, or at the very least, mislead.

I already knew that part.

Something I also already knew about photography is this: a well-made still photograph is vastly superior at capturing an important moment than a comparably well-made a moving image. I understood this long before I was able to express it, back when I was a child looking at the great weekly magazines of my childhood such as Life and Time. 

Think of the iconic photograph of the late Wille Mays with his back to home plate catching a fly ball off the bat of Vik Wirtz in the 1954 World Series. In that photograph, we can contemplate everything from the ball about to be caught, to the position Mays is in relation to where the ball is coming from, to the reaction of the fans in the stands, many of whose vision of the play was blocked by the peculiar architecture of the old Polo Grounds. The moving image of that catch is remarkable as well in its own right but as it exists in little over the blink of an eye, it mainly serves to help put the still image, forever frozen in time in our memory, into context. 

The same is true for the most memorable photograph of the Trump assassination attempt, one of several of a bloodied Trump pumping his fist to the crowd after members of the Sevret Service helped him back onto his feet, after literally pushing him out of his shoes to get him out of the line of fire. 

The one that stands out of all of them was made by AP photographer Evan Vucci. 

Here's a link to the AP page that features the photograph along with the story.

Dare I say, this is about as close to perfection as a press photograph can come. it is a shoe-in for a Pulitzer Prize.

Its composition is somewhat reminiscent of one of the most famous press photographs ever made, the Joe Rosenthal photograph of the raising of the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. 

Here is an interesting video that gives a little background of that photograph. So you can compare the difference between still and moving images of the same event, the video includes a short film of the flag raising made by a Marine Corps photographer standing beside Rosenthal. The video also refutes the common misconception that the photograph was staged.  

Like Rosenthal's photograph, the American flag is prominently featured in Vucci's picture, flapping in the breeze at the top of the frame. But in Vucci's image, the flag is mere window dressing as Trump himself replaces Old Glory as the object to which all the action is centered upon. In his photograph, four Seret Service agents, three men and one woman are caught in the middle of propping the bloodied Trump up, each one well defined in a distinct pose as they attempt to shield the former president from exposure to any other would-be assassins. If that weren't enough, they were also struggling with Trump in the attempt to haul him off the stage, while he defiantly pumped his fist to the crown admonishing them to "fight."

The photograph became an instant icon, expect to see it again and again through November as team Trump will use it to promote their man's alleged courage in the face of death.

Regardless of your opinion of Donald Trump, I haven't been afraid to share mine, you can't deny the man has more than his share of chutzpah, having the presence of mind to pump his fist to the crowd after being shot, while an average Joe like me would have crawled away to safety like a snake in the grass.

Or maybe it was just too perfect?  

I have to admit having been a little skeptical as I followed the event in real time on the radio while driving home from grocery shopping that Saturday afternoon. My first thoughts after hearing that he pumped his fist at the crowd after being shot was that this was all a setup. I later discounted my own little conspiracy theory after I learned that other people at the event actually did get shot, one of whom died.  

But not everybody gave up their theories.

The funny thing about conspiracy theories is they always portray the narrative of the people who promote them. In this case, I didn't hear any Democrats claim that Joe Biden tried to have Trump assassinated and I didn't hear any Republicans claim it was all a setup by Trump and his minions.

Just for fun playing the devil's advocate, if we could for a moment put the moral implications aside, let's examine the likelihood of a conspiracy, shall we? First of all, assuming this was a conspiracy put in motion by one of the political parties, who would have had the greater motivation to carry out an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Democrats or the Republicans? 

Well, it seems to me the Democrats had everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain by snuffing out Trump. As we have witnessed again and again, adversity that befalls the exPOTUS, including the myriad of impeachments, indictments and felony convictions against him, only works in his favor. After the failed assassination attempt, Trump was greeted at the RNC in Milwaukee, just days after the shooting, with religious fervor as many claimed him to have been personally saved by God himself. Using that logic, apparently God didn't care about the retired fireman who was killed by the would-be assassin's bullet, not to mention the children killed in the school attack in Uvalde, TX, or the thousands of people who die from senseless violence every day in this country. 

If the shooting were not bad enough for the Democrats, had Trump been seriously injured or killed, it would have been worse, as his status as a martyr figure among the faithful would have been unstoppable. Heck, even a dead Trump might have won the November election against an increasingly frail Joe Biden.

Fortunately, that didn't happen, and Trump had his moment of glory in Milwaukee as God's chosen one.

So, as the assassination attempt clearly worked in Trump's favor, it's obvious the Republicans had far greater motivation to carry it out than the Democrats. 

But did they? 

Of course not. 

Let's just use some common sense.

It was a real shooter using real bullets who really killed and maimed people. The shooter was a 20-year-old who didn't make his high school shooting club because of his bad aim. And he was using a weapon more suited for taking out a nest of enemy combatants or a classroom of third graders than for picking off a target one and a half football fields away.

I don't know about you but if I were going to sign off on a fake assassination attempt against myself and have someone shoot in my direction, this wouldn't be the guy I'd pick to carry it out.

I think what impressed me the most about this whole unfortunate event, is how vulnerable we all are to conspiracy theories. "How could this happen?" was the question I heard most in the media, social and otherwise, and in real life. 

My answer to that question is "how could this not have happened sooner?" In my 65 years on this planet, I've witnessed countless acts of violence carried out in this country, starting with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The names of the assassins of the sixties are forever etched into the memories of anyone who lived through those particularly violent years. Many of us however have forgotten the would-be political assassins who were less competent in carrying out the task at hand.

But I haven't. These are names I didn't have to look up: Arthur Bremer, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, Sara Jane Moore and John Hinkley Jr. all of whom attempted to kill either presidents or presidential candidates in the seventies and eighties.

I don't remember the names of other would-be assassins such as the ones who more recently tried to kill Congress members Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise, but political violence is no stranger to this country, nor has it ever been.

I suppose we haven't witnessed close encounters with assassination attempts on presidents in the last several decades simply because Secret Service protection has been beefed up significantly, which made the attempt on the life of Trump lead to more questions about who was involved. 

But seriously folks, the Secret Service participating in a conspiracy to kill a presidential candidate? I simply don't buy it.

Let's face it, even at the highest level mistakes happen and given the political climate in this country at the moment, it should come as no surprise at all that someone would seize on the opportunity to take out a former, current or possibly future president.

If we're willing to accept that people are willing on their own to commit heinous and senseless crimes like massacring children as they attend school, why should it be so hard to understand someone on their own attempting to kill a politician? 

This unfortunately is nothing new, we live in a violent world and a violent country.

Anyway, despite the terrible tragedy that fell upon Corey Comperatore and his family, I'm happy Donald Trump lived to see another day.

Other than that, not much happened this month.

Oh wait...

*The well known photographs made by Dr. Harold Edgerton and others that capture bullets in mid flight were made possible not through the use of fast shutters, but strobe light, the duration of which can be much shorter than 1/8000 of a second. 

Logical Fallacies

In my last post I brought up something that has been irking me for quite some time, people who use Chicago's high murder rate to make the point that relatively strict gun control laws, which this city also has, do little if anything to prevent murder. I mentioned that were there any credence to the conclusion , I'd support it, but pointed out that the argument is flawed in many ways and is not at all credible. 

For starters, the argument uses a single piece of evidence to draw its conclusion. In this case, using only the data of murder rates and gun laws in one city is insufficient because many other examples (those of other cities), need to be studied in order to come closer to a valid conclusion. Using only one example to draw a conclusion is known as an anecdotal fallacy. Every high school freshman learns in science class that you cannot make a conclusion based upon the evidence gathered in one solitary experiment.

The term cherry picking is also relevant here because data in the form of crime statistics for every city in this country, are readily available and not all of it backs up this particular conclusion. Instead, advocates of this theory select Chicago's anecdotal evidence of a high murder rate combined with strict gun laws specifically because it fits into their theory, while purposefully not bringing up comparable cities with strict gun laws and low murder rates or cities with high murder rates and lax gun laws. 

Another logical fallacy which often goes hand-in-hand with the anecdotal fallacy has a fancy Latin name: "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", in English: "after this, therefore because of this." It's the classic cause and effect question, assuming that if one event precedes another, it must be related to the subsequent event. In this particular case it is assumed the first event, strict gun laws, do not affect the murder rate, which is high despite them. This is a like a student who does poorly on a test despite studying for it, concluding that studying for all tests is useless. Never mind that there may have been dozens of reasons why the student didn't do well on the test, or the proposition that had he not studied at all, he may have done even worse on the test. 

I became interested in the subject of logical fallacies while writing that post. I looked it up and found hundreds of websites devoted to the subject, (no, I didn't look at them all). My philosophy class in college over forty years ago probably covered much of this material, but like the subject of how to factor a quadratic equation, the Spanish subjunctive and many other things I learned in school, I forgot. 

Yet another popular fallacy is the strawman fallacy. The premise of the SF is that someone making an argument misconstrues or exaggerates the opposing position, then uses arguments based upon those  faulty assumptions. This exaggerated position is designed to be easy to take down rhetorically, hence the term "strawman."

A classic example of the Strawman Fallacy can be found in my penultimate post where I talked about Tucker Carlson's evaluation of Joe Biden's address to the nation on the importance of gun control a couple weeks ago. In his rant, Carlson accused Biden of wanting to "disarm" Americans, which the president took great pains in his speech to make clear was not true.  Carlson went on to use the fallacious idea of "disarming Americans" (in this case, the strawman) to go in several directions, including portraying Biden as a tyrant who wants to take guns away from the American people in order to gain total control of them, as disarming the public has been the first act of tyrants throughout history. That last part is an example of another logical fallacy, the slippery slope. More on that one later. 

The point of this exercise is not to find more "gotcha" moments in the news to criticize a certain sector of our population which I've done a lot of lately if you hadn't noticed. Rather, I'm trying to clean up my own act, hoping to be aware of logical mistakes in my own arguments. 

Turns out I make them all the time. Here's a doozy from the last post:

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that (Texas governor Greg Abbott) 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.

That's an example of the appealing to emotions fallacy. It's debatable whether or not my statement itself constitutes a fallacy as nothing in it is untrue, in fact I may have even downplayed the gruesome nature of the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy. Nor was any of what I said not relevant to my argument as the slaughter of innocent people, in this case children, is precisely why I believe we need more gun control. Yet the statement obviously is manipulative. I could have left out the gore and just said the governor brought up the Chicago fallacy while he was in Uvalde attempting to lend support to the people of that community in their time of need, then left the judgement of the appropriateness of the governor's words up to my readers. 

Just one paragraph earlier, I brought up Governor Abbott's blaming wind energy for the crippling Texas power grid crisis of last year, despite the fact that wind accounts for a very small amount of the energy produced in Texas. 

I originally led the paragraph quoted above with: "I guess it shouldn't be surprising that such a great mind, this modern-day Don Quixote..." (going after windmills, get it?), "would bring up Chicago..."

This is a good example of the ad homiem fallacy, or an attack not against the argument, but "against the man" making the argument. In this case, the subject of Abbott's statement about energy last year had nothing to do with his statement in Uvalde, and my ironic "great mind" line attacks the governor's intelligence (really his sincerity), rather than the argument at hand.

A couple weeks ago I was reading the comments section of an article about the highly publicized mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. The comments were predictable, many of them pro-gun control, many of them anti. After one fairly strident comment emphasizing the need to keep our children safe from being killed in their schools, someone commented to that remark by saying this: "But you have no problem with abortion?"

I was partially appalled and partially stymied by that one as I had no good response for it. OK yes, they are two separate issues, but they are both issues concerning life and death and I can understand that some people see an inconsistency with people who are concerned about preserving the lives of school children but unconcerned about preserving the lives of unborn children. Conversely, I've read comments from the other side that say anti-abortion people are only concerned about children's lives if they are not born yet. I've made that argument myself on numerous occasions.

These are both examples of another logical fallacy with a fancy Latin name, tu quoque, or the "you too" fallacy. It's also referred to as the "look who's talking" or my personal favorite: "the pot calling the kettle black" fallacy. Tu quoque is avoiding an argument by turning it around on the opponent by pointing out his or her inconsistency or flat-out hypocrisy. In recent years it has become so common in political discourse that a new word has been coined to describe it, "whataboutism." 

Whataboutism is a favorite tool of Vladimir Putin, who descends from a long line of Russian dictator whatabouters. He has used it consistently during his war against Ukraine, excusing his actions by saying other nations, especially the United States have invaded countries as well. Another great whatabouter is Donald Trump whose most infamous use of the fallacy concerned none other than Putin. In a 2017 interview with Bill O'Reilly, the former FOX News personality questioned the new president about his admiration of the Russian dictator, referring to him as a "killer." Trump's response was chilling: 

There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent?

 That line prompted this astute response from the current U.S. National Security advisor Jake Sullivan:

The American president is taking Putin’s 'what about you' tactic and turning it into 'what about us?'

Supporters of the exPOTUS are famous for using whataboutism in their defense of 45, saying things like: "yeah he may be a crook with no moral or ethical compass, but so are all politicians."

Logical fallacies are not the exclusive domain of one political ideology. Case in point, in one of the web sites I checked out dealing with the subject, the author used this quote from Barak Obama to illustrate the false dilemma fallacy:

What choices are we going to make to reach that goal? (a balanced budget). Either we ask the wealthiest Americas to pay their fair share of taxes, or we are going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.

As we saw above, logical fallacies needn't be limited to one category; here Obama is clearly guilty of appealing to the emotions, after all, who doesn't have more compassion for seniors on a fixed income than for the "wealthiest Americans"? But the false dilemma fallacy which this quote also illustrates, poses one of only two possible outcomes to an action, one very bad, and the other good or at least, not as bad. There is no middle ground.

The slippery slope fallacy mentioned above, is related to the false dilemma in that it is poses an exaggerated assumption of the outcome to an action. The slippery slope argues that one thing inevitably leads to another, that is, if a particular action is taken, it will cause another action that will result in a bad outcome which will in turn result in another action resulting in a worse outcome, and so on. The classic example of this is a parent warning a child that if he doesn't do well in school, he'll end up being homeless because if he gets bad grades, he won't into a good college, then won't get a good job, etc.

I used the slippery slope in a piece I wrote about abortion. I posed the hypothetical suggestion that banning abortion in selected states may lead to a situation where an act that is perfectly legal in some states may land someone on death row in another. While there have been rumblings of a few people who say they might support the death penalty as punishment for those who perform abortions, there is no evidence to suggest that is a real possibility. Yet. So my statement would fall into the slippery slope category. 

Perhaps one of the most insidious of fallacies is the appeal to common sense fallacy. Anyone who has successfully lived through years of life on this planet has learned through personal experience certain things that will greatly improve their quality of life, things like knowing if you go out into the rain without an umbrella or protective clothing, you will get wet. We call the kind of knowledge that does not have to be taught, common sense. Of course, not everybody's personal experience is the same, someone who grew up in an arid zone may actually welcome getting wet in the rain because it is so rare where they come from and would never consider covering up to stay dry. 

Sometimes we see our own experience as transferrable to everybody else and don't even consider the possibility that other's may see things from a different perspective. 

Appealing to common sense is a way of avoiding an argument by saying the argument is so obvious it needn't be elaborated upon, and anyone who isn't on board with it is either unreasonable or stupid. A hypothetical example would be saying it is common sense that the combination of Chicago's strict gun laws and high crime rate is proof that gun laws don't work. How could any reasonable person not see that?

I am guilty of abusing the appeal to common sense fallacy in my own arguments, in fact there's a good example in this very post, see below.

It's important to remember that some arguments may technically fall into one of the categories of logical fallacies, but still constitute reasonable arguments. A borderline example is the appeal to authority fallacy. In this one, the committer of the fallacy uses the statements or beliefs of a third party, "the authority", to make an argument. 

A relevant example of this one is the use of Dr. Anthony Fauci as an authority figure on the subject of infectious diseases. An argument may go something like this: 

• Person one: How do you know that wearing masks helps prevent the spread of COVID?
• Person two: Because Dr. Fauci says it does and Dr. Fauci says...

Here person two is letting Dr. Fauci's expertise make the argument rather than making the argument himself. Is this a fallacious argument as it is clearly an appeal to authority?

Well, Dr. Fauci has spent an entire career, over fifty years, studying infectious diseases so he should know something about the subject. 

• Does this mean his opinions on the subject are infallible? No. 
• Is he immune from making errors of judgement? No.
• Is his the only credible opinion on the subject? Certainly not. 
• Is his opinion on the subject more valid than that of a layperson who has spent a couple hours reading articles on the web questioning the efficacy of wearing masks? YES, IT CERTAINLY IS!!!

So while saying: "Because Dr. Fauci says so" may not be a particularly elegant, well thought out argument, as far as the subject of infectious diseases goes, it is a reasonable argument.

If on the other hand the argument at hand is who is the most valuable player in the National League this year or what is the best wine to serve with Weiner Schnitzel, Dr. Fauci's opinion may not carry much weight, and the appeal to the authority of Dr. Fauci on those subjects would indeed be fallacious. 

The fallacy that usually wraps up discussions on logical fallacies is the fallacy fallacy, which assumes that because a person uses fallacious logic to make an argument, the argument itself is wrong.

It is possible that strict gun control laws don't affect crime very much, despite the fact that the evidence supporters of that theory promote is flimsy. If we really wanted to prove that gun laws don't affect crime here in Chicago, there is a straightforward experiment we could conduct to see if that has any merit. 

Get rid of our gun laws and see where that takes us. 

In an ideal world, I think few reasonable people would be willing to conduct that experiment. But we're living in a less than ideal world with fewer and fewer reasonable people (a whopper of an appeal to common sense fallacy), and as of this week in its infinite wisdom (ooh an ironic comment that could be considered an ad hominem attack), the Supreme Court has shown it is willing to conduct that dangerous experiment as reflected in its overruling New York State laws preventing people from carrying guns in public. 

Yes, there was another notorious ruling released by the court this week also promising horrendous consequences for our nation (do I detect a slippery slope here?), but that's an issue for another day. 

I don't want to get involved in yet another logical fallacy by comparing the two, although I'm not exactly sure which category it would fall into. 

Or by simply bringing it up, maybe I already have.

Oh well, so be it.

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 Lives They Lived

On Memorial Day we remember and honor the sacrifice of the men and women who gave their lives in service to our country. It is entirely appropriate that we do this. Memorial Day is even more poignant today as through the war raging in Ukraine, we are reminded on a daily basis of something we often take for granted, the ravages of war and the price that sometimes needs to be paid to maintain justice, democracy and liberty over the forces of oppression.

It is just as appropriate in my opinion, to remember and honor the people who through no fault of their own, get caught up in war. 

From my last post: 

Up until a couple months ago, the people of Bucha were going about their lives just as we do here, going to work, taking their kids to dance class, walking their dogs, doing the grocery shopping, in short, all the mundane things we do every day and take for granted. 

I wrote those words on the morning of Saturday, May 14. Later that day, a bunch of people were going about their lives on the east side of Buffalo, New York, when everything would change for them in the span of roughly six minutes, which to those who survived, must have seemed like an eternity.

The people shopping at Tops Grocery Store that tragic day were not caught up in a war between nations, but in a shooting war just the same. The man who killed ten Americans and wounded many more that day, is an avowed white supremacist who targeted his victims because they were black. He is by every definition of the word, a terrorist. 

Today is Memorial Day, May 30, 2022. I wrote the words you just read last weekend. My original intention was to devote a post to the victims of the Buffalo massacre.  But as I pointed out in the previous post, just like Rome, my posts aren't built in a day. In this case, I didn't know exactly which direction to go. Should I devote the post to the myth that we live in a "post-racial" America; should I write about the evils of white supremacy; should I write about the cancer of gun violence in this country; should I write about gun control or the lack of it; or should I write about the pandora's box of other issues that horrific crime brought up?

AP Photo/Joshua Bessex

In the midst of contemplating all this, the Buffalo tragedy was all but eclipsed by an even deadlier mass shooting, this one at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Last Tuesday, May 24, two teachers and 19 students, mostly fourth graders, died, and several more were injured but managed to survive.

I've checked the archives of this blog and after practically every mass shooting in our country, I wrote about my frustration over our nation's inability to come to a compromise over the issue of gun control. Frankly it shouldn't be that difficult, I don't think any reasonable person should object to things like background checks and registering gun owners. We do just that for automobiles. And how on earth can it be legal for an 18 year old who can't legally buy a beer, to walk into a store and buy a high powered military grade assault style weapon, whose bullets cause catastrophic damage to human tissue and organs which makes survival of a wound to the head or torso unlikely, and are capable of indiscriminately killing as many people as the amount of time it takes to pull the trigger? Frankly I don't think any private citizen should be allowed to own a weapon such as this, after all, lawn darts are illegal. I understand that neither automobiles nor lawn darts are specifically mentioned in the Constitution, (neither are assault weapons), but if you are against things like registering guns and gun owners, what part of the words "well regulated", the first words of the Second Amendment, don't you understand?

Don't get me wrong, I don't think for a second that even if the courts eventually override the Second Amendment, (which will never happen), would we see an end to these mass shootings. They have sadly become imbedded into of our nation's fabric, and anyone who wants to carry one out badly enough, will find a way. Besides, thanks to our supremely misguided and foolish interpretation of the Second Amendment, there are currently more guns than people in this country, and even if guns were banned, there would still be plenty of them around. 

And as long as we continue to permit these weapons of mass destruction to be manufactured and sold on the open market, there will be more and more of them available to young men (and I suppose women too) with a chip on their shoulder, to kill us and our loved ones. 

As I mentioned before in this space, there are many issues that need to be addressed if we intend to seriously tackle the issue of mass shootings which are an epidemic in this country and nowhere else. Mental health certainly is a big one, as is improving school security. 

But those are complicated and expensive fixes that are often fraught with peril and questionable results. Were it not for the obstinacy of a minority of people in this country, the pure greed of gun manufacturers and sellers, and the cowardice of the politicians they have in their deep pockets, the same cannot be said of controlling guns. As we saw at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last week, "good guys with guns" even if they are fully trained professional police officers, are sometimes no match for a guy toting a military grade weapon who is prepared to die. 

Getting rid of these weapons, or at least taking them out of the hands of people who have no business with them in the first place, is the very least we could do to honor the lives of those we lost this month and in the years since Bill Clinton's ban on assault style weapons was allowed to expire by Congress in 2004.

We could and should do something about this but unfortunately we won't. If nothing was done after Sandy Hook, Connecticut where even younger children and more of them, at Christmastime no less, were slaughtered, sadly nothing will be done now. 

This is a war as well, and unfortunately the good guys are losing. 

I wasn't going to go into all of that, after all, what's the use? So I'll stop my rant for now. Instead I thought on this Memorial Day, I'd devote this post to the victims of guns in our country, especially to those who died so tragically in Buffalo and Uvalde this month. 

Here are their names, their ages, and links to part of their stories:

Nevaeh Bravo, 10 Go Fund Me page for the family of Neveh Bravo.

 

Jackie Cazares, 9 Texas Shooting Victim Weeks Away from 10th Birthday, Father Says.

Celestine Chaney, 65 What the Racist Massacre in Buffalo Stole From One Family.

Roberta A. Drury, 32 Buffalo victim Roberta Drury, 32, is remembered as a great help to her family.

Makenna Lee Elrod, 10 Fundraiser for April Elrod by Allison McCullough : Our Precious Angel Makenna Lee Elrod.

Jose Flores, 10 Family remembers 10-year-old José Flores Jr. who was killed in the Texas elementary school shooting.

Eliana “Ellie” Garcia, 9 Eliana "Ellie" Garcia.

Irma Garcia, 49, 'Joe died of a broken heart': Husband of beloved teacher killed in Texas shooting dies two days later - CNN

Uziyah Garcia, 10, 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, "the sweetest little boy," identified as one of the victims killed at Texas school.

Amerie Jo Garza, 10 , Girl Scouts Honor 10-Year-Old Uvalde Victim Who Died Calling 911

Jayce Luevanos, 10 'They're so young:' A grandfather in Uvalde, Texas, mourns 10-year old Jayce Luevanos.

Xavier Lopez, 10, 10-year-old school shooting victim received an honor roll certificate just hours before he was killed.

Andre Mackniel, 53 Andre Mackniel recalled as someone who 'loved his family'.

Katherine Massey, 72 Katherine Massey, Buffalo Shooting Victim, Wrote Passionately About Gun Control.

Tess Marie Mata, 10 How Tess Mata's family came to learn she'd been slain in Uvalde.

Maranda Mathis, 11 School shooting victim Maranda Mathis, 11 described as a "bright" and "spunky" girl.

Eva Mireles, 44, Texas teacher Eva Mireles died shielding students: daughter.

Margus D. Morrison, 52  Margus Morrison, a 'jokester' who loved to smile, celebrated at service.

Heyward Patterson, 67 Heyward Patterson, Buffalo shooting victim, a man of worship.

Alithia Ramirez, 10, Uvalde victim Alithia Ramirez remembered for her kind heart.

Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10, Jackie Cazares and Annabell Rodriguez were cousins and best friends. They died together in the Texas elementary school shooting.

Maite Rodriguez, 10 Mother of child killed in Texas: "Her favorite color was green".

Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, 10, 'There Is an Emptiness.' Uvalde Shooting Victim Lexi Rubio's Great-Grandfather Remembers Her 10 Years of Life.

Aaron Salter, 55 Aaron Salter Jr. remembered for heroic action in Buffalo mass shooting.

Layla Salazar, 10  Shooting Victim’s Family Moved to Uvalde for ‘a Safer Place for Her’ – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10, Jailah Silguero Didn’t Want to Go to Robb Elementary School on Tuesday—She Died Beside Cousin Jayce Luevanos.

Geraldine Talley, 62 Celebrating the life of Geraldine Chapman Talley

Eliahana Cruz Torres, 10 Softball, Baseball Teams Honor Little Leaguers Killed in Uvalde Shooting.

Rojelio Torres, 10, 10-year-old shooting victim Rojelio Torres was an "intelligent, hardworking and helpful person," his aunt says.

Ruth Whitfield, 86  Oldest Buffalo massacre victim Ruth Whitfield honored at funeral service.

Pearl Young, 76  Remembering the victims: Pearl Young

We remember the dead on this day but should be ever mindful of the survivors who had to fight for their lives while personally witnessing their neighbors, friends, family members, colleagues and classmates and teachers being mercilessly slaughtered. 

We especially remember and honor those whom the dead left behind, their parents and grandparents, their children and grandchildren, and all who loved them. 

Then there is the collateral damage, much of it only to be revealed in the future when we least expect it.

And finally there is our troubled nation turning against itself, becoming less United every day.

If an act of home-grown genocide and nineteen dead fourth graders and their teachers can't bring us together as a nation, I'm afraid nothing will. 

This Memorial Day as much as anything, I'm mourning the loss of my country.

But all is not lost, I'm sending thoughts and prayers. 

The Case for Repeal

The March for Our Lives in Washington and other cities around the country this Saturday was by most accounts a tremendous success, at least if you are of the opinion that our children deserve to be heard on the issue of safety in their schools. Dozens of speakers, none of whom from what I could tell were above the age of twenty, gave harrowing accounts of their personal experiences with gun violence. Along with that, wrapped up in understandable emotion, some of the speakers got lost in the moment and let loose with rhetoric that didn't exactly stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

That point wasn't lost on the gun-toting members of the ulra-right who continue to make the accusation that the motivating force behind the march and the speeches is not the young people themselves, but adults on the "Left" who are using the kids to promote their own agenda. You can see for yourself as Fox News's Tucker Carlson leads off his story, broadcast the day before the march, with the headline "Gun Control March Backed by the Wealthy."  Carlson, who believe it or not, is one of the more level-headed of that network's talking heads, takes pains to rip into the logic of several Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School students, survivors of the mass shooting that took place on February 14.

Carlson tried to drive home the point that the anti-gun rhetoric of the students should not be allowed in public discourse because it is fueled by emotion and naturally, the people uttering it are only kids. I imagine his ire (whether it is genuine or not I have no idea), was only fueled by the actual speeches from the platform located on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol Building and the White House, many of which called for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

Now to some Americans, the Second Amendment is as sacred as mother, the American flag and sweet baby Jesus. "Mess with my Second Amendment..." many Americans will defiantly tell you, "...and you're going to have to answer to three of us, me, Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson."

I get it, nobody likes being told, especially by a bunch of teenagers that a right they enjoy should be taken away. While I've never owned a gun, I've shot them, and have to say this, it's really fun. My years as a photographer helped make me a pretty good shot, and it's quite satisfying to nail tin can after tin can with a pistol or a rifle. I've even used a shotgun to shoot a plastic milk container, thrown skeet style by a friend who was standing behind a tree, (cue the Duck Dynasty music). I can only imagine how irritating it would be, after investing a good chunk of money on a private arsenal,  to listen to kids a third my age tell me that their friends would be alive today if only I wouldn't be allowed to own my guns.

Given that, I seriously wonder which is the greater offense to gun owners, the thought that our constitution might compromised by examining the limits of one of its amendments, or the idea that someone wants to take away their stuff.

Rightfully we've come to accept that our constitution, from to each cross on every "t" to each dot on every "i" is sacrosanct. But few of us stop to really question what the document means, or why certain concerns are addressed while others are not. Sometimes it all boils down to the authors addressing issues that were specifically pertinent in their day. Take for example, the Third Amendment:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

This tidbit was written to forever put to rest a British law known as a Quartering Act, requiring local American governments, and even private citizens, to provide food and housing to British soldiers. These Quartering Acts, there were more than one, particularly irked the colonists and were one of the major grievances that led to the American Revolution. While the Third Amendment may come in handy one day, one never knows, no case has ever been brought before the Supreme Court which has used the Third Amendment as an argument. The amendment is irrelevant in our day as it addresses a matter that was settled with the founding of the U.S. Army, which has a policy of feeding and housing its own soldiers.

In much the same way, the Second Amendment was written to address an issue that was relevant at the birth of this nation, but not today:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

At the time of its writing there was still grave concern that the power of the Federal government would usurp the rights of state governments. The second amendment was written as a means to keep any potential standing federal army (there was none at the time of the creation of the Bill of Rights), in check by state militias which would be comprised of private citizens. An armed citizenry, so the theory went, would be an insurance policy for a general public weary of a central authority, against the theoretical possibility of losing their liberty as a result of a tyrannical federal government. Eventually these militias were organized into the state run reserve military units known as the National Guard.

Gun advocates continue to use the argument that the second amendment is a necessary tool for the citizenry to defend itself against the threat of a tyrannical government. However today, while the threat of tyranny certainly remains, it's a rather quaint pipe dream that a militia of citizen soldiers armed with AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons, would be any match for a government backed by the firepower of the U.S. military. Not that fringe groups like the Branch Davidians, and the Oregon Militia haven't tried it, typically with disastrous results to themselves and their supporters.

Which brings me to the point of this post: is the Second Amendment relevant or necessary in our day and if not, is there a legitimate case for repealing it?

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens thinks there is. In an Op Ed piece published in the New York Times this morning, Justice Stevens writes that he considers the Second Amendment to be nothing more than aa "relic" of the eighteenth century that has zero relevance in our day.

Speaking with admiration of the events that took place last Saturday, Justice Stevens writes:

These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society. 

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

He then gives a little history of the way that courts have treated the Second Amendment though the years. The Second Amendment was virtually left alone until 1939 when the court unanimously ruled in favor of banning sawed-off shotguns as the weapon had "no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a 'well regulated militia.'"

The precedent of that ruling led to the understanding that government could indeed regulate the sale and posession of firearms. That understanding stood until a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, which in a 5-4 vote, the court overturned Washington D.C's ban on the sale of handguns, In that ruling, the court essentially declared that militias and individuals were indistinguishable. Justice Stevens was one of the dissenting voices in that ruling and Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion in that case. As one of the most conservative voices of the Supreme Court in memory, and a self-declared champion of basing his decisions on the "original intent" of the framers of the constitution, Scalia was ironically responsible for one of the more radical, precedent changing rulings in court history, one that in Stevens's words: "has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power."

Stevens quotes former Chief Justice Warren Berger a conservative judge if there ever was one, characterizing the NRA's advocacy of the individual's (as opposed to the militia's) right to bear arms, as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

In a PBS interview made after his retirement, Berger also said that if he were writing the Bill of Rights in 1991 when the interview was conducted, "there would be no such thing as a Second Amendment."

Indeed, given the fact that there are as many guns as people in this country, that we have one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world, and that we are currently experiencing an epidemic virtually unhead of anywhere else on the planet of mass shootings, can anyone with a straight face seriously claim that we are better off with our Second Amendment?

There are valid reasons to own a gun. People legitimately use guns for hunting or target shooting. But those are hobbies, certainly not activities deserving protection from the constitution. Some people feel they need a gun for self-protection, although odds are that the gun they own is more likely to be used on themselves or their loved ones than used in fending off a bad guy.

It must be noted that a potential repeal of the Second Amendment would not mean that guns would be banned. It would simply remove them from the unreasonable protection they now have, that no other consumer product enjoys. Without the protection of an outdated constitutional amendment and a very questionable Supreme Court decision, a repeal would mean that common sense would dictate the regulation of the manufacture and sale of firearms, including what types of guns could and could not be produced, and the licencing of users who are competent enough to own them, just as other dangerous consumer products are regulated and licensed. It would enable buy-back programs that would allow people to be justly compensated for turning in their weapons, meaning fewer guns in circulation. And it would encourage studies from bodies such as the National Institute of Health into the causes and effects of gun violence in our society which are currently blocked by politicians who are under the thumb of the NRA.

Ah but those criminals aren't going to care about any laws or studies are they? Of course not. But it must be noted that the more guns that are manufactured, the more guns there are in circulation. Combine that with laws that are lax in determining who gets to own one, the more easily guns become accessible to people who have no business having them.

No, a repeal of the Second Amendment alone is not going to SOLVE the gun problem in the United States. Frankly I am loathe to tamper with our constitution at all, given the tremendous pandora's box it would create in regards to other parts of the bedrock of our democracy. If I had my druthers, I'd work with the tools the authors of the Bill of Rights have already provided within the framework of the Second Amendment. To the gun crowd who uses the Second Amendment as an argument to reject any enactment of gun control no matter how tame or reasonable I say this bluntly: "What part of the words 'well regulated' don't you understand?

Unfortunately those sentiments go unheard. Pleas for reasonable regulation of the manufacture, sale and ownership of guns are ignored by politicians beholden to the NRA, the gun industry that organization serves,  and their gun toting constituents, despite the bloodshed that occurs in this country on a daily basis due to guns.

Perhaps a new strategy is in order because the strategy of playing nice with the gun crowd by agreeing to work within the framework of the Second Amendment falls upon deaf ears. Perhaps the only way to reel in the madness that is overtaking our country as far as guns are concerned is to fight to remove an obsolete and irrelevant road block to making American sane again.

Along with that of couse is to work to elect like-minded public officials who are brave enough to take on what would certainly be a massive struggle fraught with peril.

To those who say that the ownership of guns is a fundamental liberty afforded to the American people by their constitution, I say this: no liberty comes without limits and responsibility. If you cannot accept the limitations and responsibilities that naturally come with a liberty, perhaps regretfully, you are not equipped to handle that liberty.

If it takes threatening to take away the Second Amendment like an adult might threaten to take a toy away from an spoiled, obstinate five year old child, well so be it.

Perhaps then, and only then, will the people in power start to listen. Perhaps then and only then will we begin to see results.

Mad as Hell

There are no easy answers to the outrage and tragedy of mass shootings in this country and I am not naive enough to believe that banning assault rifles alone will end them.

The gist of the argument against banning these weapons of mass destruction, which is precisely what they are, is why do honest, law abiding citizens have to give up their guns because of the criminal acts of others?

To that my answer is this:

I once enjoyed playing lawn darts, keeping my shoes on before getting on a plane, and the right to pee in a bathroom of a restaurant where I was not a customer. Unfortunately I can’t do any of that anymore because some assholes did stupid things making it bad for everyone else. 

You know what? I’m ok with that because if these small sacrifices contribute to the greater good of society, then so be it.

No, banning the guns alone is not going to solve the problem, not at this point in the United States where we now have more guns than people. But the least we can do in memory of all the lives lost so needlessly in the name of the right for people to own guns, is to not make it so goddamn easy for these killers to slaughter innocent people.

Is that too much to ask?

Guilty as charged

In a Washington Post article titled It's time to stop talking about racism with white people, the author Zack Linly makes the point that most whites either cannot or refuse to comprehend the injustices facing black people in this country, especially in light of the recent focus on African American people being killed by the police. He cites many examples of white people being "dismissive" of the problem and as the title to the piece indicates, he's willing to throw in the towel as far as trying to convince them otherwise.

Here's a list of things white people say that proves, according to the author. they just don't get it:

• “There must be more to the story.”
• “If you people would just do what you’re told.”
• “Cops have a hard job.”
• “White people get shot too.”
• “He was just another thug. Good riddance!”
• “Why do you people make everything about race?”
• “What about black on black crime?”
• “All lives matter.”

Turns out I'm one of those white people he's talking about. I've expressed at least four out of those eight sentiments right here in this space. And while in the context of this issue I understand the sentiment behind Black Lives Matter movement, I also believe deep in my heart that all lives (including blue ones) matter, although I don't state that publicly. Oops guess I just did, sorry, that makes five. 

So far this year, six people have been shot and killed by the police in the City of Chicago and eleven have been shot and wounded, which is roughly on the same pace as last year. I don't have the data on the race of the victims, the cops in those shootings, or the circumstances behind those deaths and injuries. I can only assume some may have been the result of power obsessed, racist cops abusing their authority. Others may have been tragic cases of mistaken motives or identity of the victims. And still others may have been the result of a police officer confronting an armed person both willing and able to take the life of that officer, and perhaps others. Most of the circumstances probably fall somewhere in between, as no two police shootings are the same.

Six instances of police killing civilians are indeed six too many but yes, there is more to the story.

On the flip side, there have been 500 homicides in Chicago so far this year, surpassing the total number of murders from last year, and it's barely September. The vast majority, 78.2 percent of those murdered in Chicago this year were black people. We can't know exactly because most of those crimes will never be solved, but I think it's fairly safe to assume that the racial breakdown of people doing the killing is a comparable number. Using those statistics and assumptions, if you were a black person in Chicago this year, you were at least sixty five times more likely to be murdered by another black person than by a police officer. As I've said before, separating the violence in the African American community from the police killings is disingenuous.

The author of the Post article claims that white people

aren’t paying attention to these stories (of the police shootings) out of fear for their lives and the lives of their children and spouses; they are only tuned in out of black and brown contempt.

Obviously I can't speak for all white people. The author is absolutely correct in assuming that as a white man, I cannot possibly know what it's like to be black in this country. I don't know what it's like to be constantly harassed by cops, or judged harshly by people unlike me simply because of the color of my skin.

It's also true that I cannot imagine having been brought up without two loving parents who taught me to respect others as well as myself, parents who praised me when I did right and let me know in no uncertain terms when I didn't. I don't know what it's like to have to find a parental figure somewhere out on the streets, someone who doesn't have my best interests at heart, someone who wouldn't give his or her life for me if he or she had to, in other words, a parental figure who doesn't give a shit about me.

That's exactly the plight of far too many children living in our cities today. No child should have to live under those circumstances, not is there a good reason for it to be so, but that's the reality for tens of thousands of children in our city alone. Combine those kids growing into teenagers who don't give a shit about themselves or anybody else, poverty, segregation, and the criminally outrageous availability of guns in this country, and we get the situation we find ourselves in today.

By the way Mr. Linly, I live in a neighborhood where it's not unusual to hear gunshots from our home, and in a city where life is often considered cheap. So please don't tell me that I'm "not invested", "don't have skin in the game" or that I don't live in constant fear for the safety of my wife and children. I've invested plenty in this city that I love dearly, both the black and white of it, with literally my blood, sweat and tears.

The same is true for all the hard working people of Chicago of every race, creed and walk of life.

Incidentally, the Washington Post article came to my attention as it was posted by a white Facebook friend who lives in San Francisco. It was followed in my FB feed by a picture of a young black girl holding up a sign that read, "Stop the violence, let me grow up" posted by a black friend who lives on the south side of Chicago.

That little girl's chances of growing up, something all of us should be concerned about. are not going to improve by well intentioned people sitting out the national anthem, or chanting inflammatory slogans. Unfortunately we live in a society where ideology, slogans and symbols are more important than critical thinking and self-reflection.

Until that changes, I'm afraid we can only expect more of the same.

A Hollow Victory

Last Saturday, Halloween night no less, an incident took place on the southwest side of Chicago that would serve as a bullet point for the gun crowd, (no pun intended). As trick-or-treaters prowled the streets of Gage Park, a masked, armed robber was shot and killed by a customer in a local business. The shooter who was packing heat had a conceal-carry permit, and will not face charges. Sure enough, conservative web sites jumped all over the incident, claiming it as yet another example of how allowing private citizens to carry concealed weapons in public, saves lives and property.

Well it turns out in this case, that was only partially true as the would-be robber was armed with a toy gun. With a name sounding like he stepped out of a Dickens novel, 55 year old Reginald Gildersleeve once worked in the store where he lost his life, and it has been speculated that the attempted robbery was actually a Halloween prank gone horribly wrong. To the people in the business and especially the man who shot him, Gildersleeve was dead serious (sorry), and a real threat as he pointed a very real looking gun at the heads of the store's employees. 

Since his death, Gildersleeve's story has been well documented by the press. Leading something of a double life, he had a long history of criminal activity, mostly petty stuff like narcotics violations with a few robberies thrown in. He also was a devoted husband, step father and grandfather who portrayed himself on his Facebook page as someone looking to turn his life around. 

Hailed by some as a "good guy with a gun", the man who shot Gildersleeve has not been identified in the press and to my knowledge, has not given any interviews. His brother did acknowledge the fact that this has understandably been a very traumatic experience for him and his family.

I bring this up because so often we view incidents like this as cut and dried examples of the brutality of life in the big city that pit good guys against bad guys, forgetting that the people involved in these horrible situations are complicated human beings, not one dimensional characters ripped out of the pages of a comic book. Perhaps he needed to pay off a debt, maybe he wanted to buy a present for his wife, or maybe he was just drawn to a part of his past that he couldn't let go. We'll never know because Reginald Gildersleeve will take whatever compelled him to rob a store where people recognized him (despite the mask), to his grave. 

As for the man who shot him, justified as his actions may have been, he will have to live with the fact that he killed a man it turned out, was not much of a threat to anyone, except himself.

In the end, this incident will be recorded as just another of the 2,579 (and counting) shootings in Chicago so far this year. Since Reginald Gildersleeve died four days ago, at least five other people have been shot and killed in Chicago, including a young woman from Evanston who was visiting her grandmother in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, and a nine year old boy who was ambushed and executed in broad daylight, only a few hours and blocks away.

If only they had been packing heat, maybe they'd be alive today.

Yeah right.

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.

Close to home

Last Saturday afternoon while my children were searching the stacks for books to check out, I was at the Rogers Park branch of the Chicago Public Library, putting the finishing touches on my last blog post on gun violence in Chicago. At the same time a few blocks away, a young photographer named Wil Lewis was walking through the neighborhood toward Devon Avenue to catch a bus. My kids and I left the library around 3:10, precisely the time the meter would run out on my parked car. We headed south on Clark Street, passing Devon Avenue around 3:15 on our way south to the Loop. According to police, at approximately 3:20, as Lewis stood at the bus stop at Devon and Glenwood, a few blocks from where we had just passed, Eric Vaughn, a member of a street gang known as the Conservative Vice Lords, was driving around the neighborhood with some associates, allegedly looking for trouble. They found it in the vicinity of where Lewis was standing, as members of another gang were walking down the street. One of Vaughn's associates allegedly expressed his eagerness to shoot one of the members of the rival gang. Vaughn then allegedly handed his associate a gun telling him to "Wet up that tee shirt," gangspeak for shoot the motherfucker. The associate got out of the car and started shooting. It was reported that ten rounds were fired at the members of the rival street gang. He hit none of them, but he did manage to hit Wil Lewis in the back. I'm still not clear if the shooter mistook Lewis for a gang member or if the 28 year old photographer just got in the way of a bullet, it now hardly matters. Lewis, an innocent bystander, was taken to the hospital just a few blocks from our home, where he died an hour later.

He left behind his wife and two parents who live in Wisconsin.

I first heard of the shooting Sunday morning on a Rogers Park Facebook page. Later in the day I received an community e-mail from the office our alderman, Joe Moore, who witnessed the event. He wrote how shaken up he continued to be about seeing the gunman whom the alderman described as a teenager, chasing a group of people while shooting. Moore described the humbling experience of returning to the scene to assist in the cleanup of the blood stains on the sidewalk.

The original reports stated that all parties involved in the shooting were gang members. Unsettling as it was to have such a violent act take place so close to where we had been only minutes before, I think every city resident feels some sense of relief, however fleeting, upon learning that a shooting victim was engaged in criminal activity; rightly or not, we feel that he had it coming, live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that. Callous as it may be, if you live in a big city you eventually become numbed to the banality of evil that is street violence; those of us removed from the world of gangs and guns don't feel particularly threatened by gang murders in general, as they don't normally effect us.

That tenuous feeling of calm was shattered on Monday when I learned the victim was an innocent bystander. It could just has easily have been me I thought, or much worse, my children.

Words cannot express the pain and sorrow I feel for Wil Lewis and his family. A young, promising life snuffed out stupidly, by people who have no regard for any life other than their own. I mourn for my city which has been suffering from too much violence brought about by the abject stupidity of too many guns available too easily, gangs fighting to the death over insignificant pieces of turf, people who have absolutely no intention of doing the right thing as they bring children into this world,  politicians more interested in pointing fingers than legislating and making a real difference, the list goes on and on.

And I especially mourn for the children of Eric Vaughn, two already born, and one on the way. I pray to God they they won't grow up following in their father's footsteps. Unfortunately too many prayers like these go unanswered every day in this city. This morning in another e-mail from the alderman's office, I learned of yet another shooting in Rogers Park. Last night, at about the same time I began to write this post, a car drove up to two men walking on the sidewalk. Shots were fired from the car and both men were hit.

That incident took place on the block where my son's best friend lives.

Lord have Mercy.

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.