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. 

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.

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.

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.

Just older

Another birthday has come and gone and as they say, I'm " older, but no wiser." Just as years of physical activity can make the bones and joints less agile, years of life experience seem to do the same for the mind. Case in point: had the recent tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri taken place during my teenage years, I would have had a very clear idea about who was to blame and how to fix the problem. After all, I knew a thing or two about racism and police brutality, having grown up in Chicago during the sixties, smack dab in the middle of Martin Luther King's marches for fair housing in this city, (where he was hit by a brick), the riots that took place after his death (which spawned Mayor Daley's infamous shoot to kill order), and the police raid on Black Panther headquarters on the west side, which resulted in the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, (both of whom evidence would later bear out, were shot in their sleep).

When I was a teenager, I had the answers to all the world's problems. Guided by the mantra of my generation: "question authority", I knew the world was a corrupt place and that the systems of power in place were not to be trusted.

Had Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager from a suburb of St. Louis been shot by a white police officer in 1974 when I was sixteen, rather than 2014, I would have put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the officer who shot him, and the Ferguson Police Department. I can hear the arguments with my father now. He and I certainly would have also come to blows over the demonstrators and the violence some of them have used to get their point across. And while I may not have had the gumption to get myself down to St. Louis back in '74, I probably would have joined in the protests that have popped up sporadically here in Chicago.

Forty years worth of experiences later, my mind is unfortunately not nearly as clear as it once was. For starters, in those forty years, I've been the victim of numerous crimes ranging from armed robberies and burglaries, to having been beaten bloody right outside my home for no apparent reason other than some black kids had nothing better to do one evening than beat up on a white guy. I've been in close proximity to more drive-by shootings than I care to remember, and live in a city known the world over for its senseless, violent crime. 

Despite all that, I'm not particularly obsessed with issues of law and order, and am as disdainful of police brutality as the next guy. But these days I am more vigilant, and less trusting of my fellow man.

On the flip side, over those forty years I've also had many unpleasant experiences with the police. As my mother to this day loves to point out, when I was a teenager, like many of my peers, I had long hair and liked to wear dirty army jackets. My father was less charitable. He used to tell me I looked like a bum. That, combined with being a teenage male, a demographic that accounts for a particularly high number of criminals, meant I was stopped on occasion by cops, and subjected to humiliating searches, all on account of my having fit the profile of someone who had committed a crime. Over the years I also had frequent brushes with the law as a photographer, taking pictures in places where people didn't want me to be. One time, a friend and I were taking pictures on a construction site in Indiana where some workers had recently died in an accident. We knew we were trespassing, and eventually a cop pulled up, and forced us into his squad car. My friend who didn't have a high opinion of police, let the cop have a peace of his mind, protesting that there were no no-trespassing signs present, and that we had every right to be where we were. Not having a high opinion of getting arrested, I on the other hand, was apologetic, saying we simply didn't know we were not supposed to be there. Long before the events of September 11, 2001, this police officer certainly had better things to do than waste his time with a couple of young photographers, but I know for a fact that if I hadn't had the presence of mind to pacify him, he would have found plenty of legitimate reasons to arrest my friend and me. 

And so it went every time I got stopped by a cop or somebody in a position of authority who had the power to make my life miserable; I learned to swallow my pride, and be as polite and cooperative as possible. Some might say that's sucking up or selling out, others would say it's pure common sense. All I know is that it's kept me out of jail countless times.

Despite the close encounters with cops mentioned above, I don't have a particular ax to grind against the police. I've met several police men and women over the years; some of them are magnificent individuals, some of them are assholes, most of them are normal folks, just like people in any other walk of life. I've since come to the realization that the cops who stopped me for whatever reason over the years, were doing their job and it was nothing personal.

"Ah..." I hear you say, "but you're white and can't possibly compare your experiences with those of African Americans who are continually harassed by the police in this country."

That of course is true, I cannot. Along those lines, I am also not a policeman, and cannot judge police who routinely see and experience a side of life and danger that I cannot possibly imagine. Could their actions be influenced by their experience in the streets? They would hardly be human beings if they weren't.

That is not to say there are not truly racist, sociopathic police men and women out there who abuse their power and authority, and certainly does not in any way excuse their actions.

But just as all hoodie-wearing black teenagers are not thugs, all priests are not pedaphiles, and all parents don't beat their children, all police men and women are not racist-sociopaths who abuse their power. Simply put, we are wrong to condemn the police as a whole, for the actions of a few.

So how does my life experience effect the way I view the killing of Michael Brown? Well, the way I see it, there is plenty of blame to go around. From the evidence presented before the grand jury, to me it seems very likely that Mr. Brown significantly contributed to his own death. Please note that I am not saying the teenager deserved to die, any more than someone who knowingly swims in a tank filled with killer sharks deserves to die. But like intentionally swimming in shark infested water, struggling with a police officer for his gun as young Mr. Brown most likely did, is a deadly wager. Not to be trite about the matter, but by his actions in confronting the officer, Michael Brown lost that bet.

For his part, Officer Wilson will not be winning any policeman of the year awards. I have no doubt that few police officers including Wilson, cherish the thought of being on record as having killed an un-armed person, no matter how threatening the situation.  I can't say for certain if Officer Wilson could have restrained Michael Brown without killing him because I was not there. The eye-witness testimony of the two living persons who were closest to the event, Wilson and Brown's companion at the time, Dorian Johnson, do not help. As could be expected, the two stories of the same incident told from much different viewpoints, contradict each other in crucial areas. But from what I've read about the forensic evidence presented before the grand jury, that evidence seems to corroborate the story that Brown indeed reached for the officer's gun.

Even so, Officer Wilson seemed to over-reach in his testimony that described Michael Brown as a super-human monster. The photographs of Wilson after his altercation with Brown do not show much evidence of the severe injuries he claimed he suffered in the struggle over the gun. The police officer didn't make any new friends by stating emphatically that had he been faced with the situation again, he would do exactly the same thing. There was no sense of contrition in his statements, nor did he show any compassion toward the family of the deceased.

After the shooting, Michael Brown's body was left right where he fell, in the middle of the street for all passersby to see for approximately four hours. Granted he went from being a living-breathing human being to a lifeless piece of evidence in a crime scene, but the lack of respect shown to Mr. Brown and his family was one of the flash points for the subsequent public reaction to his death.

And what about that reaction?

Let's face it, the history of race in America is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. I have many black friends who have had direct, negative contact not with just the police, but also with the Klan. These friends with families down South, can still go back and visit the sites where relatives were lynched. The North hasn't exactly proven to be the land of milk and honey for many African Americans either. Despite the fact that times have changed to a degree, the headline: "Unarmed black teenager shot and killed by white cop", no matter what the circumstances, is still bound to evoke painful memories for hundreds of millions of Americans, both black and white. The heavy-handed actions of the Ferguson Police Department, whose top brass is 100 percent white despite serving a predominantly black community, were instrumental in provoking the demonstrations that took place following the shooting, and last week after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson. Much of the righteous indignation directed at the department I might add, was justified, in my opinion.

However...

Violence directed toward the police and businesses in the community is another story. I just heard an interview with an articulate young man in Ferguson who defended the violence on the grounds that "we need to get the point across to the community of Ferguson and to the world that we will not stand for the police to continue to treat our people with disrespect. The violence is our way of getting their attention." Well OK, they got our attention. But the message the arsonists and looters are sending out merely confirms the fears and stereotypes many people in the outside world hold about the African American community. The logic of violence, especially when it is directed toward local businesses, simply defies me. The young man's mother and father who were part of that interview agreed. They stated in no uncertain terms that violence is unacceptable, stupid, and in the end, counter-productive.

I'm convinced that the majority of African American people in this country share that opinion as well. They don't need to be lectured on the impact crime and violence have on their community. They also understand like all reasonable people that in order for their children to move forward, they must be taught basic values such as hard work, obeying the law, respecting themselves and others, getting a good education, and the crucial importance of the family, especially when it comes to raising their own children. Focusing on those values can be like swimming upstream in our world where peer pressure, social media, and popular culture give us the conflicting messages of instant gratification, glamorized violence, objectification of women, and the concept of individual freedom without individual obligation or responsibility.

Unfortunately the majority of African Americans are not getting the majority of the attention in this country. How refreshing it would be for self-proclaimed civil rights leaders to use their bully pulpit to address these issues. However it's far simpler to get attention by pointing fingers, rather than self-reflection and tackling enormously complicated problems with no simple solutions. The Ferguson tragedy with its easy targets, readily tweetable sound bites, and minute by minute memes, is the perfect venue for them.

OK, having just uttered those words, I have officially become my parents. Could they possibly have been right all along?

How I long for the wisdom of youth, where life is ever so much simpler.

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.