I visited Chicago once. It was winter. It wasn’t even warm in my hotel room. I was glad to get out of there. Two things come to my mind when I think of Chicago: murder and Lewis Grizzard’s quip that he was ‘held hostage’ there when he went temporarily insane and took a job with the Chicago Tribune. Rahm Emanuel announced last week that he would not seek a third term as Chicago’s mayor. Who could blame him? The former Congressman and chief of staff for Barack Hussein Obama has presided over what is basically a slaughterhouse since 2011. Chicago has always been tied to gun violence. It was the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 when Al Capone’s guys took a couple of Thompson submachine guns and a few shotguns and went to work on the North Side Gang, killing seven. Much is made of ‘˜active shooter’ situations when they pop up in schools, clubs and other places these days and rightly so. The numbers are horrifying. The tragic result of these cowardly acts is always the same: grief and calls for gun control. The original school shooting in Columbine, Colorado killed 15 people. Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza killed 20 kids ages six to seven and another six adults who worked at the school. An Oriental student killed 32 people on the campus at Virginia Tech in 2007. A shooter at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Fla. killed 17 and wounded 17 more earlier this year. In 2016, another sicko killed 49 and wounded 53 more at a gay nightclub in Orlando. And the list goes on and on. These gunmen are basically cowards. They strike at soft targets – gun free zones – where they know there will be no armed resistance to thwart them. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Chicago which has some of the toughest gun laws in the country but has the near equivalent of a school shooting almost every weekend. One weekend in mid-August saw six killed and another 58 wounded. Two weekends prior to that, 66 people were shot and 12 of them died. Shootings are so common in Chicago that Emanuel’s law enforcement people either cannot keep up with them all or play fast and loose with the statistics. The aforementioned Tribune now compiles a running total from its own statistics and publishes it regularly. From the data that is out there, it appears 2016 was Chicago’s deadliest on record with 3,550 shooting incidents with almost 4000 victims of which 762 were killed. Most of these shootings happen in public places and involve young people. So, why do we read and hear so little about this ongoing bloodbath? Is it because murders are expected there? Is it because the ongoing story does not fit the gun control narrative because guns are already tightly ‘˜controlled’ in Chicago? Is it because no one cares? Were a natural disaster of such a casualty rate to hit a major city, there would be calls for help from the federal government but Emanuel and his cronies have not made those calls. Perhaps, as Rahm rolls out, it is time for the National Guard to roll in. Perhaps the next mayor will have the backbone to make that call.
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