Chicago Drive-by

Teen performer at inaugural events fatally shot | US National Headlines | Comcast:

CHICAGO — A 15-year-old girl who had performed in President Barack Obama's inauguration festivities is the latest face on the ever-increasing homicide toll in the president's hometown, killed in a Chicago park as she talked with friends by a gunman who apparently was not even aiming at her. Chicago police said Hadiya Pendleton was in a park about a mile from Obama's home in a South Side neighborhood Tuesday afternoon when a man opened fire on the group. Hadiya was shot in the back as she tried to escape. The city's 42nd slaying is part of Chicago's bloodiest January in more than a decade, following on the heels of 2012, which ended with more than 500 homicides for the first time since 2008. It also comes at a time when Obama, spurred by the Connecticut elementary school massacre in December, is actively pushing for tougher gun laws.

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When I took journalism classes in college, I learned that the usual questions are who, what, where, when, why and how.  These six facts should be answered in the first paragraph of an article.

Answers here are; Innocent, Killed, In Chicago (near Obama's residence), Tuesday, For No Good Reason, and "Because Gun Laws Are Not Tough Enough".

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president and the first lady's "thoughts and prayers are with" the teen's family, adding: "And as the president has said, we will never be able to eradicate every act of evil in this country, but if we can save any one child's life, we have an obligation to try when it comes to the scourge of gun violence."

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Thank you Jay Carney for turning a tragedy into a political talking point.   Had you not said that, we would not have been smart enough to realize that Liberals will do anything, say anything, to advance their agenda of undermining our constitution.

Here are a few more talking points which haven't been addressed

• Chicago laws already make it illegal to own a firearm.  .
• Making it more illegal (if that's even possible) to own a firearm in Chicago won't change a damn thing to effect "the scourge of gun violence".
• I personally own more firearms than I can enumerate without thinking about it for a while, and for the 30th consecutive day this month I have not shot anybody.

 To illustrate the proliferation of guns in Chicago, check out this map:

What you are looking at is a map of all the gun stores in Chicago.  All three of them ... only one of which is actually located IN Chicago.

Where I live, there were three gun stores, but two of them went out of business and the third is actually located in a nearby "bedroom community".  Nobody shot anybody here this year.   One might say that my small town is 42 times safer than Chicago ... but that would be true if there were at least one shooting.  Actually, my small town is infinitely safer than Chicago.

Why should this be?  Could it be because we don't have street gangs here?  Because the police are more efficient?  Certainly it isn't because our gun laws aren't "tough enough" ... hell, we're downright [spit] "Liberal" about firearms ownership here.

Could it be that we don't have a lot of wild and crazy young people here?   Probably not ... our town population is reduced by 30,000 every summer when most of the college kids go home at the end of the school year.  And we have not one, but two high schools.  Trust me, judging by the loud music and drunken parties every week in my neighborhood alone,  many of the young people are certifiably "wild and crazy".

I don't think that the "scourge of gun violence" is caused by lenient gun laws.  In fact, I don't think the problem of "gun violence" has as much to do with guns as it has to do with violence.

(In the same way, the issue of "gun control" has less to do with guns than it has to do with control.)

A July 15, 2012 article in "24/7 Wall Street" (international investor analysis) titled "The Most (and Least) Peaceful Countries in the World"  reports that "The Institute for Economics and Peace released the sixth edition of their annual Global Peace Index".   Here are a few things that report has to say about the root causes for violence ... or lack of violence:

The IEP also considers several socioeconomic factors that are not themselves part of the rank, but that they measured as possible drivers of violence and peace. The data suggests that while a country’s GDP, adult literacy and unemployment do not appear to have a strong impact on peace, others appear to be directly related. The presence of civil liberties and freedom of the press have much closer relationships to peace, according to the report.
The clearest among these are political factors such as corruption. According Killelae, the relationship between corruption and the lack of peace is profound: Slight increases in corruption do not appear to affect slight increases in peace, but he says that once a tipping point is reached peace “just disappears.” While the IEP is not exactly sure why corruption is such a powerful indicator, Killelae suggests that it is near perfect measure of “just how well functioning the level of government is.”

Let me see: civil liberties, freedoms, corruption.   What communities in the United States come immediately to mind here?   How about Detroit, Chicago, and Washington DC?

Lots of violence in those towns.   Really hard for an honest citizen to own a legal firearm, in exactly those places where it's most needed.   Heller was a good start, but what communities are dragging their feet on compliance?  See above.

It is a tragedy that an innocent child was murdered in an act of senseless violence.  

It's also a national shame that the leaders of the most free nation in the world can think of no better way to curb violence than to reduce our freedoms, and limit out ability as free citizens to defend ourselves against attack.

If we let them do this to us, we will no longer be free citizens.   We'll just be "subjects".   I don't want my government to turn me into a subject ... or a felon.

And that is MY political agenda.