Again, the City of Chicago may have to face simple facts, not matter how much they want to avoid them. One, the Bears made a bad trade for their quarterback Jay Cutler. Two, guns don't cause crime. Bad people, aka bad guys with guns cause crime.
Guns and Crime in Chicago
John R. Lott Jr.
The Windy City’s gun ban hasn’t worked.
The Chicago gun debate finally shows signs of changing. With the Supreme Court’s decision on the city’s gun ban imminent, people might be beginning to understand that gun bans don’t stop criminals from getting guns.
At a press conference two weeks ago, Mick Dumke, a reporter from the liberal Chicago Reader, asked Mayor Richard Daley what should have been an obvious question: “Since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective?” Daley’s response wasn’t very helpful. Picking up a very old rifle with a bayonet that had been turned in during one of Chicago’s numerous gun buybacks, Daley blustered: “Oh, it's been very effective. If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective it is. . . . This gun saved many lives — it could save your life.”
Reporters greeted Daley’s outburst with a moment of stunned silence. But it wasn’t Daley’s answer that was important. The novelty is that a reporter actually questioned Daley on whether the gun ban had failed.
Even mainstream television news is questioning the gun ban. Take this report last week from Chicago’s CBS-TV:
They are law-abiding citizens in Chicago, but they are so worried about their own safety, they say they might have to break the law. The last straw was the death of Chicago Police officer Thomas Wortham IV last week. That has some African-American families in Chicago considering doing something they never would have done before: carry a pistol. CBS 2’s Jim Williams reports he grew up among those families and he’s never [seen] anything like it. Many Chicagoans have been upset for some time about violence here, but Wortham’s murder has touched a raw nerve in the black community. Now some want to do more than simply call 911 or march for peace in the streets. They want their own gun.
The very next day, many Chicago residents had found a new hero: an 80-year-old man, a Korean War veteran. The Chicago man found an armed robber, with a long criminal record, who had broken into his home at 5:22 a.m.:
The intruder, armed with a pistol, came in through a rear window and ran up a rear staircase, banging on his locked door before running downstairs and being shot in a confrontation with the older man. The intruder shot first before the veteran fired back and killed him, the son said and police confirmed. “Evidently, he missed,” the son said of the intruder. “My father had no choice. It was him or the other guy.”
A next-door neighbor stated what seems to have been the consensus among the neighbors who talked to the Sun Times: “It’s a good thing they had a gun, or they might be dead.” Yet the 80-year-old, who was robbed in a separate incident just a couple of months ago, has been left twisting in the wind while Chicago officials decide whether to prosecute him. They have already taken away his gun.
Murder rates soared in D.C. and Chicago after their gun bans were put in place. As shown in the just released third edition of my book More Guns, Less Crime, before the late-1982 ban, Chicago’s murder rate was falling relative to those in the nine other largest cities, the 50 largest cities, the five counties that border Cook County (in which the city is located), and the U.S. as a whole. After the ban, Chicago’s murder rate rose relative to all these other places. Compared with the 50 most populous cities, Chicago’s murder rate went from equaling the average for the other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992, to exceeding their average by 68 percent in 2002.
Chicagoans might not know that every place in the world that has banned guns that we have crime data for has also experienced an increase in murder rates, but they do know that Chicago’s ban hasn’t worked.
With the Supreme Court's ruling on the DC gun ban, it's a safe bet that the Chicago gun ban will soon be history. The Chicago city government will be forced to face simple facts. You punish those who commit crimes and they tend to not commit the crimes over. You take a crook who robs a man at gun point and put him away for twenty years, he don't commit armed robbery for twenty years. Will the city council figure this out? Time will tell.
Now on Da Bears and their QB please keep that up...I got more lunches to win!
UPDATE:
From my friend Darren at ROTLC there is a chance a liberal from of all things the Washington Post may have figured it out...is there chance he may discover the sun rises in the east?!
Did liberals get it wrong on crime?
By Richard Cohen
This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation -- in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty -- my view at one time -- have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.
The figures are rather startling. From 2008 to 2009, violent crime was down 5.5 percent overall and almost 7 percent in big cities. Some of those cities are as linked with crime as gin is with tonic or as John McCain is with political opportunism. In Detroit, for instance, with the auto industry shedding workers, violent crime was down 2.4 percent. In Washington, D.C., murder was down 23.1 percent, rape 19.4 percent and property crime 6 percent. Stats for political corruption are not available.
Probably the most surprising numbers come from Phoenix, which thought of itself as sinking in a sea of supposedly immoral and rapacious immigrants, all of them illegal and all waiting for nightfall and the chance for a nifty burglary or home invasion. If so, the crime reporting system has virtually collapsed. To the surprise no doubt of local TV news anchors, violent crime was down almost 17 percent. Back at 11.
What's going on? A number of things, say the experts. As is always the case, the police credited the police for magnificent police work, while others cited the decline in crack cocaine usage. Those answers, though, are only partially satisfying because, believe you me, if and when crime begins its almost inevitable ascent, the very same police authorities will blame economic or social conditions beyond their control -- not to mention the inevitable manpower shortage.
Whatever the reasons, it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims....
...The Watts survey tended to support liberal dogma that criminals were like everyone else, only more desperate. Probably the ultimate example of this was cited to me years ago by a woman who had her necklace yanked from her while walking in Manhattan. When I commiserated with her, she said of the crook -- I am not making this up -- "he probably needed it more than I did." This is liberal guilt at its apogee.
...Common sense tells you that the environment has to play a role and the truly desperate will sometimes break the law -- like Victor Hugo's impoverished Jean Valjean, who stole bread for his sister's children. But the latest crime statistics strongly suggest that bad times do not necessarily make bad people. Bad character does.
There is hope an intellectual can actually see and think. Who would have thought it!
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