By Daniel Greenfield
America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out west where you can
get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown.
Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. There were over 400
shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of those shootings, 3 or more
people were shot.
2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up,
in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter,
Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running.
Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common, they're all
run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to
control the criminals who have the guns.
The murder rate in Washington, D.C., home of the progressive boys and
girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The capital of the national
bureaucracy has also been the country's murder capital.
These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t
the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are
racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s
Obama’s own voting base.
Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012.
Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and
Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for the crimes of their
own voters.
Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers
that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war
Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number
of murders for the entire country of Canada.
Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the
American 4.2 rate, but it does look like the murder rates in failed
countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s
murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody
genocidal civil war.
But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That
would be St. Louis with 50 murders for 100,000 people. If St Louis
were a country, it would have the 4th highest murder rate
in the world, beating out Jamaica, El Salvador and Rwanda.
Obama won St. Louis 82 to 16 percent.
New Orleans lags behind with a 39.6 murder rate. Louisiana went red for
Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17. Obama
won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won
Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.
Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t
broken among Republican voters rushing to stock up on rifles every time
Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among
Obama’s base.
Any serious conversation about gun violence and gun culture has to begin
at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Los Angeles and
in Washington, D.C.
Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at
Seattle. So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of
hell?
A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those
murdered in Chicago in one year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s
75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In
Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many
as 80% of the homicides were gang related.
Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago
or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized
crime networks which stretch down to Mexico. And Democrats pander to
those gangs because it helps them get elected. That's why Federal gun
prosecutions in Chicago dropped sharply under Obama. It's why he has set
free drug dealers and gang members to deal and kill while convening
town halls on gun violence.
America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural
homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows,
and whom the media profiles after every shooting, but by the gangs
embedded in urban areas controlled by Democrats. The gangs who drive up
America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill
suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a
school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the
norm.
National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be
killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The
single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th on the list is
juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various
flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America
has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico
have murders.
Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can
only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood
that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to
39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and
criminal past.
If this were going on in Rwanda, El Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would
have no trouble knowing what to make of it, and silly pearl-clutching
nonsense about gun control would never even come up. But this is
Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to see
that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble
spots in the world.
Lanza and Newtown are comforting aberrations. They allow us to take
refuge in the fantasy that homicides in America are the work of the
occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in one of those perfect
small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or Stephen King
novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something American
about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism
and bad mothers.
But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart.
There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear
an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El
Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets
like them and they kill like them.
America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of
major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El
Salvador. Gun violence largely consists of criminals killing criminals.
As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and
Control, put it, "The majority of homicide victims have extensive
criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal
homicide works. It's a fact.”
America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as
it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being
dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would
like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain
hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun
control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the
War on Drugs.
Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about
rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts
attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have
sat on for generations.
America does not have a gun problem. Its problem is in the broken
culture of cities administered by Democrats. We do not need to have a
conversation about gun violence. We need to have a conversation about
Chicago. We need to have a conversation about what the Democrats have
done to our cities.
Sultan Knish