Four members of Chicago street gang are in custody and facing a litany of charges in relation to a gangland attack last Thursday night that sent 13 people from the embattled Back of the Yards neighborhood, including a 3 year-old boy, to the hospital.

That assault was in retaliation to another gang attack earlier that same day.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy would like for you to blame the firearms used for the shooting, not the gangbangers that they treat almost as an afterthought.

They’ve placed considerable political weight behind the insistence that the blame for the shooting goes to a so-called “military-grade weapon” used in the Black P Stone gang’s attack on members of the Gangster Disciples, an attack that also wounded innocent bystanders. Emanuel and McCarthy publish statements sgugest that they blame the tools used almost more than the repeat offenders wielding them. It is their constant insistence that more federal gun laws are the solution to Chicago’s having become little more than Mogadishu on Lake Michigan.

The problem with their constant and hysteric assertion however, is reality.

The two known firearms used in the shooting were a .22 revolver—the same kind Trayvon Martin was trying to sell before he was shot according to his social media accounts revealed during the Zimmerman trial—and a semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull) Kalashnikov mimic not in known use by any military in the world, firing cartridges of moderate power, from a standard-capacity magazine.

Chicago already has extremely strict laws governing the criminal use of firearms, and they have continually failed. Instead of solving the gang problem, Chicago is possessed by a police chief so militant against even the lawful use of firearms by the good citizens of his city that he’s even threatened to have his police shoot lawful concealed carriers.

Chicago lacks intelligent leadership, and instead is plagued by zealots that place ideology above the safety of the citizenry.

A million dollars was wasted on funding a pet gun control group that has failed to reduce violence, which is now having to close two locations. Millions of dollars more have been wasted fighting against the Constitutional rights of Chicagoans to defend themselves, in one court case after another, including one that has seen dozens of good men freed to right an injustice.

Chicago’s intransigence toward effectively countering gang violence is so bad that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made the very public suggestion of deploying the Illinois State Police and even the Illinois National Guard to try to bring the violence-plagued city back under control.

But Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy don’t want to solve Chicago’s gang problem.

They do not want help from the Illinois State Police.

They do not want help from the Illinois National Guard.

Nor will they allow the good citizens of Chicago to defend themselves.

Emanuel and McCarthy instead demand that the rest of the nation comply with their failed policies.

The rest of the nation doesn’t have an out-of-control gang problem. In the rest of the nation, taxpayer dollars are not spent recklessly and ceaselessly to deprive law-abiding citizens the right of self defense, nor are citizens subjected to a police chief more interested in refusing help and protecting his own power than solving the problem of violent gangs.

Chicago has a gang problem. Chicago has a leadership problem. The only “gun problem” in Chicago is that the city government’s insistence on failed laws means that the city’s law abiding citizens remain unarmed victims.