Chicago’s streets were littered with bodies again this past weekend as revised numbers reveal that 82 people were shot in the Bloodiest City In America, including 14 that died. The deaths include two alleged criminals killed by police.

Avoiding responsibility for policies that continue to fail, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blamed the rest of the country for the bloodshed:

McCarthy said in a press conference today that the department had deployed “hundreds” more officers over the weekend in anticipation of holiday violence.

“The results were a lot of shootings and a lot of murders unfortunately,” he said. “Yesterday was the day that really blew it up for us in our strategy.”

“It all comes down to these guns: there’s too many guns coming in and too little punishment going out,” McCarthy said.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel put out a statement Monday afternoon calling the violence “simply unacceptable” and said that it “points out that we still have work to do.”

McCarthy says that there are “too many guns coming in and too little punishment going out,” asserting that the rest of the country is at fault for having less restrictive gun laws, and simultaneously, for Chicago’s punishment of convicted criminals.

These would perhaps be valid arguments if the rest of the country were plagued by dozens of shootings every weekend, and the rest of the nation decided Chicago’s laws. Both of McCarthy’s excuses are laughable, as is Emanuel’s lame and toothless suggestion that city needed to “create a partnership for peace.”

These are failed leaders, of a failed city, searching for excuses instead of solutions.

Mayor Emanuel and Superintendent McCarthy continue to ignore decades of single party misrule, endemic corruption, and everything else that might suggest that they must make a serious course correction and admit that the city’s decades-long attempt to scapegoat the legal ownership of firearms has made the city more violent.

The failure of Chicago-style gun politics is so complete that even the media is forced to lampoon the city’s failure, from the editorial cartoon posted at the top of this article that suggests a parallel to cartel-torn Mexico, and an article in the satirical The Onion that suggests the atmosphere of the city is mostly bullets:

Highlighting increasingly dangerous conditions within the city, a new study published Monday by Northwestern University’s Department of Environmental Studies revealed that approximately 75 percent of the air in Chicago is now composed of bullets. “Far exceeding the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and even oxygen, bullets now constitute three-fourths of Chicago’s air supply,” said atmospheric scientist and study coauthor John Molina, stressing that the dense and widespread deposits of jacketed lead and copper in the air pose severe and potentially fatal health risks to all Chicago residents. “According to our measurements, the proportion of bullets in Chicago’s overall air composition is significantly higher than that of other cities with comparable sizes and population densities. Frankly, if this trend continues—and there is unfortunately little evidence suggesting otherwise—living safely within the confines of Chicago will be almost impossible.”

The satire from both the cartoon and the faux news story is effective because it contains a biting element of truth: the violence in the Bloody City is out of control, and those in charge of the city are refusing to substantively change the decades of failed policies that put the city in this situation.

Emanuel and McCarthy are more interested in playing politics than making the radical changes to the culture and the laws of Chicago that would eventually correct the city’s violence problem.

Bodies will continue to fall… until Chicago itself tires of electing the same corrupt anti-gun politicians that deny law-abiding citizens the right to defend and protect themselves and their neighbors.