Amy Swearer works for The Heritage Foundation and focuses on gun rights, among other things. She’s spoken quite eloquently on the topic in congressional testimony in the past. She’s a forceful and engaging speaker on the right to keep and bear arms, from what I’ve seen.

However, Swearer ran into a problem recently when she tried to testify before Congress about the spike in violent crime. It seems that someone wasn’t really interested in listening to what she had to say.

It’s no secret that Chicago, like many major U.S. cities, has suffered from an unprecedented spike in homicides and non-fatal shootings over the last two years. Despite seeing record low homicide rates between 2004 and 2015, Chicago residents are now experiencing violent crime at levels unseen in decades—including truly horrific surges in gun violence during 2020 and 2021.

One important factor driving this violence is the failed leadership of Chicago’s mayor and city council, particularly their general lack of support for the Chicago Police Department. Chicago’s progressive prosecutors have exacerbated this problem by routinely allowing violent offenders to run amok without any meaningful consequences.

And yet, when I attempted to diagnose this problem at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence in Chicago held earlier this week, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., twice interrupted my testimony.

The testimony Durbin didn’t want the committee or the nation to hear? A well-publicized story from early October in which gang members lit up a residential Chicago neighborhood with gunfire on a Friday, only to be inexplicably released without charges by Monday.

It seems that Durbin was more interested in using Chicago residents as political pawns than in understanding why Chicago’s criminals feel free to shoot whomever they want without fearing consequences.

I’d invite you to go on over and read Swearer’s abridged remarks.

We’ve talked about what happened in Chicago. Both Cam and I have. The idea that because one gang shot back, no one should get arrested is absolutely insane. It’s as bad, if not worse, than the Rittenhouse prosecutor trying to say that if you bring a gun, you don’t have the right to self-defense.

It’s insane.

But Durbin interrupting that testimony is suggestive of something, at least to me. It tells me that Durbin knows what happened, knows how messed up it is, but because of his team loyalty, he’s not man enough to acknowledge it or even allow someone else to acknowledge it.

I’ll call the right out when they screw up. I’ve done it. Durbin, however, isn’t just unable to, he’s also unable to allow anyone else to call out someone for such a vile decision.

He didn’t have to actually say anything. He could have allowed Swearer’s testimony to proceed and just let it go. In fact, if he had, many of us wouldn’t have even known Swearer was testifying before Congress. I don’t really keep up with who is speaking to what committee on any given day, so I’d imagine most of you don’t either.

Now, though, we’re talking about it. We’re talking about what happened in Chicago and what Durbin did to Swearer.

In fact, if we were more like Democrats, we’d talk about how misogynistic it was to interrupt her or something. Instead, I think it’s just because he’s a partisan ass. I mean, he really is aptly named…right, Dick?

So now, we have a choice. We can shrug and pretend nothing happened, or we can make sure everyone knows what Durbin didn’t want brought up. The choice is yours.