The city of Chicago is one of those cities that gets to dictate what the rest of the state has to deal with. After all, enough of the population lives there that they get to vote on pretty much everything, and so that means gun control. While the city doesn't have the same restrictive policies it had before the McDonald decision, that doesn't mean they like it. They've done everything they can since then to make it as much of a pain as possible.
So, from time to time, it's worth looking at the violence in the Windy City and seeing how that gun control is working.
After all, we're told these policies are essential for saving people's lives, right?
At least 27 people were shot, five of them fatally, Friday into Saturday evening in gun-controlled Chicago, Illinois.
Breitbart News noted at least 13 people were injured in a drive-by shooting Friday night around 11 p.m. The shooting occurred in the Princeton Park neighborhood, WLS reported police believe two shooters inside a red SUV opened fire simultaneously on a crowd of people.
None of the 13 wounded persons suffered a fatality.
The Chicago Sun-Times pointed to fatal drive-by that occurred at 5:15 Friday “in the 11900 block of South Michigan Avenue.” A 29-year-old was standing on the sidewalk when was shot numerous times from a gunman inside a vehicle. The man died later at a hospital.
At 8:55 p.m. a 33-year-old man was found shot in Little Village. He was transported to a hospital where they pronounced him dead.
Shortly before 10 p.m. Friday a man with a gunshot wound to his chest was discovered “in the 1100 block of West Latrobe Avenue in Austin.” He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
And note that in about six hours, 16 people were shot, three of them killed, over four separate instances in the city.
And as noted, there were another nine coming, but they came over the next hour or so, not the next day or the rest of the weekend. Seven hours, 27 people. It didn't get better for the rest of the weekend, either.
Despite all of the gun control laws on the books in Illinois, nothing stopped these 27 people from being shot.
"But that's because of guns in Indiana," we'll likely hear, because that's who Chicago always blames for their problems. Of course, Indiana doesn't have 27 people being shot over seven hours in just one city, for the most part, now do they? They don't have nearly the same violent history Chicago has "enjoyed" over the last handful of years.
That's because the problem isn't guns.
Chicago has a thriving gang culture and, frankly, is in close proximity to where Al Capone--someone many gang-bangers legitimately admire--did most of his crap, which likely just makes it worse in some ways. Then we look at how lenient some of the supposed sentences can be, if they're even prosecuted and not allowed a pass for "mutual combat" or something equally brain-dead.
Look, I have a fondness for Chicago as a city. I had some great times there when I was stationed up at Great Lakes going through Hospital Corps "A" School back in the day--it's no San Antonio now, which might have been more fun, but alas--and so I hate what that city is. I hate what it's become, though it wasn't exactly puppies and daisies back in the early 1990s.
Still, I hate that we can't get through some of these people's thick skulls.
Homicide rates are down throughout the country at a time when, if the anti-gunners who run Illinois are right, we should be seeing near record highs. We're not, and that's because gun control is predicated on a lie, and Chicago is a prime example of that lie in practice.
Criminals will always find a way to get armed. Nothing will stop them.
But the law-abiding will be inhibited, and that's the problem. That's always been the problem.
