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Chicago Wants To Reduce Gun Violence By Doing A Gun Buyback That Isn’t A Buyback.

July 16, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              There’s a self-styled entrepreneur in the neighborhood where I work who walks around every day with a shopping cart picking up empty bottles and cans. When his shopping cart is full, he goes to some redemption center, dumps the bottles and cans in some kind of big machine which turns them into metal and glass that can be used to make more bottles and cans. Then he gets some cash, goes home and the whole process begins again the next day.

              This guy does particularly well in the summer months because that’s when everyone’s sitting outside on the stoop drinking soda and beer to keep cool. Most of the neighborhood folks dump their empties in a garbage can next to their homes which makes it easier for this guy to fill up his shopping cart without having to run around picking up just one can here or one bottle there.

              I started thinking about my neighborhood can and bottle collector when I read a media story out of Chicago where Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced a new program to reduce gun violence by paying residents of the 2nd City to turn in unwanted guns. She’s setting up a million-dollar fund which will be used to pay anyone who brings a gun to the police – details to be forthcoming soon.

              What Mayor Lightfoot is referring to as a “bold and creative action” is no different than what happens at gun buybacks which take place in various cities from time to time. In New York, the Attorney General has been sponsoring gun buybacks in different cities since 2013 and has collected more than 3,200 guns.

              Do gun buybacks work? It depends on what you mean by using the word ‘work.’ There doesn’t seem to be any direct connection between the number of guns collected in a buyback and the before-and-after stats on violent crime. But there does seem to be some value in buybacks because they alert the community both to the issue of gun violence, as well as helping to promote more governmental and police attention to reducing the violence caused by guns.

              What bothers me about the Chicago program, however, is not whether the buyback will work or won’t work. The problem is that the program is designed, according to Mayor Lightfoot, to incentivize people to turn in ‘illegal’ guns.

“We need everyone’s help to make sure we are doing everything we can to address this horrible plague of illegal firearms,” says Her Honor, the Mayor.

Actually, the good citizens of Chicago don’t have to turn up at the po-leece and drop off an ‘illegal’ gun. All they have to do is give the cops a ‘tip’ as to where the cops can find an illegal gun. 

So, this program isn’t a gun buyback. It’s a gun tip-off. Call the cops, tell them that so-and-so next door has a gun he’s not supposed to have, and you get some kind of reward.

Did it ever occur to Mayor Lightfoot that crimes are usually solved because the cops get an ‘anonymous’ tip? How can you give an anonymous tip about a gun crime if you want to get a reward? And by definition, anyone in possession of an ‘illegal’ gun has already committed a crime.

I don’t want to play Friday morning quarterback but to me, this scheme (to quote Grandpa) sounds pretty fa-cocktd.  Over the July 4th weekend, the Windy City celebrated our country’s independence with 104 people shot, of whom 19 were killed. In other words, we have a gun-violence pandemic in Chicago which is much worse than the pandemic from Covid-19.

Over the July 4th weekend, an average of 5 persons were admitted to a Chicago hospital for Covid-19 illness each day. Admissions to hospitals for gun injuries should be so low.

Back in 2007, our good friend Kathy Kaufer Christoffel published a fundamental article on gun violence, “Firearm Injuries: Epidemic Then, Endemic Now.” 

I think we need to give Dr. Christoffel’s article a new title because gun injuries were epidemic back then, but for sure they are pandemic now.

When It Comes to Gun Violence Chicago Is Bad But It Ain’t The Worst.

December 18, 2016

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Chicago was ablaze with gunfire again this weekend and as of Sunday morning, five people were dead in a single house and another fifteen were in various hospitals with wounds.  There’s a good chance that the Windy City will rack up more than 800 gun deaths in 2016, almost double the number of gun murders in 2015, which was a 12% increase from the year before.  The city is looking at the newly-issued report of a taskforce that is calling for new measures to deal with the violence; you know, another taskforce, got it?

chicago             Last year I looked at the map of shootings for Chicago that is carried in The Tribune, and noticed that some neighborhoods, particularly parts of the South and West Sides, appeared overwhelmed with gun violence, whereas other areas of the city seemed to have little or no gun violence at all.  But the map for 2016 is different because although gun violence is still concentrated in neighborhoods like Austin in the West and New City in the South, shootings occur in every neighborhood, even in places like Rogers Park.  I lived in Rogers Park in the 1970s and forget about violence or crime, our apartment on Greenleaf Avenue didn’t even have a front-door lock.  This year there have been 25 shootings in Rogers Park, although that’s an improvement because shootings numbered 40 in 2014.

Doing a quick calculation brings the murder rate in Chicago (per 100,000 residents) to just around 30, give or take a few. The national gun homicide rate is around 3.5 per 100,000, in other words, one-tenth of what’s going on in Chicago these days, no wonder the weekend shooting deaths of five people in one house made the national news. Incidentally, I just went back to the browser and the city’s shooting toll since Friday afternoon has been upped to 9 dead and 26 wounded with most of Sunday still to be gotten through.

So what makes this city such a human shooting gallery with no end in sight?  It’s almost like you could walk down any street in the Second City and a bullet might go whizzing overhead.  Except the fact is that Chicago, compared to some other places, isn’t so dangerous after all.  St. Louis this year has a murder rate of 61, New Orleans is 46, Newark is 39.  I don’t know how many of these murders were committed with guns, but if the usual 70% average for guns used in homicides holds true in these towns, then all of them, and some others, rank well ahead of Chicago when it comes to the number of residents who are being gunned down.

If the gun-violence problem in Chicago was just related to Chicago, we could probably come up with some quick and easy reasons why such an exceptional situation existed in only this one place.  But gun violence, more particularly the increase in gun violence, isn’t just a Chicago problem at all. It seems to be occurring in many places, and I am not sure that this generalized increase in gun violence is only found in high-density, inner-city neighborhoods. The FBI says that the murder rate is lowest in cities with less than 100,000 residents, but the town of Mangonia Park, FL (which has a great waterslide) registered two murders in 2015 which gave this place a murder rate per 100,000 of 151!  When a homicide occurs in a place like Mangonia Park it never makes the national news, but there are little towns (what the FBI calls ‘tiny cities’) all over the place and violent crimes, shooting crimes, take place in these spots as well.

Violent crime and, in particular gun violence dropped steeply in the 1990s and 2000s but levelled off but let’s stop patting ourselves on the back and pretending that we’ve got the problem under control. As the accuracy of gun-violence reporting gets more accurate, it’s clear the numbers are moving up.  And they are moving up everywhere, not just in the city on the lake.

Want To Know The NRA’s Election Strategy? Here It Is.

October 28, 2015

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Now that the 2nd Amendment has become an issue in the looming 2016 Presidential campaign, it was just a matter of time until the NRA got its own campaign playbook together and started adding its voice to the political fray.  So it was hardly a surprise when the NRA released its first political message right out of the mouth of Wayne LaPierre, who claimed he was responding to Obama’s appearance at a police chief’s meeting in Chicago where the president dutifully repeated his call for ‘common-sense’ laws to help end the everyday carnage from guns.

The NRA’s campaign message turns out to be a riff on the ‘we don’t need no stinkin’ new gun laws’ mantra that was first promoted by Donald Trump.  And once Trump said it, all the other Republican Presidential pretenders fell into line with what has become official policy for the NRA.  And why don’t we need any more gun laws to stop what Wayne-o calls the “bloodshed?”  Because all we have to do is “enforce the federal gun laws” and “direct every federal jurisdiction to round up every felon, drug dealer and gangbanger with a gun” and the problem will be solved right then and there.

lapierre                But Obama won’t do it, and if she’s elected Hillary won’t do it because they “wait for a crime that fits their agenda and blames the NRA.”  Which is another way of saying that instead of locking up all those bad guys with guns, the Democrats just want to pass new gun-control laws.  “President Clinton and President Obama use the carnage to campaign for new gun laws” says Wayne-o, and the result of not enforcing current laws is that “thugs” like Darius Brown (picture of Brown the thug with voice-over from Wayne-o) don’t go to jail and instead end up shooting a nine-year old girl.

So here we have the NRA game plan as we inch towards Election 2016.  Blame it all on the Democrats who don’t enforce crime laws, tie them to ‘thugs’ who are always young men of color, and make sure to remind everyone that urban ‘bloodshed’ has nothing to do with guns. Doesn’t it remind you just a bit of the Willie Horton campaign ads that secured the White House for the first iteration of George Bush?  But if the Horton campaign was short on facts and long on emotional, racist-tinged images, it can’t be compared to the misrepresentations and racist-laden messaging this time around.

Let’s start with the charge that Clinton and Obama won’t enforce laws and are ‘soft’ on crime.  In 1993, the national violent crime rate was 746. Eight years later, at the end of the Clinton Administration, the rate had fallen to 506, a decline of 33%.  Eight years after that, at the end of Bush II, the rate stood at 457, a further decline of 10%.  In 2014, seven years into Obama, it’s at 357, a drop from the end of Bush’s tenure of 22%.  Since 1993 the violent crime rate has declined by 52%, of which 90% disappeared during the administrations of two, crime-loving Dems.

In the rush to get Wayne-o’s comments up there right after the President addressed the police chiefs, the folks who produce those insipid NRA videos might want to take another look.  Because the picture of ‘Darius Brown’ is actually a picture of Jamal Streeter, one of three young men charged in the murder of a 13-year old teenager named Darius Brown.  Oh well, if every young man of color is either a gang banger or a thug, how hard is it to get them all mixed up?

It’s not hard at all if you’ve decided that, everything else failing, you’ll fall back on the time-honored issues of race and crime in order to galvanize your political base and garner some votes.  I happen to believe that most Americans, gun owners or not, will see right through this stupid charade even if Wayne-o and the NRA haven’t yet figured it out.

 

 

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