32 people shot, 6 killed, in violent Chicago weekend - CNN.com: "CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- An epidemic of gunfire rattled the city during the weekend, with at least 32 people shot and six killed.
Police Superintendent Jody Weis blamed an excess of guns and gangs for the rash of violence. 'There are just too many weapons here,' Weis said at a news conference Sunday. 'Too many guns, too many gangs.'"
I once lived near a military base, where they had a LOT of guns. In all the time I lived there, they did not have 32 people shot in violence, nor 6 people killed violently. Over several years, shootings in that community that was chock full of guns did not add up to 32.
In suburban Pennsylvania, I learned to shoot a 12-gauge in my teens. Three of us teens loaded up the shotgun, a handgun, and a bag of rounds, and off we went to the outdoor shooting range. The friends who taught me to shoot taught me to be careful, too. It didn't take a parent lecturing us - we wanted to be safe, we didn't want to hurt each other or someone else, so we took it upon ourselves to include safety alongside "this is a trigger" and "here's how you load it." We had no adult supervision, and I don't even remember paying for the range time - it might have been a public park set up specifically for target practice. As far as I know, we were well within the limits of the law. You don't send kids out into the woods to hunt deer without giving them an opportunity to learn to shoot first. I never much thought about it - children didn't shoot up their schools back then, although we did hear about the odd adult shooting up an office or post office - but it was commonplace for a family to have guns in the house. Even children as young as 10 had hunting guns of their own. Between our own families and our friends, we all had access to guns.
We didn't have 32 shootings (not counting shooting at game while hunting) ANY weekend the entire time I lived in Pennsylvania. We didn't lock our doors, we didn't live in fear, and - remember, I'm in my 30's. I'm talking about the mid-80's to early-90's, not the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s. I read two newspapers in high school - the local paper and the Philadelphia paper - and I'll tell you, we didn't have many break-ins, muggings, burglaries, rapes, or robberies, either. All those guns - rifles and handguns and cross bows and knives and arrows - probably every other house had at least one gun - and we didn't have "an epidemic of gunfire" rattling the city, the county - heck, we didn't even have many shootings in Allentown/Reading, an area that still hadn't recovered from the steel bust. All those guns sat quiet, unused, unwanted for any purpose beyond hunting, target practice, skeet shooting, and perhaps home defense. Thousands upon thousands of guns, never once used in the commission of a crime.
So, to Police Superintendent Jody Weis, I would like to say this: You don't have too many guns in Chicago. You have too many criminals.
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6 comments:
So, speaking as someone from Chicago, what are we supposed to do with them all, ship them to Pennsylvania? LOL
Your too many criminals comment is right in this however, solutions to the problem has to address why there are so many criminals, not just in Chicago, but across the United States, and that has to do with the increasing criminalization of our society and the lack of investment in education equitably, especially at the early childhood level.
Where to criminals come from?
Hopelessness.
How many people doing crime do you think actively chose to become who they are today?
Do you think that if they had the opportunities that many of us did that they as many of them would be doing what they are now? Doubtful.
How did they get there?
Some were born with physical problems that resulted from parents who had drug addictions that made it difficult or impossible for them to learn at the same rate as you and I.
Others grew up in such impossible home situations that their own mental and emotional health was fragmented beyond belief. Suffering physical, mental and or psychological abuse from the earliest ages.
This really messes with your ability to get the most out of Sesame Street.
We'll exclude poverty as a reason, just to be brief.
But what we cannot exclude is the need for better early childhood education.
The single biggest barrier facing criminals is that they have no other way to make a living. At least this is what they believe. That is because many of them gave up on school some time around third grade. That's when it usually happens.
When kids who do not have parents at home who are able to help them with their homework because of their own educational problems or situations or lack of presence in the home because they may be poor but working three jobs at minimum wage, give up on school because they feel they can't keep up.
They stay in school as long as they are forced to, but many, boys especially, fall farther and farther behind because they truly do not believe they can succeed and don't figure that trying any harder will help them.
Teachers with overwhelming classroom sizes, sometimes as large as 35 or more, find it progressively more impossible to make up for lost time as each year goes by.
Eventually the system graduates or fails to graduate a high school student who cannot make it into college (overheard on the Cermak Bus on the way to a college fair at McCormick Place "What did you get on the ACT?", "Man, I'm goin nowhere, I got an 11!" His frustration and pain wrenched everyone on the bus. This was a kid who really wanted to do good things in life but saw no way to get the education he wanted.)
The place to start now is by funding much smaller classroom sizes in K-2. My recommendation would be no more than 20. Period.
Across the country as a Federally Required maximum. I know there are lots of people who hate federal requirements, but once children were not required to go to school at all, so this is not such an immodest proposal.
Why is this so important?
Because it gives the classroom teacher time to really work with each child and doubles the classroom minutes she can spend on making sure her children are really getting the kind of education that they each individually need.
15 would be better.
Especially in areas where parents are unable to do what they should be doing with their children at home to reinforce their education.
There is no use in pointing fingers. Previous generations messed up and it is up to us to fix things or it will just get worse. Let's start now.
The children who can succeed in education in these areas may still have a terrible fight ahead to stay out of gangs and succeed. But the first battle, learning that they can learn and succeed in the classroom is won or lost often by the third grade.
Yes, you can do a lot after that. Yes all the other grades are important. Vitally so.
Cost? How much does it cost to imprison all the criminals imprisoned today? Billions $. And don't expect the numbers to go down.
And the victims of crime are both those with and without children - that's to those who complain about paying taxes for schools.
So its Hobson's choice really. Better education or even worse crime.
And I can tell you now, its not lack of trying on the part of teachers in Chicago. Most are well-education and working as hard as they can and, very-very tired. Because their classrooms are much fuller than they should be. And they know it.
Many of them cry at night because they see the failures slide through their fingers because they just do not have the resources to save everyone. But they try anyway. Day in and day out. Dividing their precious classroom minutes of individual instruction time in each day between each child as fairly as they can using every effective technique they know.
Many of these teachers have Master's Degrees, some have more than one or have a Ph.D.
At some point you do have to have the money to deal with it all. And right next to the guns article should have been an article about where Illinois is in spending on its schools in Chicago.
Thanks for letting me rant.
Hope you don't take offense. None meant.
I have nothing against guns in the woods. But think about how you would feel if one of your kids took a job in a big city with its huge urban densities and an armor piercing bullet just happened to pass through several walls into theirs after traveling a mile to get there?
That's why so many Democrats are upset about guns.
Though sometimes I wonder if all our problems are urban density or just politician density.
Peter
Sorry, meant "Where DO criminals come from?"
Need one of them sexy young typists. But my wife won't let me keep one around the house....
In 2001, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders. Enjoy the fruits of your labor!
I am a life-long DC resident. I have historically been strongly anti-gun, mainly because I know how easily gun accidents can happen. HOWEVER, my support for the DC gun ban has waned over recent months and I am realizing more and more that it does NOTHING. The criminals who want guns already have them. Overturning this ban will certainly not change that. What cities like DC and Chicago need right now is the National Guard. We have had more than 50 shootings in a small section of DC since January. Many of these shootings have occurred in broad daylight. While most are clearly targeted, there have been a few random ones as well that happened during robberies. There are TOO MANY CRIMINALS and we need to do more to get them off the streets. I don't care how it happens anymore. I realize that shoving people in jail is only a temporary solution, but I am a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. I want to be able to walk out of my house each day without fear of getting caught in the cross fire. I want to be able to walk out my front door and go for a walk without worrying about being robbed at gun point at 3 in the afternoon. The bottom line is that the leaders in these cities are not doing enough to stop this violence. THEY MUST DO MORE!!
Anon 6:58: I agree wholeheartedly. It should be criminals who live in fear, not honest citizens. That basic truth should be the heart of our enforcement, prosecution, and penalties.
The seeming uptick in crime and violent crime is probably more perception than reality - increased population + increased news coverage = more crimes reported, even if the crime rate is the same or lower. But that's no help to the honest citizen who risks being shot by any one of, say, 32 weekend shooters, rather than the 2 weekend shooters of a few decades ago. The risk of being a victim of a violent crime is astronomically higher than the risk of being a victim of terrorism or dying in a plane crash or dying from eating a toy colored with lead paint.
Gun accidents... Many perfectly legal things cause accidents, dismemberment, and death. I certainly don't need dangerous kitchen knives - I can buy my food pre-cut. There are professional food cutters and professional criminal stoppers, and, honestly, the professional food-cutters do a better job - the police come by after the fact to take a report.
I am glad that this is opening a dialog - the honest taxpayer has more of a stake in crime than the criminal does. We pay the price in our taxes, our insurance premiums, our feeling of well-being, the alarm systems and gated communities and the time we spend forming neighborhood watches and lobbying for change. So, good, let's talk about it - and then what will you DO? What can you do?
Hi, Peter, That's a great idea - please do send your Chicago criminals' guns to law abiding folks in Pennsylvania (or elsewhere). :-)
I agree with you that some people turn to crime because they don't know what else to do, but many people turn to crime because they can. Let's not insult the millions of honest, hardworking folks from difficult backgrounds - criminal behavior is a choice.
Yes, we need to provide everyone with an opportunity for success - not merely to reduce crime, but because our success as a society requires making the most of our natural resources, including people. Between illegal immigration and welfare, the lost souls in our society have fewer opportunities or motivation to get that first, lousy job that offers a step towards, eventually, a good job.
Yes, education needs to improve. Truancy needs to be enforced. Parents need to be held responsible. Criminal penalties need to more penalizing.
Educational intervention isn't going to solve the problem with the adult criminals we have today. We need social change, policy change, and prison reform - and I'm talking about making prison harder. We need to focus our public policy intervention on rewarding honest taxpayers and punishing criminals. Gun restrictions - criminals ignore them - only punish honest citizens.
And when the public and the police superintendent blame a rash of shootings on the inanimate guns, it takes us three steps further away from real solutions.
Thanks for your comments. I'm glad to see other people care passionately about protecting the honest citizens in this country from crime.
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