Obama Touts Gun Control, Not Gang Control
Investor’s Business Daily, Inc. Posted 02/19/2013 07:06 PM ET
Gun Control: On his way to a play date with the world’s most famous golfer, President Obama stops in America’s most violent city to push universal background checks that Chicago’s violent street gangs will totally ignore.
Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed late Friday just hours after her younger sister joined a group of teens onstage for President Obama’s speech in Chicago on gun violence.
McFarlane was shot to death hours after her little sister, Destini, 14, sat just feet away as Obama spoke in the aftermath of the similar murder of Hadiya Pendleton.
The 15-year-old Pendleton was gunned down in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, a few blocks from the high school she attended and a few days after she performed with her high school band at Obama’s inauguration. The park where she was killed is less than a mile from the president’s Kenwood home.
Pendleton’s death was one of more than 40 homicides in Chicago last month, a total that made it the deadliest January in the city in more than a decade, after more than 500 murders in 2012.
This carnage in the nation’s most gun-controlled city in America has been blamed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others on the flow of guns into Chicago from elsewhere — notably suburban gun shops.
They do not explain why the areas outside Chicago don’t have anywhere near Chicago’s murder rate. The Windy City’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like America’s overall 4.2, the Midwest’s 4.5 or Illinois’ 5.6 rates.
As the president noted in his speech, of Chicago’s 2012 murder victims, 65 of them were 18 and under.
“That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months,” he said. “That’s precisely why the overwhelming majority of Americans are asking for some common sense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun.”
Yet, speaking of common-sense proposals, in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, our current president voted “present.”
The fact is that up to 80% of Chicago’s murders and shootings are gang-related, according to police.
By one estimate, the city has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of cops. A police audit last spring identified 59 gangs and 625 factions — mostly on the south and west sides — none of which is going to submit to things like universal background checks.
A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago in 2011 had criminal records. Nationally, 67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas.
The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average.
Among teenagers, the firearm murder rate is 14.6, or almost three times the national average.
These are not, as Obama said of rural Pennsylvanians, bitter people clinging to their guns and Bibles while being fearful of others not like themselves.
After his speech, worn out from his nonstop attention to the nation’s problems, Obama set off to vacation in Palm City, Fla., staying at the Floridian Yacht & Golf Club resort. And he hit the links with professional golfer Tiger Woods and resort owner Jim Crane.
We need gang control, not gun control, and policies that don’t result in 70% of African-American births being to unwed mothers, with the children growing up in fatherless homes.
The nation does not in fact face an epidemic of gun violence. No, it faces a chronic problem of urban gang violence in decaying gun-controlled cities like Chicago, which are largely run by liberal Democratic mayors who fail to create jobs and opportunities for their largely fatherless youth.