The epic slaughter in Chicago continued over the past weekend with 11 people reportedly killed and 44 more wounded, and among the victims was 58-year-old Willie Cooper, an anti-violence activist whose slaying takes the Windy City from the surreal straight into the Twilight Zone.
Cooper, according to the Chicago Tribune, worked at Lilydale Outreach, a South Side organization that is trying to somehow curb the violence. With a 2017 body count of 349 so far, and some 5 ½ months remaining in the year, that just seems farther out of reach.
The local CBS affiliate is reporting that 1,988 people have been shot in the city so far this year. That includes a dozen children age 12 and under, the newspaper said. One week ago, the media was reporting that two people were killed and 38 others were wounded.
With statistics like that, it is a cinch that the city’s gun control policy has been a failure. Chicago has been forced by the courts to comply with the Second Amendment, but the Rahm Emanuel administration, like the Richard Daley administration before it, is being dragged kicking and screaming into that new reality.
Decades of anti-gun liberal policies have paid off in one respect. The city is a textbook example of what doesn’t work when it comes to reducing criminal violence.
They’ve tried “gun buybacks.” They’ve tried marches. They tried banning handguns for about three decades until the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and made the city stop in a landmark case brought by the Second Amendment Foundation with the late Otis McDonald as the chief plaintiff.
Then they tried a gun ordinance that was further rejected by the federal court. They’ve tried zoning requirements to prevent gun shops and gun ranges from operating inside the city.
The majority of these murders involve minority gunmen and minority victims. The killers don’t bother with such details as background checks. They endure no waiting period, nor do they typically possess an Illinois Firearm Owner Identification (FOID) card.
All of the measures adopted by city and state government haven’t discouraged the city’s criminals from committing criminal acts.
There were 14 slayings and 100 more people were wounded over the July 4 holiday weekend, despite the presence of 1,000 additional police officers on the job, according to American Security Today.
The Chicago Sun-Times maintains a “shooting tracker.” It also has a column called “Homicide Watch” that reports every slaying in the city. For a major daily newspaper serving a major metropolitan area to have those columns speaks volumes about the environment in which the newspaper is published.
