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Police Supt. Garry McCarthy (courtesy chicago.cbslocal.com)

Last weekend at least 36 people were shot in Chicago, four fatally. chicago.cbslocal.com reports that Police Supt. Garry McCarthy’s getting heat for failing to curtail the “gun violence.” When pressed, McCarthy put the focus on the locus of the problem: Chicago’s gangs and the politicians who protect them. OK, the gangs. And weak gun control laws. “McCarthy said police have identified some gang rivalries at work in some of the most recent shootings, and were moving to intervene; but the superintendent said ‘lax state and federal gun laws’ thwart the department’s efforts.” You mean there aren’t enough laws to charge people who shoot people unlawfully? No, of course not! It’s about . . .

lax laws that allow law-abiding citizens murderous gang members to get access to guns. Because if those laws were tougher, well, gang bangers wouldn’t have guns would they? And then they couldn’t shoot each other. So there’d be less gun violence. They could get honest work tending to the city’s unicorns. Speaking of animal analogies . . .

“At the end of the day, it’s like running on a hamster wheel, when we’re drinking from a fire hose seizing these guns, and people are coming right back out on the street,” he said. “They’re not learning that carrying a firearm is going to have a severe impact on what’s happening in their lives.”

McCarthy actually seems to be blaming the court system and the criminal statutes for the murderous mayhem, not gun control laws [supposedly] designed to limit criminal access to firearms. So what up with the crack about “lax gun laws”? And how come CBS forgot to point out that recent revelations about fudged Chicago police violent crime data undermines McCarthy’s contention that the City’s violent crime rate is falling? Simple oversight? Or lack thereof?

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85 COMMENTS

    • There’s also freedom and low crime 0 miles southeast. You can step directly from the city of Chicago into Indiana. It always struck me as odd, not to mention unjust, that merely taking a walk on the wrong side of the street there would be felonious should one have a firearm or bottle rocket on one’s person.

    • It is not Chicago’s lax laws he is complaining about, it is the lax laws in neighboring communities and states that allow gang bangers to buy guns, and lax laws that allow these thugs back on the street in such a short period of time that they don’t learn their lesson…so he says.

      • What lax laws in neighboring communities and states allow prohibited people to buy a gun? If they are not prohibited from buying a gun it doesn’t matter what state they are in. If they are buying illegally it’s not lax laws, it’s illegal purchasing.

      • I’m sure the lax gun laws in the surrounding states are at fault because those states have just as much violent crime as Chicago….. Or not.

  1. Chicago still has a way to go before it reaches the same enlightened level of governance as Detroit. Thankfully under Rahm Emanuel things are on track.

    • Gun laws are much better in Detroit. And our police chief encourages self defense. MI also has CCW reciprosity with many other states. Detroit has no additional gun laws over the state of Michigan. So I hope Chicago will be more like the D someday.

  2. When you’re an ideologue, what choice do you have when hit with evidence that your ideas don’t work. He’s doubling down. It’s all he can do. To change the approach, people who aren’t ideologues have to kick guys like this out of office and replace them with people willing to try new ideas.

  3. He’s just a mouthpiece for Rahm E. “McStreetlights” has no credibility, considering he himself publicly discharged a firearm whilst drunk .

  4. McBeerNuts always falls back to the lax gun laws line when the honor students starting shooting and killing en masse. When we have a quiet stretch, it’s because of aggressive police work and enforcement, but somehow those same lax gun laws don’t apply then.

    Illustrating Chicago Crime, Murder and Mayhem at http://www.heyjackass.com

    • What he said. HeyJackAss is a hoot unless of course you happen to live in Chicagoland, then its not so funny I guess.

      • DEFINITELY not funny. Wryly amusing, like my asshole uncle, who I don’t know is dead or alive.

        Dead, hopefully.

  5. In Baltimore 91% of murder victims are gang members, active criminals or persons with five or more arrests.

    http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-31-criminal-target_N.htm

    A score of police Department studies around the US show gun violence is 80% to 90% criminals shooting criminals. If you are not a drug dealer, gangmember or living with one, your risk of being murdered in the US is lower than in Europe.

    Incidentally, armed homes of law abiding persons are actually safer than mean US household since the studies on people killed in their own armed homes don’t control for that 80 to 90% of “gun owning homes” where an occupant is shot which are actually homes of criminals.

    Chicago’s violence problem is:
    a) the great progressive movement social experiment of illegalizing dugs.
    b) being a great and welcoming home for criminals generally due to the polices of the left.

    • Don’t be silly! Criminals can’t own guns, it’s against the LAW!

      Also, Chicago is a welcoming home for criminals because it has been run by criminals for 75 years or more.

    • I wouldn’t call criminalizing drugs a “progressive movement social experiment.” Conservatives are mostly responsible for the “war on drugs.” But the funny thing is, drugs are just as illegal in other parts of the country where gang violence is no where near as prevalent.

  6. If the ghetto bangers are shooting each other, please don’t stop them. It’s the best form of population control

  7. Coming from a guy who was drunker than hell shooting out streetlights with his service pistol when he was on the NYPD, I’d take every word he says with about 80 pounds of salt.

  8. I can’t believe I am going to even somewhat defend McCarthy, but he did suggest that the “lax gun laws” related to the punishments for illegally possessing or carrying a firearm. This is demonstrable nonsense, however, as it has been shown that the Cook County judges commonly impose weak punishments even though they have the tools to impose harsher ones. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/10/could-stiffer-penalties-illegally-carrying-gun-reduce-violence-chicago/7265/

  9. NYC likes to claim they brought down homicides by having strict gun laws. The thing is, their handgun licensing (both the City and State) was just as strict back in the 80’s, when the murder rate was very high. What worked is locking people away for much longer for illegal guns, but Illinois has neither the will nor the resources to do that.

    • Exactly, but to be specific NYC’s drop in crime, including murder, compared to equal demographic cities tracks exactly with guliani’s measures including the unfortunate “stop and frisk” (“walking while black”) which interdicted a massive number of crimes, like any shredding of the bill of rights can do.

      Other aspects of NYC that make it an outlier:
      1) it already has a huge density of both law enforcement and legal firearms per mile.
      2) its cops are known to be trigger happy
      3) It has massively gentrified.

      It has nothing do with NYC’s strict gun laws which only harm the law abiding.

    • No, it’s actually not that. They WANT crime to stay sky-high, because people will accept more control, in exchange for the illusion of “safety”. That’s why they release violent criminals quickly, while non-violent drug offenders sit out their sentences.

      The released criminals commit more crime, and the non-violent offenders don’t cause problem in prison.

      It’s a win-win, from their point of view.

  10. Yea this has nothing to do with the criminals who are roaming the streets so freely with stolen guns. How about enforcing the existing laws and locking them up?

    • Maybe we should have a law about laws: If you want to pass a bill into law, you must find two other laws and wipe them off the books.

      That’s MY idea of progressive policy.

  11. Chicago’s problem is Gang Culture, not gun culture. Unless and until we address the toxic culture among inner city youth, nothing will improve. Gang violence, and criminality will continue to rule the day.

    Liberals just don’t seem to get that calling something other than it is, sanitizing, or mischaracterizing its nature through language, or pointing to something in the opposite direction, never addresses or solves problems.

    I would like to understand how one gets mis-wired this way, and lives in this fantasy world, but am simply incapable of the level of self deceit required to attempt it.

    • …but then you would have to demand that black men stop impregnating women and then disappearing into the night, at which point you’re just a racist for pointing out one of the key elements in the urban gang culture: a complete lack of cohesive family unit, and a giant gaping hole where their father figure needs to be. The same applies to the women as well – growing up without a father is even worse for a young girl, who needs a father in her life to teach her self-respect and a healthy, functional image of what a man should be, so that she does not gravitate towards the irresponsible thug personalities who end up in gangs and perpetuate the cycle..

      • I would point out that the disappearing fathers do not fit the role you have assigned to them.

        With fathers like them, families are better off without them, in many cases. So the issue is even more difficult than the one you describe.

        There is no law that can make a good father.

  12. Lax drug laws must be to blame for all those drugs being distributed. I hear a lot of those guns get stolen off trains that go through Chicago, maybe we should stop the trains too.

    • This will never be a solution. Does making ever-stricter gun laws affect gun crime?

      Then why would you think ever-stricter drug laws will affect drugs? The problem is not the drugs. The problem is with the laws. Obviously.

      Legalize drugs, ALL drugs, and make them available at a reasonable price. Then you put the drug dealers out of business, because they can never make a living underselling official prices. They’ll be forced to get jobs.

      Do you think that legalizing drugs would mean “drugs running in the streets?”

  13. Nahshon Shelton didn’t want to pay the 22-cent tax on his $1.79 two-liter of Pepsi on Saturday afternoon, Chicago Police said.

    So he allegedly pulled a blue-steel Intratec .22-caliber submachine gun out of his Gucci satchel inside the convenience store

    Idiot pulls out cheap plastic/stamped steel 22 rimfire semi-auto pistol over a 22 cent tax and idiot police and journalists speak of the fearsome submachine gun that it certainly ain’t.

  14. CBS….. is that the same CBS that heavily redacted and curtailed the reporting by Sharyl Attkisson because it was going against the grain of the politically correct narrative?…

  15. Ah Yes… If only we could get that federal law passed to hold back the tide. Or even if only those other less restrictive states would get on the bandwagon.

    It’s only common sense tide control… We’d have so much more beachfront property!

    • I like this. How can there ever be more beachfront property? If the shoreline moves out, that will be the beachfront. If it moves inward….

      Beachfront and non-beachfront. That’s all there is.

  16. Not to be politically incorrect, but gun statistics would be more meaningful if they were presented in terms of black-on-black crime, gang crime, black-on-white crime, et cetera.

    How deep in denial can this PD Chief be, really? I’m sure he wants to do the go-along-to-get-along thing and follow the gun-grabber agenda, but he seems to not have either oar in the water. Just reading from the Teleprompter or what?

  17. So … He turned a fire hose on his pet hamster when he was a child? Or did he turn the stream on the side of the wheel to make a hamster centrifuge? Or….?

  18. When citizens elect idiots and idiot Democrats appoint idiot Democrats as Police Chief we get those absurd statements. The lowered crime rate in Chicago is due to a newly armed populace. The lower crime rates in Detroit is due to a newly armed populace.

    The large decrease in crime rate in Kennesaw, GA was due to the public announcement and law that the head of each family was expected to have and know how to safely operate a firearm.

    No gun zones are fertile territories for mentally unsound, criminals, and Muslim jihadists.

  19. “…how come CBS forgot to point out” the recent revelations about fudged Chicago police violent crime data?

    CBS doesn’t ‘forget’ to point out anything. CBS deliberately chooses to minimize any information flow that gives support to the notion that guns are useful in any way, or that proves anti-gun proponents wrong. CBS does this to the point of attempting to suppress positive pro-gun pro-2A information most often by simply ignoring it.

    On the other hand CBS will stretch and embellish violent events involving guns in such a way as to draw inference that guns and gun owners in general are dangerous depraved ticking time bombs capable of the greatest horror possible, with their Nightly News Anchor, Pelly, leading the charge. Pelly has in fact by large measure become the face of the anti-gun industry on the CBS Evening News and anywhere else he reports on gun politics.

  20. Lets just put all gang members if stadium give each a gun and knife and lock them in and let them have at it… gang problem solved

  21. He needs to be explaining how he plans to get the Illegal Guns out of the possession of Convicted Felons by enforcing restrictions on the legal Owners. Were those weekend gangsta shootings done by legal Gun owners??? .. How Ignorant than these Morons be?

  22. Chicago is one of the most gun restrictive cities in the Nation as it is with Detroit and DC.. How obvious can it be that your gun restrictions on legal citizens only increases the gun crimes against Unarmed Victims. Compare cities with harsh restrictions on Guns to equal sized cities where the population has armed protection…And they wonder why we call them Libtards.

  23. I was under the impression that Shitcago has some of the most draconian gun laws in the country. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, hmmmmmmm?

  24. Where did this living example of a truly brainless moron come from.? Sounds like he fell into the Kool-aid vat.. Lax gun laws how about you going after the gangs and criminals? The citizens are not committing these crimes.. It’s the politicians and gangs and the lawyers bought and paid for by drug money. Crimes for which your department is failing miserably at stopping. You sitting in you office preaching to your sycophants.get off you butt and be a cop not a politician/whore.

  25. Garry “street light assassin” McCarthy should explain why Chicago has the lowest
    prosecution rate for illegal gun possession, and tell us how a drunk policeman in
    N.Y. becomes chief in Chicago.

  26. Chiraq’s murder rate could be the result of lax gun laws — OR maybe, just possibly, the complete incompetence of McCarthy and the collaboration by the Chicago Machine with the street gangs.

  27. Right, dickwad. Next he’ll blame those terrible Amish people for the violence. We all KNOW who’s killing whom in Sh*tcago.

  28. To give him a bit of credit, it sounds like at least part of his problem is that they have gun laws, they arrest the bad guys, but the courts just let them skate.

  29. Cesspool of a City. If half of it broke off and sunk into Lake Michigan, no one would bat an eye. The city is rotten to the core.

  30. . . . . . and because if the media focuses on gun laws, the focus won’t be on whether the CPD is doing a good job!

  31. At the end of the day, McStreetlights is about as bright as a hampster. Luckily Rahm isn’t smart enough to throw him under the bus.

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