Windy City PD Superintendant Garry McCarthy has it all figured out. Finally. He’s looked at his city’s murder rate and discovering that it’s higher than New York, a city with three times the population. His boys have confiscated 109 illegal guns since January 1. Garry’s also apparently been combing through the FBI’s uniform crime reports because he’s found that — shazam! — gangs, drugs and illegal guns are intertwined. I know, right? This is evidently why The Godfather pays him the big bucks. Garry has that unique ability to peer through the miasma of chaos that parts of Chicago has become and he’s put his finger right…on…the…problem. But wait! He has a solution, too . . .
McCarthy just held a press conference to announce that the fix to Chicago’s gun crime problem is mandatory minimum sentences. That’s right, he wants to make sure that anyone caught with an illegal gun (which is pretty much all of them as far as he’s concerned) goes away and stays away.
Then he showed a couple of poster boards with mug shots. On one were a series of murderers who’d committed their crimes with illegal guns. On the other were victims of those crimes, criminals themselves. His point: If the shooters had been put away, the people on the other board would still be alive.
But he didn’t stop there. The victims were criminals, too. And he wanted to make it clear that if they’d been kept behind bars, too, they’d have been much safer than they were out on the streets. So the powers that be in The City of Big Shoulders seem to have come to the conclusion that, given their Mogadishu-like crime problem, Chicagoans would be safer behind bars than free to stroll the avenues.
Finally, the top cop had a plea for the media. He asked them (paraphrasing here) not to adopt the talking points of gun rights organizations when referring to his city. In his exact words, “Chicago does not have strict gun laws.” And given what’s been enacted in New York, not to mention what’s in the works in Minnesota, California, Colorado, Maryland and others, he may soon be right. Relatively speaking.