I hate to harp on about Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitpropagandists at The Trace. But they are the most pernicious and insidious of the civilian disarmament brigade, cloaking their gun control agenda in the mantle of respectable journalism on a daily basis. Today’s installment: A Young Chicago Woman Has Lost 23 Loved Ones to Gun Violence. She Wants You To See Their Faces. In her attempt to wave the bloody shirt for gun control, Bloomberg lackey Maya Dukmasova chronicles the life and times of Chicago resident Camiella Williams. Only she’s not the victim The Trace would want her to be. Or is she? You be the judge . . .
In sixth grade, Williams got her first gun: a loaded 9mm pistol she bought from a friend with $25 of her allowance money. After school, she’d rush home and stuff the heavy weapon in her backpack before heading out. She’d pull it out of her pack to scare kids in the neighborhood. “That power, that fear that other people had, I got a rush off that,” she says.
By high school, Williams had begun to sell marijuana. “I wanted to be the female [Pablo] Escobar,” she says. “I just wanted to sell drugs and get cars.” Over time, she acquired two more guns, a .38 and a .22. Increasingly a target for rival gang members — many of whom attended her high school — she felt she needed the weapons for protection. She didn’t imagine it ever going beyond that. “My friends were not out killing people,” she says.
Right. Ms. Williams’ friends were “peaceful” armed gang bangers. The only way you can spin Ms Williamns’ story for gun control is to assume that she was a victim of her circumstances. If only she — and the criminals shooting up her neighborhood — didn’t have access to guns!
That said, perhaps Ms. Williams is a victim of her circumstances. If so, how would gun control have put her on a better path than the one she chose? Sorry, wandered into? Aren’t the problems of her past related to wider issues of law and order, economic opportunity, moral and political corruption, community infrastructure, the failure of the educational system (including unionization) and more?
Even as her first gun grew into a small collection, even after her house was shot up, Williams viewed Chicago’s bloodshed as a far-away problem. “I was immune to it,” she recalls. Then, in 2004, when she was 16, a boy named Quincy Harris was shot and killed while he sat in his car in an alleyway. Harris was a friend of Williams’s older brother, smart and cute with “a rough edge.” She had a big crush on him. His killer was never found.
It was the first time Williams realized that “gun violence existed close to you.” The gunplay of her crew had been just that — play, posturing, the pump-up gestures of scared kids.
I reckon Ms. Williams’ Trace biographer is taking her dope-dealing subjects’ account of childhood (16?) innocence at face value, as it protects the narrative that guns are somehow at fault.
Anyway, Williams falls into the protective, loving embrace of Father Michael Pfleger, “the pastor at Auburn Gresham’s St. Sabina church and one of the city’s most prominent anti-violence activists.” Who no doubt hooked-up the writer with her subject. And the cure for her gang-banging ways?
When Williams’s son was a year old, she packed her belongings and left for Chicago’s south suburbs, moving with her mother and two adopted siblings into a five-bedroom house in a quiet subdivision. At their new home, her son could play outside without fear. She describes that day in August 2007 as like “stepping toward freedom.”
At 20, Williams got her GED and began attending community college. But as she was making her escape, gun violence continued to claim the lives of people close to her.
Who didn’t escape the ‘hood. ‘Nuff said? How about this: does Ms. Williams still have a gun for self-protection? Do her new neighbors? One thing’s for sure: this isn’t the gun control hero The Trace is looking for. No doubt they’ll try again. And again.