Chicago: The roots of a murder epidemic

“Why is Chicago unraveling?” said Chris Stirewalt in FoxNews.com. While crime continues to drop in most other big cities, a total of 535 people were murdered in the Windy City last year, up from 433 in 2011. This January alone, 43 people were killed—including 15-year-old honor student Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot to death just days after performing at President Obama’s inauguration. Obama returned to his hometown last week to make the case for tougher gun-control laws; hours after Obama spoke, another girl, 18-year-old Janay McFarlane, was gunned down in the street. Chicago already has the strictest gun laws in the nation, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, with bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and a rigorous permit system for handguns that requires extensive training and background checks. But criminals “couldn’t care less.” Passing “feel-good” gun laws hasn’t helped Chicago, and it won’t help America.

Chicago’s real problem isn’t guns, said Kevin Williamson in National Review, it’s gangs. When the city demolished its infamous housing projects in the late 2000s, it inadvertently dispersed a handful of major gangs into hundreds of smaller factions, led by juveniles who trade gunfire “over the slightest of slights.” Now an estimated 80 percent of the city’s homicides are gang-related. But Mayor Rahm Emanuel has failed to crack down on the gangs, said John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. A sensible mayor would “flood problem neighborhoods with aggressive cops,” but Emanuel is evidently more willing to “fight for gun control than fight the gangs.”

Chicago may have strict gun laws, said Monica Davey in The New York Times, but the state of Illinois doesn’t. Criminals can easily buy firearms right outside the city limits, not to mention from black-market dealers in their own neighborhoods. Obama, meanwhile, fully acknowledges that better gun control alone won’t solve Chicago’s problems, said the Chicago Sun-Times. On his visit last week, he emphasized that gang violence is rooted in the breakdown of families and the urban community. “When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill,” he said. “Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.” He’s absolutely right. Sensible gun control nationwide can help reduce violence—but to save Chicago, we must deal with its problems “from the ground up.”

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