Chicago is bracing today. Gun crime in the Windy City is at near-record levels, and expectations are that this Labor Day weekend will be bloodier than last year's.
The toll a year ago over the holiday stretch in Chicago was nine killed and 46 wounded in gun violence.
It's a pretty good bet on Tuesday that this year's news will be as bad or worse, which is a sorrowful reflection on the reality in the nation's third-largest city derisively referred to lately as "Chi-raq." But in 2016, nine lives extinguished by homicide over four days in Chicago won't be much of an exception to the everyday rule.
Through the end of August, there have been 459 murders--an average of 1.9 per day--in a city of 2.72 million. The population for the entire state of Arkansas is 2.97 million, and our statewide murder tally so far this year is only 165, which is still a 50 percent higher rate than the U.S. average.
Little Rock represents less than seven percent of Arkansas' total population, but accounts for nearly 13 percent of its 2016 murders. The capital city's murder rate is twice the national average; Chicago's is nearly twice again as high.
So that makes Chi-Town's murder rate, yes, stratospheric. The number of shootings in Chicago so far this year is on a pace to exceed 3,000--more than eight every single day.
All this gunplay in a city and state notorious for continually enacting stricter gun-control laws (a new law this year stiffens penalties for straw buyers bringing guns in from other states).
Chicago's experience can be instructive as a crime laboratory of sorts for other cities and states. What can be learned from a microscopic view of the Chicago crime lab is how not to manage a violent crime problem.
Stop hanging hopes on hapless gun laws. Compared to Arkansas, and most of the rest of the nation, Chicago is run by gun-control nazis. Just about every Second Amendment restriction known to liberals has been put on the books there, and criminals somehow keep getting guns and shooting people at escalating rates.
Anybody in Chicago who wants to buy a gun has to have a government ID card. There are additional rules for keeping guns locked up in family homes, limiting purchases over time periods and reporting individual gun transactions in advance. The eligibility list to be a card-carrying firearm owner excludes felons, domestic-violence offenders, restraining-order subjects, mental health patients and illegal immigrants, among others.
What has all that gun-control legislation done for Chicago? Nothing but personify the adage anti-NRA types love to hate: Outlaw guns, and only outlaws will have guns.
Take a hard line on gangs. Drug abuse in and of itself is often not violent, but the violence perpetrated by gangs that finance the trade, along with prostitution and other criminal black markets, more than makes up for it. Gangs are nothing more than domestic terrorists, but because of the disparate representation of minorities, a hard-line stance is often portrayed as racially insensitive.
Caving on that point does minorities no favors. They are typically the prey of gang violence. But try telling that to the ACLU, which successfully stifled proactive policing efforts that proved effective against gangs elsewhere.
On streets and in neighborhoods where drive-by shootings are common, special-interest activists were worried about police stopping people in racial percentages that didn't jibe with census tract data. The fact that crime statistics (and gang activity) also don't jibe racially with census data was evidently irrelevant.
The predictable result? Police stops down 70 percent, shootings up 80 percent.
Somewhere down in the PC rabbit hole, civil rights leaders have lost sight of the soul-sapping oppression that violent crime perpetrates on low-income victims of color. Get back to basics on law and order. Criminality and disorder are enemies of society. New York City once wallowed in crime rates like those Chicago is staggering under, but a few simple policing strategies based on common sense made a world of difference.
Violent criminals are actually a tiny fragment of any city's population. It's really not hard to recognize who they are, where they like to hang out and how they like to operate. So it's not rocket science that by disrupting their behaviors and environments, and better fitting deterrents to offenses, crimes and crime rates will fall.
It's not impossible to have low crime where poverty is high. Or where schools are underfunded. Or where unemployment is high.
Areas of the high-homicide, violent Austin neighborhood in Chicago, for example, have median household income levels below $20,000. Yet murder is rare and violent-crime rates are often 90 percent lower than the national average in the poorest counties in America that dot the Appalachian area in eastern Kentucky.
It's sad knowing that, over the next few days, 40 or 50 people in Chicago are going to get shot. Sadder still knowing that failure to learn from such tragedies means their suffering will be (but wouldn't have to be) in vain.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 09/02/2016