Don’t Bring Yer Guns to Town
As a follow up to this, the count keeps growing higher…
The murder of Martinez, 32, brought the city closer to 500 homicides this year, statistics show. This year is the first time the city has had this many slayings since 2008.
While the city of Chicago has more working police officers per capita among the five major cities, it has the second-highest homicide rate. In terms of raw numbers, the city will finish 2012 with the highest number of murders in the country, statistics show.
It’s difficult to pinpoint a single cause for the increase in shooting deaths, but some point to gang turf wars, unseasonable warmth earlier in the year and the disbanding of special police units that specialized in tackling violent crime.
Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blamed the proliferation of guns onto Chicago’s streets and conflict among the city’s larger gangs for the rise in homicides. At recent press conferences, McCarthy has consistently said that while murders have increased, overall crime is down.
(click here to continue reading Man shot dead before he can ‘get out of the game’ – chicagotribune.com.)
and then the City reached that particular metric:
[Nathaniel T. Jackson’s] death was the 500th homicide in Chicago this year, marking a grim milestone. The city last reached that toll in 2008.
…
As of Thursday night, homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago, and shootings had increased by 11 percent, according to police statistics.
Largely contributing to the spike was the unusual number of homicides that occurred during the early part of the year, when the city experienced unseasonable warmth. In the first three months of the year, homicides ran about 60 percent ahead of the 2011 rate.
(click here to continue reading Grim milestone: Austin shooting 500th homicide in Chicago – chicagotribune.com.)
Not to make light of the situation, at all, but having just watched Michael Moore’s documentary about gun control, Bowling For Columbine, I feel like I should add that it is rare that I feel threatened by gun violence in my normal areas of the city. When walking around, I don’t feel like I am in a war zone. A quick glance at the Near West Side Crime map validates my perspective – in the last month there has only been one homicide in this large area. If one adds in the Loop, the number of murders is still only one (i.e., there were zero homicides in the Loop in the last 12 months).
That said, something drastic needs to be done to reduce the number of gun murders in our city, our state, our country. The answer is not to bring back Al Swearengen and the thugs of Deadwood as suggested by the idiots of the National Rifle Association and their minions. I’d rather try Chris Rock’s solution of making each bullet cost $5,000…
“You don’t need no gun control, you know what you need? We need some bullet control. Men, we need to control the bullets, that’s right. I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars… five thousand dollars per bullet… You know why? Cause if a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no more innocent bystanders. Yeah! Every time somebody get shut we’d say, ‘Damn, he must have done something … Shit, he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass.’ And people would think before they killed somebody if a bullet cost five thousand dollars. ‘Man I would blow your fucking head off…if I could afford it.’ ‘I’m gonna get me another job, I’m going to start saving some money, and you’re a dead man. You’d better hope I can’t get no bullets on layaway.’ So even if you get shot by a stray bullet, you wouldn’t have to go to no doctor to get it taken out. Whoever shot you would take their bullet back, like “I believe you got my property.”
(click here to hear Chris Rock: You don’t need no gun control, you know what yo….)