Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered a review of city pension-fund holdings today to determine whether fund managers hold stakes in companies that manufacture or sell military-style guns.
“We cannot support or invest in companies that profit from the proliferation of assault weapons and the violence these guns bring to our communities,” Emanuel said in a statement released by his office.
Uh huh. Let me guess -- you've ordered all your cops to dispose of their pistols and patrol rifles, which are in fact AR-15s?
I thought not.
But heh, Chicago had over 500 gun murders last year. With a population of 2.7 million for the city itself the murder rate is about 19 per 100,000 people. Detroit is much worse on a per-capita basis, but Chicago isn't good. To put this in perspective Chicago's gun murder rate is approximately equal to that shining example of non-violence found in Brazil, with a 19 per 100,000 firearm death rate. Detroit, on the other hand, has a rate of about 48 per 100,000 which places it (as a nation) second only to El Salvador (with 50!) and behind such shining places as Jamaica, the Honduras, and Colombia! (I'm excluding those other shining examples of nation-states that don't have functional governments at all such as Somalia..... I do wonder if we could get accurate statistics if they'd actually be worse than Detroit..... maybe not!)
Rahm, like the rest of these clowns screaming about guns, already have some of the most-restrictive firearms laws in the United States. It is particularly instructive to note that these other nations with even worse statistics tend to have very restrictive firearms laws as well. It hasn't cut down the murder rate there; Mexico, for example, has extremely restrictive firearms laws yet it also has three times our gun murder rate of the United States.
The US as a whole, incidentally, has a gun homicide rate of about 3.7 per 100,000 -- Chicago's is five times the national average.
Is it the guns?
Nope.
It's the gangs. And most of those shootings are felons shooting other felons; by definition a felon doesn't give a crap about the law.
Exactly as it was during Prohibition.
Incidents like Sandy Hook are horrible but they're the statistical aberration. The "norm" is a bunch of young adult criminals gang-banging one another -- organized crime doing what organized crime does, settling disputes with flying lead instead of lawsuits and to hell with the collateral damage rained down on the law-abiding citizens.
But rather than take that issue on from both sides, de-funding the gangs by changing our drug laws and refusing to accept what amounts to rule by the mob in these cities, we instead bleat about guns and then scream about pension funds owning companies that make firearms.
Somehow I suspect that the local police departments would be rather unhappy without their guns. And this points to another question -- why do the cops need AR15s with 30 round magazines and 15-round magazines in their pistols if we do not?
The police face the same threats the common citizen does. The drugged-up felon who is shot several times and keeps attacking is the same jackass who comes after you when he's in your house at 3:00 AM trying to rape, rob or murder you!
The simple fact of the matter is that we the people are the first responders -- always. The cops and firefighters are second; we're either the first responder or the first victim simply due to being the target of the crime and there is sometimes more than one felon at a time doing the attacking.
Our problem isn't guns. It's gangs, exactly as it is in failed nation-states like Somalia.
And guess who's responsible for that?
That's right -- the responsibility falls directly on those folks doing the screaming about guns -- because it's far easier to blame an inanimate object than to take responsibility for the fact that you have basically ceded control of your city to organized crime.
