In the 1/4/22 Chicago Tribune, community activist Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed titled “My Group’s Violence Prevention Efforts Have Taught Me What Works and What Doesn’t.”
Duncan writes,“… there is a profound lack of understanding among leadership about everyday life in our high-crime communities. For example, Chicago confiscates more guns than any other city in America, yet there is little correlation between the number of guns confiscated and the number of homicides.”
Duncan adds, “In 2015, the city collected almost 6,800 guns and had fewer than 500 homicides. The following year, it collected 8,400 guns and had 770 homicides. In 2020, Chicago collected more than 11,000 guns and still had about 770 homicides. Last year, it collected over 12,000 guns and had about 800 homicides,” and continues:
“The problem is that most people arrested on gun charges are not likely shooters. Chicago police are mostly arresting people who are simply scared for their lives. They carry guns to go to the store, visit their moms, pick up kids at school or go to work because they don’t feel safe. Even men with a record will take the chance of being arrested with an illegal gun and sent back to prison rather than go out unarmed.”
Duncan then goes on to say, “I fully support removing guns from the community, but that approach is clearly insufficient. If we solved more homicides and shootings, fewer people would feel the need to be armed.”
OK, let me get this straight (and by the way, I’m the one who applied the bold lettering above): you admit confiscating guns doesn’t reduce homicides, you recognize many people are carrying them in genuine self-defense, and you still want to eradicate them.
Arne Duncan, it would have been more helpful if you’d told those community people you’re trying to reach that if they identified the killers to the police – you know, the same killers they are afraid of and want to wreak vengeance on – that might be an effective new strategy to solve your city’s murder problem?
By the way, Mr. Duncan is reported to be considering running for mayor of Chicago.
This part from him: “If we solved more homicides and shootings, fewer people would feel the need to be armed.”
This makes zero sense. If you solve every murder, but the homicide rate never changes, would that make anyone feel safer? I live in a town with a infinitesimal homicide rate, yet I carry every day. I can list many reasons why. The most obvious one: I have a God-given right to defend my life. Hello, is this thing on?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the intellect of someone who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
In his defense, it sounds like he’s operating on the assumption that a disproportionately-high number of homicides are committed by a relative few violent offenders, and if those few offenders are removed from society and incarcerated, the homicide count and rate will drop significantly.
If homicides scale with crime in general, he’s probably not wrong — it has been shown that a disproportionate amount of criminal activity is committed by a relative few repeat offenders — but I don’t recall ever seeing that hypothesis proven for homicides specifically. But hypothetically speaking, if, say, 50-60 individuals were responsible, directly or indirectly, for 300-ish of the shooting deaths, then removing those few dozen might cut the homicide rate almost in half. (Or might not, since many/most homicides in major cities are drug- and gang-related, and the convicted killers would be replaced by other up-and-comers.)
I find it much more fascinating that he’s willing to make the admission that most people arrested on “gun crime” charges are “unlawful possession” (or the IL equivalent) by otherwise-innocent people who have a legitimate fear of being victimized and want to carry the means to protect themselves … in a city where the authorities are either disinterested in helping or hamstrung and unable to help.
The question then is, if elected Mayor of Chicago, will he work to make it easier or harder to get whatever permits are required for good people to carry defensive firearms legally? As a follow-up, when the police do arrest a shooter/killer, will they tack on the “gun crime” charges, or will they continue to drop those against the real criminals? (I suspect I know the answer to both, so he likely still has s#!+ for brains and is drawing the wrong conclusions. But the admission is interesting nevertheless.)
There are two concepts in the quote I pulled from him, which he thinks go hand in hand. One is murder rates, the other is a “need to be armed.” And the reason I chose to comment on that quote is because Mas already highlighted the folly of the rest of this guy’s nonsense.
From 1966-2003, Chicago had between 500-900 murders per year (closer to the high end). In 2004 it fell to the 400s, and with the exception of one year, stayed there for 10 years. One reason for this was because Chicago targeted criminals differently, yes. But let’s say you solve every single murder this year. What if, the following year, the rate doesn’t change? What if it drops by a third? Or a half? Or 90%? It doesn’t matter how much it does or does not drop. His rationale is what? I need my gun 30% less? 50% less? 90% less? Do I carry only on every third Tuesday? I already said that I live in a place where murder almost never happens, yet I carry every day.
This guy doesn’t support self-defense, period. Well, that’s not correct. He supports it for him. When he was Sec. of Education, he had security. If he runs for mayor, he will have security. If he becomes mayor he will have security. The rest of the peons?
I’ve read this tyrant’s thoughts before. Not impressed by his thinking.
“…an effective new strategy to solve your city’s murder problem?”
*defund the cops-
*refund Soros’ DA-
*no bail requirement-
*catch and release violent offenders-
This news about confiscation may be outdated. If not in Chicago, then in some other American city. Am I thinking of NYC? Some District Attorney somewhere will not prosecute thieves who use guns for theft, as long as they don’t harm anyone. That means gun possession is OK for anyone, as long as they don’t use the gun. Also, I hear cops are not being pro-active anymore. Why look for people carrying weapons when you can play it safe and still collect your pay?
Maybe lawlessness is better than enforcing strict, unconstitutional gun laws. Maybe groups of vigilantes could make a city safer than law enforcement can. Our legal system used to arrest criminals, put them in decent prisons, then release them to continue their lives of crime. Maybe gangs of vigilantes could kill the mutants. That would put an end to their crime sprees. This might make the cities safer. Also, maybe the gangs of vigilantes will work for free, or less than taxpayers now pay for cops to stand there and watch Antifa loot and burn down the businesses of those taxpayers.
Remember the movie, “Magnum Force?” In that movie, the cops became like vigilantes. Maybe that is needed today.
People who live in cities look like idiots. Some people who attend universities become idiots. Why do parents want the teachers to return to the classroom? Schools are not teaching children what they need to learn. Parents who send their children to public schools are guilty of child abuse. Teach your children yourself. It would be impossible for 98% of parents to do a worse job of teaching than the public schools do. Government can’t do anything right. End public schools and property taxes should go down by 66%.
There are no perfect solutions, but good people can get together, help each other, and let the bad people destroy themselves. The bad people are dragging us all down.
Residents of New York City, especially those who ride the subways (almost everyone) probably wishes Bernard Goetz and many similar minded people will soon begin looking for bad guys to offer $5 to and load them up with hot copper instead. Lead bullets should not be used, so condors in NY will not get sick from ingesting that toxic metal.
Having worked in minority areas and having professional reasons to venture into the housing projects, I feel for the regular folks who have to live there. Since the entry at the top mentions Chicago, perhaps the best comparison for that city would be Chicago in the Capone era.
There were, and are, “business” reasons the conditions exist. A more modern possible answer can be seen in Northern Ireland. Sectarian (or any other driver) violence existed for decades until the common folks on both sides decided they’d had enough and turned on the terrorists on both sides. BUT, the common folks have to see that the authorities have the political will and follow through. Richmond, VA established Project Exile back when in cooperation with the Federal Attorney. Felons found in posession of a firearm got a mandatory 5 year per count jolt in a federal lockup. It worked astoundingly well until someone realized (after things were under control) that certain communities were being over represented in the process.
Once upon a time, there was a study on how teacher behavior influenced the behavior of students. Those with unruly classrooms were found to let the students get away with more misbehavior before crackin….uh, taking steps to control the situation.
If people feel safer, then fewer will carry firearms. This is perfectly sensible. It is even reasonable. And it is human nature.
Arne Duncan is tailormade for Chicago, as was people-picked-on-me-because-I-had-a-dark-tan Rahm Emanuel, who disbanded the anti-gang units, and Barak Obama who took Illinois politics to the National stage. Bill Ayers and Hillary are from that primodial ooze, too.
Chicago is locked on doing the wrong thing, and has been for a long time. Chicago has a gang problem, and since when? The days of Cabrini Green? Before? Like the Teaching of Jesus Christ to love your neighbor as yourself and love God with the entirety of your heart mind and spirit, and that the most effective way to lose weight and maintain it is to control your food intake, the answer is simple. It just isn’t necessarily easy. The answer isn’t more Federal dollars, because that hasn’t solved the problem, except to enrich more grant-grifters, and program leeches. So how does Chicago solve the problem? A good place to start is by not electing people like Lightfoot and Duncan. Stop doing things that haven’t worked. Stop blaming inanimate things for human failings. In Chicago? Naw.
The Albuquerque police strike of 1975 comes to mind. While the police were absent, the crime rate dropped because the criminal element feared the armed citizen more that the police. Now there’s a correlation that supports the armed citizen.
If Duncan does become mayor of Chicago, he can compete with Adams, the new Mayor of NYC who has also vowed to eliminate firearms from his city. Maybe he thinks allowing 800,000 illegal invaders of our country living in the Big Apple to vote will help him stay in power forever. As a former high ranking member of the NYPD, Adams knows that gun control doesn’t reduce crime, but he’s just another sleazy liberal politician, a darker version of the former dictator of that city.
The main problem comes from the division in society. The people who are sponsoring prosecution don’t live with everyone else – they have gates and armed guards or other ways to keep themselves away from the rest of us. They know full well what they are promoting, but since it moves their political vision of this country along, and provides more power to their faction, they will continue to promote a policy of confiscation. To be clear: they don’t want crimes to be solved, but they want more money for solving crimes. They don’t want citizens to feel safe in their homes, since then those citizens will have to grovel to the politicians to “save them.” That’s where we are today – don’t expect politicians to understand the needs of the average citizen, because they do not have the same situation. As with vaccines and other medical treatments, or even college admissions, the pols can then dictate which groups are acceptable to receive these blessings of society.
Yupp… the Blind leading the Blind as it were. “Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed titled “My Group’s Violence Prevention Efforts Have Taught Me What Works and What Doesn’t.” …. She must have slept through this lesson.
I can’t prove it but I believe many of these victims of Cook Co. crime are voting with their feet and are moving out of the area/state.
Many of which have found new life in Texas somewhere on the NAFTA corridor. We like to call the NAFTA highway the Fentanyl corridor just a wild hunch.
The Cook County Sheriff said that the majority of the 2600 people his department electronically monitors are charged with violent crimes and about 100 are charged with murder. With stats like that it is no wonder Chicago has turned into a crime-ridden cesspool. The wealthy that voted for those policies are fleeing to the suburbs or out of state. The poor & working class are stuck & until the majority decide they have had enough it will continue to get worse.
“I fully support removing guns from the community, but that approach is clearly insufficient.”
The defining characteristic, displayed by believers in left-wing ideology, is their ability to divorce from reality. In this sense, left-wing ideology is the opposite of science. True science is guided by reality. True science continually tests itself against reality. When a hypothesis fails to match reality, it is discarded or modified and then re-tested. Only when a hypothesis matches reality is it accepted and, even then, it is only provisionally pending future re-checks as new information is developed.
Science is guided by a logical mind. Left-wing ideology is guided by pure emotion. It is ruled by the heart rather than the head. The human heart lives in fantasy and so does left-wing ideology. Hence, it’s ability to totally depart from reality and live in an alternate, fantasy world of its own making. We see the fancies of the Left, everyday, in the narratives that they concoct and push upon the public via their vehicles of propaganda and indoctrination.
If you think that they above statement is too strong, I suggest that you go back and educate yourself about their “Russia Hoax” fantasy which they pushed upon the public for over three years. Anyone who, honestly, looks into the facts regarding the “Russia Hoax” must acknowledge that it was all “made up out of whole cloth”. It was a left-wing fantasy or, more properly, a left-wing delusion that was pushed, mercilessly, upon the pubic by the left and their media minions.
In truth, left-wing ideology has no more substance than the superstitions that ruled primitive cultures. Yet, like the superstitions that drove the crusades and witch-burnings of the past, left-wing ideology is powerful and can seize the minds of those who give in to it.
There is no ideology that has failed, more consistently, than left-wing ideology. It has been tried, in various forms, for hundreds of years and in numerous nations around the globe. Where tried, especially in a pure form, its performance has ranged from mediocre (at best) to dismal failures at worst. Usually, when tried, it makes society worse while reneging on its promises to make things better. In its extreme failures, it has sparked episodes of intense warfare, mass poverty and genocide.
Yet, despite its long history of abject failure, there is no political ideology that draws more support, even today, then left-wing group-think. It is a kind of “double-think”, as defined by George Orwell, in which the mind is made to firmly believe in things that are contradicted by reality.
For example, left-wing ideology insists that firearms are a negative environmental influence in society. That their removal from society, if it could be accomplished, would be an unvarnished GOOD. Almost all true leftists pay homage to this core belief as shown by the quote that I listed above. Most leftists accept the validity of firearms-prohibition in much the same way that they would accept that statement that “The sun is bright”‘. It’s truth is accepted as a axiom by most leftists.
Indeed, leftists have a hard time understanding the minds of gun-owners. It is ever strange and beyond reckoning, to them, that there are people who own, and who desire to own, firearms. From their point-of-view, it is a desire to hold onto EVIL. A desire that they can only attribute to either greed, on the part of those in the firearms industry, or to blind ignorance for those of the public who simply want to do it.
Yet, reality clearly shows (as Arne Duncan acknowledged) that confiscating firearms by the thousand had no effect in reducing crime, in Chicago, or in creating a more peaceful city. Indeed, it actually seemed to be a contra-indicator and made the situation worse.
Yet, Arne Duncan cannot accept that left-wing ideology has failed him. It would shake his entire worldview to do so. Therefore, he clings to his left-wing ideology, holds it close to his heart, and double-thinks his way out of the situation.
I would argue that sanity is linked to a firm grounding in reality. Where a grounding in reality is rejected, then a form of insanity exists. Therefore, mass left-wing cultural movements, such as we see around the World today, are a form of hysterical mass-insanity. The leftists that drive “cancel culture” on twitter and in our universities, institutions and the media, are every bit as insane that those rabid crowds that gathered and cheered, centuries ago, as some old woman was burned at the stake for being a witch!
Science may progress but human folly remains a constant in the universe!
TN_MAN,
Left wing ideology must have a powerful, attractive power in order to make people fall in love with it over and over. As you wrote, it fails and fails, but people keep pursuing its goals. It’s like a shiny, attractive lure that is simply irresistible to fish.
My guess is that it is inspirational. It makes its adherents feel good about themselves. Left wing ideology promises near perfection in the here and now, and it is easy, compared to other religions/philosophies. We can all get to the promised land if we co-operate. And won’t it be wonderful? None of us will have to work too hard. We’ll all be equal. No super rich and super poor. Stars in their eyes. Just listen to John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.” That is the left’s anthem.
Arne Duncan arguably bears some responsibility for the Parkland school shooting. It was his approach of avoiding prosecution of certain groups that allowed the shooter to remain not just free but in the school despite numerous run-ins with the law. He’ll fit right in the Chicago machine after Mayor Beetlejuice gets run out.
Mas,
Having recently been in the Windy City I will just say that your best bet for getting around is Uber and only a fool would venture to that cesspool without a handgun for protection.
Vince
Duncan is a long-time anti-self defense activist who used his platform as Secretary of Education to promote the dysfunctional school safety policies that led to at least one major school shooting. As CEO of Chicago Public Schools he bears part of the blame for that failure as well.
Whoa, Mas. Time-out. I checked in here to see if you put anything up on the news of the DC Capitol Police officer that shot that rioter/protestor inside the Capitol building last year and you hit me with this? According to something called RealClearInvestigations the officer was NEVER interviewed by investigators about the shooting, additionally his Linkedin page says he was just promoted to director of security operations. I’ve never heard of a LEO (nor any civilian) being cleared of a use of lethal force without an interview before. And appearantly the post jan 6 riot press conf was the first time in its history that the Capitol Police had a “press conference”.
I’ll never be able to figure these people out but they seem made for each other. Hey, a county DA in my tri-state area just got “reprimanded” by a legal magazine for advising a swat team sniper on shooting a barricaded perpetrator, on-scene in real-time, then signed off on clearing the sniper instead of recusing himself on the use of force investigation. 2022 is fast looking like the year of doubling down on stupid. I need an aspirin and a MAG-20 classroom refresher…
I suspect that the surge in violence is part of a program to cause “normies” to evacuate so as to provide an excuse to import a new population drawn from the Illegal Alien influx that is being imported. It worked in Compton (California).
Otherwise,the political “elite” would find a way for urban residents to get FOID cards and maybe even licenses to carry. If the locals thought that the City/County would really Hold and prosecute the violent, they might actually inform on the threat to themselves and their family. I suspect that many of the locals are “prohibited persons” due to past history so making them “legal” would make life safer for law enforcement. Unfortunately Duncan is both anti-prosecution of criminals and very tolerant of the crime in Chicago. The powers that be are driving business and “normies” out of the City by not prosecuting theft and looting but are making no effort to make it possible for the locals to defend themselves. Looks to me like part of a Compton plan. In Compton, the new Hispanic population (their gangs, actually) attacked and killed Black gang-bangers, their friends and families. Compton went from ~100% Black to ~70% Hispanic within a few years. If the Black population could defend themselves, it would probably disrupt the population replacement. The Chicago/Illinois politicians have probably come to the conclusion that the Black urban population would never be part of a functioning community so keeping them defenseless encourages their vulnerability to eviction and “exile”. Let the suburbs and smal” towns deal with those useless people.
Compton was part of an endless ghetto. No one cared where the useless population escaped to. BUT, if the Whites in the surround are armed, they might take action to protect themselves, their families, and their neighbors from the influx of ghetto refugees. That might disrupt the plan if the ghetto gangs were afraid of the White population in the designated refugee dumping grounds.
Pols like Duncan are anti-self defense for a reason. His financial future depends on disarmed victims both in the City and in the surround. American cities are doomed relics of the 19th Century. No one needs them any longer. Clearing out the “defectives” to make a “landing zone” for the replacement population means a new cycle of grift for the “Pols” and profit for the RINOS and The Chamber (pot) of Commerce. Victim vulnerability is an essential part of the process.
“Arne Duncan, it would have been more helpful if you’d told those community people you’re trying to reach that if they identified the killers to the police – you know, the same killers they are afraid of and want to wreak vengeance on – that might be an effective new strategy to solve your city’s murder problem?”
Many are carrying guns, even illegally, not to do crimes but because they are scared. While it’s better to have one’s gun confiscated and even be prosecuted for illegal carrying than to be murdered, it’s better not to suffer either. And if you snitch on a murderer you’re going to need to use that gun — you most certainly will either be murdered or get caught for your illegal gun.
Heck, even among people who carry guns legally there’s a fear that if you shoot a criminal in a place like Chicago the city will try to make your life miserable and try to find some excuse for prosecuting you.
It doesn’t help that for years we’ve been told that we shouldn’t resist violent criminals — that we should just let them have whatever they want. Well, one of the things they want is not to be snitched on.
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