Welcome to Chicago.

Chicago’s already off to a rousing start this year, with forty-some homicides in the month of January, eclipsing last year’s orgy-of-violence numbers.

Meanwhile, leftist Democrat politicians in Chicago are decrying “guns” are the problem, distracting attention away from their miserable economic, social and cultural leadership of the city.

Guns aren’t the problem, folks.

Guns are merely the scapegoat.

Gangs are the primary problem, and they are prevalent and popular with the young men because of the urban dependency culture.  Uncle Sam is the absentee “father” and breadwinner for too many of these families in the inner cities and those young men have no role models aside from what they see on TV which is about as far from healthy and responsible as one could get.

Generations of families have been raised by single moms, often not even adults themselves when they have their first baby, which is seen as a right-of-passage into adulthood.

Have a baby, get your own place and get government benefits and then cry to the media when one or more of your ill-tempered, criminal children get killed in gang-related violence.

It’s even sadder when non-gang folks are brought into this violence, through happenstance or as victims of these hoodlums preying on innocents to subsidize their thug lifestyle.

That happened yesterday.  Twice, fatally.

15-Year-Old Girl Shot And Killed In Kenwood Neighborhood Park

Chicago (CBS) – A teenage girl–an honor student who had just performed at President Obama’s inaugural–was gunned down Tuesday afternoon in the Kenwood neighborhood, just blocks from the high school she attended.

CBS 2’s Mike Parker reports the victim, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, was taking shelter from the rain with a group of 10 to 12 teenagers under a canopy in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park on the 4500 block of South Oakenwald Avenue around 2:30 p.m., when someone jumped a fence, ran up to them, and opened fire.

And the second instance?

Two teens accused of beating man to death over a cigarette

Chicago (Sun-Times) – Two West Side teenagers were ordered held in lieu of $500,000 bail Tuesday for beating a 43-year-old man to death during a fight over a cigarette.

Derrick Burns, 15, punched Anton Baker causing Baker to fall onto a couch at Burns’ home in the 1000 block of North LeClaire on Dec. 12, Cook County prosecutors said.

What sort of monsters beat a man to death over a cigarette?

The same sort of monster than kills his brother for asking him to be quiet.

Officials: Man, 63, fatally shot brother with shotgun for telling him to be quiet

Bleeding from a gunshot wound to his side, prosecutors said Ronald Peters crawled to the street outside his South Side home on Friday and put his hands in the air.

Larry Peters then raised a 12-gauge shotgun and shot his brother a second time, a witness told police.

Ronald Peters, 50, died a short time later. His older brother is being held without bail on a first-degree murder charge. Prosecutors say the dispute started when Ronald Peters asked his brother to be quiet.

Larry Peters, 63, was arrested about five minutes after the 3 p.m. shooting as police responded to the scene in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.

No, sir.  Guns aren’t the problem.

A subset of Obama’s inner-city voters are the problem.

As are Chicago’s Draconian gun control laws, which do nothing more than keep black and Latino inner-city residents disarmed and unable to defend themselves against monsters in their midst.

Gun control laws are race control, pure and simple.

Gun control is racist.  It’s classist and sexist too.

Look at Aurora, Illinois’ second-largest city merely 20 miles west of Chicago.  They live outside of Chicago’s gun control plantation, with none of Chicago’s litany of gun control rules, regulations and laws.

Aurura also had ZERO homicides in 2012.  Not a one.

Chicago and Chicago-style gun rules and regulations:  532 homicides.

Aurora and no Chicago-style gun rules and regulations:  0 homicides.

It’s not rocket science.

We wrote about the cultural aspect of the violence a couple of weeks ago in response to a grand-slam article from Front Page Magazine.

Here it is for your ease of finding it.

America’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs

January 8, 2013

 

Front Page Magazine hits a grand slam home run with a story about the real problem in America.  It’s not guns.  It’s gangs.

These gangs are turning our inner cities into third-world war zones.

And Obama and his voters blame gun owners.

America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Gang Problem

(Front Page Magazine) – Chicago’s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore’s murder toll has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland.  It’s 121 in Memphisand 76 in Birmingham.

Washington, D.C., home of the boys and girls who can solve it all, is nearing its own big 100.

Those 12 cities alone account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all murders in the United States. And we haven’t even visited sunny Atlanta or chilly Cleveland.

Highlights from the rest of the story, all WELL worth reading in its entirety.

• It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.
• …Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.
• …Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs.
• …Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.
• …America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Our murder rate now largely consists of criminals killing criminals.
• …Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.
• America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.
• We do not need to have a conversation about the NRA. We need to have a conversation about Chicago.

Emphasis added.

Let’s come together and strike down the racist gun control regulations in Chicago.

Let’s allow the good guys in Chicago to more easily acquire the proven benefits of firearm ownership for their families.

Let’s also come together and pass a right-to-carry measure to allow law-abiding Illinoisans – and particularly law-abiding Chicagoans – to carry the means with which to defend themselves from the barbarous, predatory thugs preying on innocent people just as 49 other states have done.

After we get right-to-carry, those practicing the “thug lifestyle” will either be smart enough to be deterred from attacking innocent, law-abiding folks or the not-so-bright will assume room temperature.

In either event, violent crime will go down, as has happened in EVERY OTHER STATE to adopt shall-issue carry license laws.  In short, it’s a win-win for innocent, law-abiding Illinois residents, making our families safer.

Then perhaps we can tackle some of the cultural issues that are quite frankly holding down so many of Obama’s voters.