Several factors drive Chicago’s current orgy of violence, but the supposed availability of guns isn’t one of them.

For example, in Florida, nearly one in five adults has a concealed carry license of some sort, and firearm violent crime in that state had dipped to historic lows.  Chicago, with its relative paucity of guns, is in its worst orgy of violence in 20 years or more – and that’s with modern medicine to save the lives of those who have been shot or otherwise wounded in attacks from violent criminal predators.

It’s nice that Chicago’s new top cop Eddie Johnson appears to have deviated from the old Chicago Machine Democrat playbook of blaming guns for Chicago’s problems.  Maybe he knows that blaming guns isn’t going to solve the problem – and if the problem isn’t solved he may find himself out of a job.  Maybe he’s just tired of the violence and unlike his predecessors, really wants to go after solutions, not scapegoats.

Here’s an excerpt of a Sun-Times editorial he wrote:

Supt. Eddie Johnson: Two men with 80 arrests tell crimes’ story

By Eddie Johnson, Chicago Police Superintendent

(Sun-Times) – Eighty.

That’s the combined number of arrests between two men – one an alleged offender, Raul Martinez, and one a victim, Robert Rosenau – involved in a homicide that occurred in Chicago this past Monday. The long and violent histories of these men demonstrate the challenges that Chicago police officers face every day in making our city safer.

…Police cannot respond to this alone. The sad arrest histories of these men is the latest illustration of how judges and the rest of the criminal justice system need to join parents, clergy, activists and Chicago’s residents as our partners to create a culture of responsibility and accountability in neighborhoods across the city. For years, repeat offenders with violent criminal records have been able to continually cause harm in our communities with minimum consequences.

Offenders tell me that as long as they can get out of jail in a matter of months for carrying a gun, they are going to do it again. And Martinez, the alleged offender in last week’s murder case, is the perfect demonstration: in 2014, he was sentenced to three years in jail on a gun charge, but walked free just over a year later.

So I’m going to continue to demand that the criminal justice system do a better job to hold these violent individuals accountable and keep them off of our streets.

…By our count, about 1,300 individuals — or less than one percent of the city’s population — are responsible for the vast majority of violence we’ve seen in recent months.

…Just as integral is the role of parents. A life of violence can start when parents look the other way. With gun offenders getting increasingly younger, we all have a responsibility to be better parents to our children. I raised one son and two daughters and I’m helping raise a granddaughter. It’s on us, as parents, to teach young people right from wrong. Because if we don’t raise them right, the streets will steer them down the wrong path.

…We are all in this together.

I didn’t see a single mention of blaming “guns” for their problems.

Eddie Johnson instead tackles many of the real reasons for the Windy City’s spike in violence.  The only issue he didn’t tackle was the Ferguson Effect, but he’s taken a big step in the right direction.

Reason:  Repeat offenders

He mentioned how many of these offenders and so-called victims frequently (how about almost always?) have long histories of arrest.  These aren’t the people voted “most likely to succeed” in high school – these are members of America’s criminal class.  I’ve seen the Chicago Police reports detailing victims of shootings and homicides.  Two things stand out:  On any given day, only maybe 15% of the victims have no criminal history or gang affiliation.  The number of arrests of the victims?  It’s off the charts.  They are frequent fliers in the criminal justice system.  And they are the “victims”.

We’ve seen a number of these reports, and even wrote about them in January.

 

CHICAGO VIOLENCE: A look at Victims Jan 08-10, 2016

We love Second City Cop.  They have all sorts of great information from the law-enforcement perspective on current events on the ground in Chicago.

They love us too.  You’ll notice a link to our site on the right side of their page.

This weekend we got a scanned copy of a Detailed Situational Report from Chicago Police sent from a Yahoo account, with the simple message “Have fun with this”.

“For Internal Law Enforcement Summary Briefing Purposes Only” each page said at the bottom.

Over the weekend of January 8-10, 2016, there were three armed robberies where someone was shot, five homicides and 20 incidents of aggravated battery, firearm incidents (someone got shot).  The data looks a lot like what’s reported at HeyJackass.com on a regular basis, and shows homicides over this period were more than twice that of 2015, and shootings just shy of three times that of the same weekend period in 2015.

Welcome to Murder City, USA.

There’s 11 pages of information – including the names and description of victims and detailed summary of each incident.  I don’t want to post a .pdf and inadvertently burn my benefactor, or to unnecessarily disseminate personal information about people victimized.  I will say reading it left my jaw agape.

The most telling things in page after page of victims?

1. Only two had no criminal history and no gang affiliation.  The first was a 21-year-old Hispanic male driving in the area of Laramie and Deming when he felt a pain in his foot.  He went home and realized he’d been shot.  Cops believe he just happened to be driving through when “Spanish Four-Corner Hustlers” were shooting it out with the “Pachucos”.  Of course, when cops canvassed the neighborhood where the injury occurred, nobody knew anything.  The second was a female present when her girlfriend tried to shoot her own brother in an altercation over a cell phone.  Read on for the Jerry Springer-like narrative from that incident!

2. Only two of twenty-eight incidents had suspect information listed.  Not arrests, mind you.  Merely suspect information.  The suspects, three total, had 17 arrests between them and only four convictions.

3. The victims, almost without exception, were all gang affiliated or hanging with people with known gang affiliations.

4. There was one justifiable use of deadly force listed.

5. The justifiable use of deadly force we were looking for – the Z&S Liquor store robbery thwarted by a shop owner – was not listed.

Reason:  Poor parenting.

Attached to a story about this past weekend’s rally out from of Father Phleger’s church by some do-gooders demanding a “cease fire” on Mother’s Day (and more gun control) was this piece.

Mom loses 2 sons in 2 years to shootings: ‘The devil is very busy’

 

(Chicago Tribune) – Jutuan Brown gathered her three surviving children Sunday afternoon and told them — for the second time in two years — that an older brother had been shot to death.

“You live, you gotta die. But it’s just the way that my kids are leaving here, you know? Gunshots,” Brown said Tuesday. “That’s hard. Very hard. Especially for a single parent. I told them before we left what had happened, and they was just staring at each other like, what are we gonna do now?”

Her oldest son, Timothy Triplett, 20, was found with gunshot wounds in a parkway on the 3500 block of West Flournoy Street in the East Garfield Park neighborhood Sunday afternoon.

How he came to be shot is not clear. Brown found out when her brother called.

He was killed on April 25, 2015.  He wasn’t at home studying for his college Differential Equations class or his Rocket Science 201 class.  He wasn’t volunteering at church to help feed the homeless or deliver “meals on wheels”.  He wasn’t at his job, either.

No, he was shot four or five times by someone on foot.  No, he was no choir boy.  He sure looked like a sperm donor daddy with three kids with as many “women” and no marriages to show for it.

Brown got a similar call two years ago after police shot and killed her 16-year-old son Tywon Jones in the Lawndale neighborhood. Police said the boy had been shooting at a crowd from his bicycle, and then at police, when officers returned fire and killed him.“He was bipolar, depressed,” Brown said at the time. “He took medication for it. He was sad sometimes, too sad, sometimes too happy.”

Oh, your poor son “Tywon” tylost when he tried to run his gang-banger-with-a-gun bully act on police officers – AFTER opening up on a crowd of people like they are nothing more than clay pigeons.  Cops shot his pathetic ass dead right there.

This woman makes a convincing case that she herself is a poster child for poor parenting.  She tries to make up for gross parenting incompetence by playing that victim card.  “Oh, poor me.”

She would do well to look in the mirror to see the single biggest reason her boys are dead instead of on their way to successful, productive lives through hard work, education, and self-discipline – subjects apparently alien to Miss Jutuan Brown.