Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is famous for saying that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste since it allows you to do things you might not be able to get done except for the emotions of the moment spurring calls to action.Chicago’s bloody Memorial Day weekend, which saw a dozen people killed -- including a four-year-old-girl -- certainly proved no exception to Rahm’s Rule as he called for, wait for it, stricter gun control as he spoke at a luncheon honoring police officers for valor and service. “It’s not just about how many police you have, it’s about the quantity of guns that are on the street so we actually have gun laws that back up the men and women we just recognized,” Emanuel said.
This delusional sentiment warning that otherwise inanimate objects are the problem was echoed by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest after a bloody holiday weekend in Baltimore saw 29 shot and nine killed:
When asked about the violence yesterday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest suggested more gun control was one of the solutions.
“Obviously there’s some common sense things we could do -- certainly passage of some gun safety laws in Congress that could keep guns out of the hands of criminals would be one thing that we could do to try to limit the violence,” Earnest said.
In response to this liberal talking point, which ignores the fact that Democratic bastions like Chicago and Maryland have the strictest gun control laws in the nation, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke went on Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs to say that Rahmbo, a nicknamed earned for his White House ruthlessness, was shooting blanks in suggesting the problem was guns and not the criminals who use them:
Sheriff Clarke describes Emanuel as “dead wrong,” observing that “he must have gone to the same school that ‘president’ Barack Obama did on how to run a law enforcement agency. This is what happens when you have community organizers and academic elites and others who don’t know a thing about policing in the American ghetto start to dabble in police science.”
He says the cities experiencing these heightened levels of violence “might as well get used to it because this is what you’re going to have as long as you’re going to try to turn cops into social workers and you’re going to try to get them to emphasize de-escalation and more dialogue instead of going on the offensive to go after some very dangerous individuals.”
Indeed as Investor’s Business Daily noted in 2013, the problem in Chicago has historically not been gun violence, but gang violence:
The fact is that up to 80% of Chicago's murders and shootings are gang-related, according to police.
By one estimate, the city has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of cops. A police audit last spring identified 59 gangs and 625 factions -- mostly on the south and west sides -- none of which is going to submit to things like universal background checks.
In 2014, city fathers were crowing about a drop in the crime rate over the prior year, but did not bother to acknowledge its connection to...
