I was talking to the Old Hippy at the building yesterday as he puffed a cigarette. He is one of those guys with the hair thinning on top but the long stuff on the sides still gathered up in a pony tail. Nice guy. Unreconstructed. We got to talking about the gun thing. Turns out he turned in his NRA card and sent back his ball cap after the massacre at Columbine. He still likes shooting, but opposes big magazines and assault rifles.

I said, “This is more in the line of a Constitutional crisis, in my view. For example, I have a semi-automatic Ruger rifle. It is completely legal under even the most restrictive legislation introduced so far. I replaced the stock, though, and now it is an Assault Rifle. Same gun, same action, same barrel length. That is ridiculous. The people proposing the laws do not know what they are talking about.”

“Yeah,” said the Old Hippy. “But you don’t need a folding stock for hunting.”

“Who said this was about hunting?” I asked. Then we talked about other things. The level of discourse is depressing. I have said from the beginning of this national agony that there is a mechanism for addressing perceived issues in the Constitution. It can be amended, and has been dozens of times. If this is really important, maybe we ought to try following the law of the land, right?

It is puzzling to me that the places where the restrictions on the 2nd Amendment are the most severe are the places where violence- gun and other- is so prevalent.

It is a difficult thing to discuss, and there is so little rational thought on either side. It is too simple to say that on the one side are people who think people should not do bad things to one another, and view it as only common sense to restrict tools that are used sometimes to do truly bad things.

On the other side is a large body of people who are implacable in their belief that the progressives are intent on disarming law-abiding citizens, and each incremental step in restriction will lead ultimately to confiscation under the imposition of a police state.

Given the severity of the new raft of laws in New York State, and California’s vow to go the Empire State one better in terms of restriction, it is hard to argue that the progressive wing is not going about exactly that.

Other states- Virginia among them- teeter more closely between the poles of belief systems. In Colorado, the proponents in the legislature made some astonishing assertions about women and the way they should be permitted to defend themselves against assault that would be hardly countenanced were they to have emanated from the Right.

My Front Range pal sent me a long thoughtful appreciation of this situation in the historical context of gangsterism in Chicago. Why Rahm Emmanuel would want to be Mayor is beyond me. Even he must understand that nothing he believes actually seems to work in the City That Works.

Here is what he said this morning, after examining a piece in the National Review:

“Here in Colorado the state House of Representatives has narrowly passed a bill controlling the size of ammunition magazines we may buy in the future.  No more than 15 rounds to a magazine.  No doubt the Senate will also pass the bill and Governor Hickenlooper will sign it.

All this in the cause of public safety.

Not that there’s any credible linkage between gun control laws and public safety.  In Massachusetts they passed fairly draconian gun control legislation back in 1998.  Since then the number of annual gun-related murders in the state have doubled.

The excuse given for this inconvenient reality is that the Massachusetts measures were undercut by more lax laws in neighboring states. That doesn’t wash either. In 1998, Massachusetts had a lower gun murder rate than the surrounding states.  Now it’s twice as high as the surrounding states.

Let’s face it:  The progressive obsession with gun control is about just that – control.  Specifically, they’re fixated on disarming law-abiding citizens whose political views they dislike.  To do something about mass shooting incidents, they’d have to address the complexities of people with mental health issues and an obsession with violent video games (or violent Hollywood movies).  To do something about the appalling murder rates in some cities, they’d have to address drugs and gangs.

The casualty list from the Newtown disaster pales before that in Democrat-run Chicago.  Here’s a peek into the situation there from National Review:

Hey, man. Hey, man. What you need?” The question is part solicitation, part challenge, and the challenge part is worth paying attention to in a city with more than 500 murders a year. The question comes from a young, light-skinned black guy with freckles. We’re in the shadow of what used to be the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, only a 15-minute walk from the Hermès and Prada boutiques and the $32 brunch at Fred’s that identify Chicago’s Gold Coast as highly desirable urban real estate, a delightful assemblage of Stuff White People Like. Just down Division Street from the boutique hotels and the more-artisanal-than-thou Goddess and Grocer, Cabrini-Green is still in the early stages of gentrification, though it does have that universal identifier of urban reclamation: a Starbucks within view of another Starbucks.

All that remains of Cabrini-Green is sad stories and the original section of row houses around which the projects grew up. Those row houses are being renovated as part of the foundations-up effort to rebuild the neighborhood. Even the name “Cabrini-Green” is being scrubbed from memory: The new mixed-income development on the site of the old Cabrini-Green Extension heaves under the unbearably pretentious name “Parkside of Old Town.” But some of the old commerce remains, and Freckles is pretty clearly an entrepreneur of the street. “You buying?” I ask what he’s selling, and he explains in reasonably civil terms that he is not in the habit of setting himself up for entrapment on a narcotics charge…

Chicago may vote for the party of housing projects, but nobody wants to live next to one, or even drive past one on the way to Trader Joe’s. One local tells of the extraordinary measures he used to take to avoid driving by Cabrini-Green, where children would pelt his car with bottles and trash whenever he stopped. And eventually, he learned not to stop at all, blowing through red lights on the theory that it was better to risk a moving violation than risk what the locals might do to him.

So they tore down Cabrini-Green. And they tore down the Robert Taylor Homes and the Henry Horner Homes and practically every other infamous housing project in the city. And in doing so, Chicago inadvertently exacerbated the crime wave that now has the city suffering more than twice as many murders every year as does Los Angeles County or Houston.

You cannot really understand Chicago without understanding the careers of Larry Hoover, David Barksdale, and Jeff Fort, the three kings of the modern Chicago criminal gang. Chicago has a long history of crime syndicates, of course, including Al Capone and his epigones. In the 1950s it had ethnic street gangs of the West Side Story variety, quaint in pictures today with their matching embroidered sweaters and boyish names: the Eagles, the Dragons. But in the 1960s, marijuana began to change all that… Chicago’s black gangs came to dominate the marijuana business – an enterprise model that would soon become supercharged by cocaine and heroin. David Barksdale built a tightly integrated top-down management structure for his gang, the Black Disciples, while Larry Hoover and Jeff Fort did the same thing for their organizations, the Gangster Nation and the Black P-Stone Rangers, respectively. Barksdale and Hoover would later join forces as the Gangster Disciples, a group that, though faction-ridden, remains a key player on the Chicago crime scene today, with thousands of members – 53 of whom were arrested for murder in 2009 alone…

Government contributed mightily to the growth of the modern gang by providing the one key piece of infrastructure that the Barksdales and Hoovers of the world could never have acquired for themselves: the high-rise housing project. The projects not only gave the gangs an easily secured place to consolidate their commercial activities, they helped to create the culture of loyalty and discipline that was the hallmark of the Chicago street gang in its golden age. With most members living and working under the same roof, the leaders could quickly quash intra-gang disputes or freelance criminality. Fort, Hoover, and Barksdale were children of the 1940s and 1950s, men who came of age before the cultural rot of the 1960s – practically Victorians by the standards of the modern gangster. They were (and are) brutes and killers, but they managed to maintain some semblance of cohesion and structure. Barksdale went so far as to collect taxes – fees from unaffiliated drug dealers operating on his streets.

When the towers came down, Chicago’s organized crime got a good deal less organized, and a number of decapitation operations run by the Chicago police and federal authorities had the perverse effect of making things worse: Where there once were a small number of gangs operating in a relatively stable fashion under the leadership of veteran criminals, today there are hundreds of gangs and thousands of gang factions. Chicago police estimate that there are at least 250 factions of the Gangster Disciples alone, with as many as 30,000 members among them. Vast swathes of Chicago are nominally under the black-and-blue Disciples flag, but in reality there is at least as much violence between those Disciples factions as between the Disciples and rivals. Some are one and two block operations, many with young teens in charge. The Barksdales and Hoovers may not have been Machiavellian in their subtlety, but they were far-seeing visionaries compared with the kids who came streaming out of the projects in their wake.

…Mr. Butt is dearly missing his AK-47. He’s a native of Pakistan, where Mikhail Kalashnikov’s best-known invention is as common as the deer rifle is in the United States, but in Chicago he cannot possess even a pea-shooter, which has him slightly nervous in his role as my ghetto tour guide, chauffeuring me through the worst parts of Englewood and Garfield, the biggest battlegrounds in Chicago’s 21st-century gangland warfare.

“In Pakistan, everybody has an AK-47,” he says. “But it’s not like here. They don’t go walking into a school and shooting people… On the South Side, it is just like Afghanistan. Every square mile has its own boss, and everybody has to answer to him. From the business district through 31st Street, everything is perfect.” Perfect may not be the word, but I get his point. “Below 31st Street, everything is jungle.”

Mr. Butt locks the doors, and we cruise through Englewood and environs. Martin Luther King Drive, like so many streets named for the Reverend King, is a hideous dog show of squalor and dysfunction, as though Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s depressing reportage in 1965’s ‘The Negro Family’ had been used as a how-to manual. Mr. Butt points out the dealers, who don’t really need pointing out. It’s about 8 degrees outside, and the Windy City is living up to its name. In the vicinity of Rothschild Liquors, grim-faced men in heavy coats smoke cigarillos and engage in commerce. Mr. Butt’s habit of pointing out miscreants by literally pointing them out brings scowls from the street. Lying low is not Mr. Butt’s strong suit…

“They do this to their own neighborhood,” Mr. Butt says, exasperated. “They make it a place no decent person would want to be. Why do they do that? It’s very bad, very scary at night.” This from a guy who vacations in Lahore.

…The usual noises were made [by Democrats in Washington and Chicago] about gun control, and especially the flow of guns from nearby Indiana into Chicago, though nobody bothered to ask why Chicago is a war zone and Muncie isn’t…

Chicago was the only US city to break 500 murders last year, and that is a spike – but a spike only over the past few years. Chicago has seen these waves before: In 2008 the city saw 516 murders, and it had nearly 1000 in 1974, the year David Barksdale’s past finally caught up with him and he died of kidney failure resulting from a gunshot wound suffered years before. Things have been worse in the past, but there is a sense that Chicago is moving in the wrong direction. New York City had nearly 2000 murders in 1974, and more than 2000 the year before. But those numbers are unthinkable today: New York City finally got control of itself, which is a big part of the reason why Rudy Giuliani – a thrice-married recreationally cross-dressing pro-choice big-city liberal- was taken seriously as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Rahm Emanuel would need a miracle worthy of his surname to follow a similar path, to get Freckles to give up commerce and to get Mr. Butt to regard him as something other than a municipal joke…

The related problems of drugs and gangs are driving most of the crime in this country.  There’s no easy answer to the challenge.  Drug legalization won’t help.  Even if you were to legalize marijuana nationwide (something I’m sure Democrats would be willing to do), are we to legalize crack cocaine?  Heroin?  Meth?  The Mexican drug cartels are all-pervasive in American cities.  In Chicago, I understand, the trade is controlled by El Chapo Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The street gangs are just his retail connection.  But gangs aren’t a simple problem either.  They are an amorphous asymmetrical warfare threat, just as tenacious in their own way as the Taliban are in Afghanistan – and you know how well we’ve done with the Taliban.

Deeper down, below the drugs and the gangs, is a cultural problem.  Why aren’t there nightly massacres on the streets of Muncie, Indiana?  Why is Houston, with a larger percentage of minorities than Chicago, twice as safe in terms of gun murders?  Neither Muncie nor Houston have strict gun control laws.  Why is New York City, which does have strict gun control laws, so much safer than Chicago, which also has strict gun laws?  Why are Oakland, Detroit, St Louis, East St Louis and Jackson, Mississippi all high-murder cities, yet with widely-varying gun laws?

I think the competence of municipal government is a factor in the above, as is each city’s policing strategy.  But there has to be more to the story.  I’m not completely sure what that might be.  I am sure, though, that the current wave of punitive gun control legislation being generated wherever there’s a Democrat-controlled legislature will do nothing to help the problem.  If it did, Chicago would be a paragon of public safety.

Instead, it’s Gangsterville.

Copyright 2013 National Review, Vic Socotra and Our Pal in the Front Range.
www.vicsocotra.com