It Stops When You Stop Being Stupid, Chicago

I saw this coming when I lived in Chicago — the first pieces of it were evident then. What had been a “bad area” problem was starting to bleed into other parts of the city, including where I lived. It was infrequent, but the statistical pattern was clear — and convincing.

So was the usual leftist horsecrap in response — “there are too many guns!” (never mind that it was flatly unlawful to possess a weapon useful for personal defense in Chicago — and had been for 30 some years at the time), primarily.

The murder spree continues, as do the political polemics:

On Saturday, gunfire upended their plans. Lewis was standing in the 1300 block of West Devon Avenue about 3:20 p.m. when a gunman approached on foot and shot him in the back, Chicago Police said. He was pronounced dead less than 40 minutes later.

“He was looking to start a family. He was talking about having children,” said Warren Rader, a close friend and fellow photographer. “Everything was going right for him.”

Lewis’ wife, an art director with the advertising firm Leo Burnett, called Rader on Sunday morning.

As near as anyone can tell this man was not an “intended” target — he just happened to be where a thug pulled a gun and started shooting. Police believe the shooting was related to some sort of gang dispute.

The usual polemics are again being trotted out, specifically “there are too many guns.”

Ignored is the fact that it’s still illegal for a criminal to possess a weapon, say much less use one. Further ignored is that by definition if you are about to commit a criminal act you have already declared your refusal to follow the law. One more law will not change a thing, particularly in this case; once you decide to commit murder all the other laws you violate in the process are “free” in that it is not possible to imprison someone for life more than once, or execute them more than once.

Those are facts by the way, not opinions.

What might change things is more guns — in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Raising the risk of the gang-banger confronting someone who can stop him immediately and permanently just might get through his thick skull. Quite possibly not, but irrespective of that I would argue that it is better to die resisting someone’s attempt to murder you than to be a target in a shooting gallery. The answer here is to simply respect the Second Amendment: Anyone who is an adult and wishes to carry, openly or concealed, may do so — period. Now the bad guys have absolutely no idea whether their “shooting gallery” might turn into a two-way firing range. It won’t have to happen to them often before the gang-bangers decide that if they want to shoot each other they better do it where those who are not their intended targets can’t see and stop them.

What would change things is two-fold – destroy the funding base for these gang-bangers and keep the violent ones locked up until they’re not dangerous anymore — which might mean “forever.”

Destroying the funding base for the gang-bangers is not complicated: Stop the War on Drugs. Legalize and tax them all. Yes, all of them. Test and label for purity then sell ‘em in the drug store over the counter. Yes, I said all of them.

Guns are ammunition are expensive. Gang fights are, for the most part, fundamentally over money. Destroy the funding base and most of the problem will go away.

But here’s the base problem: Politicians don’t want to break up the gangs as they’re useful for running their polemics on both the left and right. Rahm doesn’t have any desire to stop this crap in Chicago and neither does anyone else. The cops know who the gang members and leaders are, and there are already extremely nasty laws that bear on this conduct – specifically, Racketeering. 

If Rahm did care and so did the prosecutors they could go out and arrest all of the gang-bangers right here and now, charging them all with 20 year felonies. Convict ‘em and sentence them on an “every day to be served” basis.

The problem with doing that today is that there’s no room in the prisons. But if we legalized drugs and got rid of the laws that criminalized non-violent possession and trade among adults in same we could release half of the people in our prisons. The rest are there for violent felonies and serious financial crimes, and should stay.

We can break the back of the gangs in Chicago — or anywhere else in this country — in a literal afternoon. RICO is a very simple law; you only need a predicate felony and two or more co-conspirators. In this case there are lots of felonies and dozens of gang members in a given area. Arrest them all and charge them all — no roll-overs, no pleas, no nothing — and release all the non-violent people who are doing nothing worse than what people do every day when they go to the corner liquor store and buy, then consume a bottle of booze.

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

Contributed by Karl Denninger of Market Ticker.

Karl Denninger is the author of Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World. You can follow his daily commentary on capital markets at The Market Ticker and his weekly Ticker Guy Blog Talk Radio broadcasts.