Mass Killings and Killings in Chicago

In conservative and right wing comments on internet news reports of mass killings, especially where those killings are racially motivated (a significant fraction of mass killings), there are recurring memes. In addition to the ever popular “guns don’t kill people,” and “it’s a crazy person problem, not a gun problem,” we find versions of “why aren’t the media reporting on the n number of killings in Chicago in the last m days” (for some large number n and small m). 

Why should Chicago’s homicide statistics show up in online discussions of a white nationalist’s premeditated slaughter of Hispanics in El Paso? The explanations I find are either scary, stupid, or both.

I will pass quickly over the first stupidity. The fact is that the why-aren’t-the-media commentator almost certainly got the quoted n deaths and m days figures directly or indirectly from the media criticized, although perhaps filtered through the distortion of right wing internet sites. I will concede that the Chicago killings, like those of other localities, probably are farther back in the newspaper than today’s ideologically motivated mass murder.  The death of one and an unrelated two and one on the other side of town and so on get less coverage than the simultaneous murder of 20.  What is interesting is the commenters’ implication that this could only be because of political bias. What is their thinking, and why is it always Chicago they bring up?

Chicago’s murder rate is too high, of course, as any non-zero rate is. The Windy City’s rate, however, is not comparatively high among cities – around 25^th, with fewer murders per hundred thousand than, e.g. Dayton, Kansas City, KS; Richmond, VA, and San Bernardino. 

Our commentators sometimes take some apparent pleasure in pointing out that Chicago has long been a Democratic town. True, but then almost all big cities have Democrats in City Hall. Looking to the exceptions, San Diego, with an alternating but mostly Republican administration in recent years, has a low murder rate; Jacksonville, with a similar city hall history, has had a high rate. The mayor of El Paso is Republican, although he reports that Trump called him a RINO. I conclude that the party politics of Chicago are a not particularly informed add-on item for our “what about Chicago” commentators.

The real reasons for picking out Chicago is that, in the popular mind, Chicago is an African American city and that, as the third largest city, its murder rates, although not especially high per hundred thousand, are high in absolute terms. Chicago’s African Americans make up just over a quarter of its population. Among the 10 largest cities, only Philadelphia has a higher percentage, and it is enough smaller than Chicago’s to lessen the scariness of its statistics. New York has more African Americans than Chicago, but its murder rate is so low it would not further the implied argument. So it is Chicago that is best suited to white nationalist propaganda: “The real problem is not guns or white supremacists or right wing terrorism, it is black people (and brown people too, of course, but, hey, you get the point.)”

The right wing likes to portray every shooting by an African American as a “black problem,” and certainly not a gun problem or a poverty problem. The hypothesis that there might be fewer gun murders by every single demographic and social group if the country were not awash in firearms is suppressed. 

It is ironic that Chicago is the poster city for this right wing propaganda because it was Chicago’s tough handgun registration laws that the Supreme Court struck down in its aggressive expansion to the Second Amendment of the “selective incorporation doctrine.” The decision how to deal with gun deaths was taken away from the local elected officials by justices all of whom express states’ rights positions in controversial cases of other sorts. 

(Detour: To so rule the Court had to argue that the only right of the  Bill of Rights to be prefaced by a clause setting out a rationale (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,”) was none the less a “fundamental right.” Yet, not being based upon anything else is the very definition of “fundamental.” It is not 1^st Amendment wording that, “Religion being necessary to the virtue of a free citizenry, Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Free exercise stands on its own feet. It is fairly included within what is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” the traditional selective incorporation test. That you cannot have ordered liberty without a broad individual right to handgun ownership would seem an odd idea by almost everybody of almost every nation, except an ideologically committed section of the US population, among whose members are numbered the activist wing of the Supreme Court.) 

It is precisely the gun control issue that is the second motivation, after racism, for the “what about Chicago” response to mass shootings. President Trump: “The most stringent gun laws in the U.S. happen to be in Chicago - and look what is happening there!” (Tweet 1:00 AM - Jul 10, 2014) Chicago, he said elsewhere, is a “disaster.”  

Trump’s comments, not surprisingly, are false as to special Chicago stringency as well as to the relative disaster ranking of Chicago. It is true that it is more difficult to buy a gun in Illinois than in e.g. Indiana, which requires no background check for private sales, and happens to border on Chicago.   In addition to the Indiana guns, many involved in Chicago killings are black market, bought in Illinois privately without the state firearm identification card. Often these were stolen.  There are a lot of stolen guns in the United States because there are so very many guns, and because guns rank only after money as the burglar’s booty of choice. The bad guy’s gun may very well formerly have been the property of a good guy, one of the many side effects of good guys' having guns “for protection” – along with suicides, family quarrel shootings, and child deaths.

This aspect of the “what about Chicago?” meme is just a particularization of the general argument, that any shooting occurring in a building, campus, city or state that has gun laws too restrictive for NRA approval shows that gun control doesn’t work. What it shows in fact, of course, is that in a society saturated with guns, the probability of armed violence goes up everywhere.

As an argument against meaningful gun control, citing Chicago firearm deaths or the most recent death in a gun free zone is just stupid. “What about Chicago” as a response to mass killings is racist and stupid.