High-decibel discussions of a "gun crisis" have been pushed to fever pitch following massacres in Texas and Ohio. Meanwhile, Chicago and other cities battle mass shootings--committed by many shooters, not just one--just about every weekend.
On the same weekend El Paso and Dayton suffered their tragedies, 59 people were shot in Chicago and seven victims died. The Chicago Police Department communications officer publicly posted a 51-second audio clip of one of the shooting incidents. It's a chilling account of an unimaginable night in a residential neighborhood.
Start to count in your head: 1,001, 1,002 ... All the way up to 1,051. And imagine relentless gunshots sounding the entire time. Pop-pop-pop-pop, rat-tat-tat.
It's hard to believe you're not listening to a battlefield recording from some war.
Unlike El Paso and Dayton, neither of which will likely ever again see shootings such as happened a couple of weeks ago, Chicago's gunplay resumes in some terrifying measure every time the sun goes down. Holidays always strike horror in hearts in certain violence-ridden sections of town. Locals there know what's coming; they can only pray and hope it won't affect them or their families.
The gun-crime shame in America is this: We wouldn't even be having noisy national arguments about a gun crisis if it weren't for El Paso and Dayton.
How have we come to a place in our thinking that we're happy to ignore the run-of-the-mill shootings en masse in cities like Chicago that decimate poorer communities?
"Do something" is the shouted mantra following firearm atrocities at a popular bar scene and a crowded store. Why haven't we "done something" about day-in/day-out gun crimes that outnumber mass shootings 10,000 to 1?
Add up all the victims of mass shootings for the entire year, and it won't even equal the annual murders in one medium-sized city.
The worst-ever year of mass shootings left 117 people dead among our 320 million citizens. More than that had died on Chicago's streets by Easter this year. Across the nation, which is full of large cities with violence-beleaguered residents, it only took the first three days of January for gun crime to claim more lives than have been lost in mass shootings during all of 2019.
The true crisis in Chicago and St. Louis and Detroit and elsewhere is crime. It's a critical mass-level counter-culture that embraces lawlessness and devalues life, liberty and property. Among the criminal subclass, guns have high value, which creates demand.
Ask any basic economist what that leads to. And how well it's ever worked to try and control rampant demand by throttling supply. That's the proverbial formula for creating lucrative black markets, be it alcohol or drugs or--as Chicago knows too well--guns.
When we remember that 26 percent of America's gun homicides are clustered in neighborhoods housing less than two percent of the population, it makes fearmongering on this flashpoint issue even more disgraceful.
Today's frenzied anti-gun rhetoric cold-shoulders the poorest Americans stranded in violent neighborhoods, whose kids are stuck in failing schools. And who live in real fear every day of imminent gunfire near their parks, their playgrounds and their homes.
News programs feature stories of average people being afraid about where the next mass shooting might occur. But they can't begin to comprehend the daily dread and terror of a single mom trying to keep her kids alive on Chicago's west side.
It's the difference between fear as a political ploy and fear as an ongoing mode of survival.
A bogeyman is scary because of what we think might happen. That's worlds apart from being afraid of what is actually happening. Of what happened last week, yesterday, today. And what will happen again tomorrow and next weekend and--in hope against futile hope--over the Labor Day holiday.
Maybe it's the numbers that make us numb. You can't count the overlapping gunshots in those 51 seconds. So why even try? And why don't people just move out of those bad neighborhoods anyway?
We seem to like our news best in big, breaking style, so we can elevate our arguments to principle-level disagreements over what the founders intended regarding AR-15s.
Daily mass gun crime is ugly. Maybe we prefer to only look at that much ugliness on rare occasions, the way unhinged single-shooter mass killings are served up.
It would be a national achievement if this loud conversation could migrate toward the roots of America's violent crime culture problem, for which guns are merely accoutrements.
But that would lead us to confronting hard truths, and harder decisions, about lifestyles and values and education and complicated cultural corrective measures.
It's so much easier to simply squawk for an assault-rifle ban.
That won't help 99-point-something percent of the homicide victims in America, but at least it would mean we have done "something."
Before any new crime legislation of any sort, Congress needs to load up on buses and head to Chicago. Democratic presidential candidates, too. Spend an entire weekend within earshot of what's on that 51-second recording.
Then face the American people and grandstand over assault rifles.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 08/16/2019