It’s A Quagmire!
No wonder Obama wants to bring the troops home; he’s got a fancy house that needs protecting
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — Nine people were killed in 36 shootings over the weekend in Chicago, reflecting what some community leaders say is a deadly breakdown in discipline among gang members after a crackdown over the past few years put many of their leaders behind bars.
“The older guys, in the past, looked out for the little ones. Now they’re all locked up,” said Nick Stames, a social studies teacher at Crane Tech High School on the city’s gang-ridden West Side.
I love this meme: it’s the cops’ fault. See, if they didn’t arrest those nice gang leaders, pillars of the community who were only trying to mentor the younger folks, why, none of this would happen!
Politics | Mr. Bingley | 
April 22, 2008 10:09 pm
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“The older guys, in the past, looked out for the little ones. Now they’re all locked up,”
Like hell they did. Gang leaders in particular, the older members in general used (and still use) kids to do their dirty work to avoid long jail sentences. A kid gets busted, he goes to juvie for a spell and ends up with their records expunged when they hit eighteen.
That’s worse than the Al Capone gang war days.
Maybe Elliot Ness and the Untouchables should be
called in.
This is the Chicago version of gun control.
What we need to do is declare a war on gangs. There has to be a swift, equivalent action against this type of violence. The problem isn’t just that these people are killing each other, its that they’re killing innocence, and terrorizing neighborhoods. Their violence needs to be met with the strength of the communities, and of the government. When seeing the crackdown, instead of deciding to join a gang, they may then decide to join the workforce, aiding the community in that way. We have too many problems at home we need to focus on before we’re seen as a paradigm country. How do these people get AK-47s? We let them by not acting.
Now the City and State law makers will push for more laws on gun control. Chicago and it suburbs have more than enough gun control laws. These individuals that participated in this past weekend’s bloodshed do not care about the laws – so why should “Jo Citizen” have to suffer. Here are the laws for Illinois. It is unlawful to own a handgun inside the City of Chicago. And for the cat who shot up a store with an AK-47, those were banned back in 1994 – huh!
# Must be 21. Age 18-21 requires consent of qualified parent or guardian
# No felony convictions
# No drug addictions
# Has not been patient in mental hospital in preceding five years
# Does not have mental illness
# Must be a legal resident of U-S.
# Must be 21 to purchase handgun. 18 (with responsible adult permission) to purchase a long gun.
2. Waiting Period
# 72-hours for handgun
# 24-hours for rifle or shot gun
3. Cities with Handgun Bans
# Chicago: Chicago bans possession, retail sales, and private sales and/or transfers of handguns and also bans the sale and/or transfer of certain types of handgun ammunition. It also requires that all other guns legally possessed be registered.
Gangs are essentially a cancer on American city life. And they are metastasizing. Smaller cities and even some towns are beginning to have gang problems.
I have no smart ideas on what to do about it but this is one of the things that worries me a lot.
I think that a good place to start ricki is to crack down on illegal immigration, a two-pronged approach by (1) more effective border sealing and (2) prosecution of employers. And I don’t want lawn service guys in jail; I want the large-scale employers of illegals, the chicken folks like Tyson and the pork folks like Hormel, for example, to be arrested and do time. And just watch the trickle-down from that.
Reduce the number of illegals and you reduce the potential members of all the hispanic gangs that are a large part of the problem, and by reducing the number of illegals in the work force you make more jobs available for poorer native-born Americans, especially blacks in places like cabrini green so they have an alternative to gang life. i see no reason why we should help out the poor of other nations to the detriment of our own.
a perfect solution? of course not, but a good step in the right direction, it seems to me.
Unfortunately, illegal immigration is only a tiny part of it. Most gang members here are homegrown, even those with strong contacts with Mexican gangs.
Prosecution of employers is a non-starter, unless it’s limited to employers who deliberately and knowingly hire illegals. I’ve seen ideas floated to prosecute ANY employer who hires illegals, even unknowingly. That is absolutely a non-starter – I got pissed the first time that I was required to prove, with a birth certificate, driver’s license, AND SS card, that I was a citizen (and that was to keep a job).
Crack down on employers too hard, and the fallout on everyone will not be pretty.