I guess you could call this the war at home.
As violence increases in the city not 20 mins (to an hour or more depending on traffic) from my home, the best answer the local government can come up with- is even more guns on the streets.
Chicago Police SWAT teams are already equipped with M4 carbines, but rank-and-file officers are out-gunned. They’re only allowed to carry pistols. When you’re up against a street gang member armed with an AK-47, that’s like taking a BB-gun to a battle.
Used by the U.S. Marine Corps, the M4 is an assault rifle that fires more shots in less time than a conventional handgun. The fully automatic version can fire up to 1,000 rounds a minute, although the magazines hold 20 to 30 shots.
Last week, police arrested a man suspected of using an AK-47 during a shoot-out with police just after he allegedly used the gun to kill a man at a South Side plumbing business.
In October 2006, police were in a shoot-out with three gang members they thought were on their way to carry out a gang hit. Police fired at the men after one of the suspects raised an AK-47 at them. Some of the officers were armed with assault weapons and shotguns. Two of the suspects were killed.
Of course, this spawns many questions:
How did these individuals get their hands on ak-47s?
Couldn’t this just prompt violent offenders to seek the next level of fire power to combat police armed with semi-auto to automatic weapons?
Granted, there has been a big increase in violence, specifically gang related shootings reported in the past week or so, and people are looking for any reason to explain the increase, from increases in temperature (allowing for more outdoor extracurricular activity they say), to ease of procuring weapons, and lack of police presence aside from cameras on street corners.
But one has to wonder if returning the streets of Chicago to a warzone like state of readiness/weariness is the way to go. The last time gang activities saw this kind’ve response in the city- booze was being trafficked and sold illegally, and the government was notoriously corrupt.
Now the switch has been made from booze (now legal) to drugs (still not) but the government is still questionable (though now for more white collar dealings and frauds, and not turning blind eyes and being in league with the gangs).
High school dropouts are high, the U.S. education system at large is years behind other developed countries, absentee parenting is rampant as recession falls hardest on the ever shrinking middle class and leaves the lower class needing to hold multiple jobs if there’s even a hope of holding onto homes and keeping food in the fridge, drug use continues to be criminalized at a rate that is ill-fitting given the “crime” itself of using- leaving many in a ”justice” system that sees 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. imprisoned coming out far worse off in life than they ever could’ve been with treatment and education on addiction rather than mandatory minimum sentencing and fines, and let us just all face it- times are tough and getting tougher, with no end in sight…
So now here we are with a plan some are calling Mayor Daley’s surge. As I’d like to hope we’ve seen in Iraq, force is not an answer to a problem, when the problem itself is hardly understood. We have to dig into the roots of our social ills if we want to seek peace. Of course, we could just spend years and billions barricading off areas of our cities, setting up check points, and having heavily armed roaming patrols on duty 24/7 from now until an unforeseeable future, lord knows we’re good at that.
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