The Gun Fondlers Save Chicago, And More News In Your Gun Fun Times Roundup

Late last week some actual good news about violent crime came out of the great city of Chicago: the homicide rate for the first three months of the year fell to the lowest level of any first quarter since 1958 . There were six fewer homicides than in the first quarter of 2013, and 55 fewer than the same period of 2012. What accounts for this significant drop? Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy cited more intelligent police training and activities, more community programs keeping kids off the streets, and the seizure of 1,300 illegal guns since the beginning of the year. Some blog commenters we saw attributed it partly to the face-melting Chicago winter being even more face-meltingly brutal than normal. But America’s gun-fondling wingnuts know the real reason: Illinois passed a concealed-carry law last summer and now Johnny Thug will think twice about messing with potentially armed, freedom-defending citizens!

“Illinois Gets Concealed Carry, Chicago’s Murder Total Plummets Immediately” trumpeted the Second Amendment fetishists at Bearing Arms. “Chicago Enacts Concealed Carry; Murder Rate Promptly Falls to 1958 Level” enthused the rabid ferrets of Townhall. “Can We Credit the New Conceal Carry Law in Chicago for Reduced Homicide Rate?” asked Pajamas Media’s aptly named Rick Moran before he cited a whole bunch of reasons why the CCW law probably didn’t deserve credit, but finished up by telling his readers not to discount it. Good save, Moran! On Twitter, some of our favorites, like Ol’ Perfesser Instapundit and Dana Loesch, were uncritically citing some of these stories as if they are gospel truth.

But then here are some facts that one had to go beyond the headlines to note. For one, this was the sixth consecutive quarter in which violent crime in Chicago has dropped, which means the trend started well before the Illinois legislature passed concealed carry. For another, the city of Chicago did not start handing out concealed carry permits until the end of February (and already yanked one idiot's permit because he thought having a concealed carry permit meant he could wave his gun at anyone he was arguing with). Chicagoans have been legally packing heat for one month during an eighteen-month downward trend in the overall crime rate, so of course the wingnuts are interpreting it as, “We’ve got the thugs and gun grabbers on the run!”

What’s particularly funny to us is just a couple of weeks ago we were rolling our eyes at a flare-up of the wingnuts’ oft-heard shrieks about Chicago being a war zone done in by Obama and his liberal thugs’ refusal to let citizens defend themselves. A couple of weeks later the wingnuts hear that crime has been going down, and they want credit for it! Sorry guys, you don’t get to show up with a six-pack at the end of the party and take credit for getting the entire crowd hammered.

It’s possible the news out of Chicago didn’t get wider play because of the terrible shooting at Fort Hood, after which the wingnuts were predictably hollering about soldiers not being allowed to carry guns on military bases, which as yr Doktor Zoom gunsplained the other day, is a twenty-year-old regulation signed by President Clinton, who was following up on a policy set by Poppy Bush before him. A couple of military commanders went on TV to say that no, despite this terrible event and the prior Fort Hood shooting and the mass slaughter at the Washington Navy Yard last year, they still don’t want thousands upon thousands of people walking around their bases strapped. This led to the entertaining sight of one former Army colonel slapping down diseased skunk vagina John Lott, the all-guns-all-the-time advocate most famous for being his own sock puppet. Lott’s son is stationed at Fort Hood, and we are very happy for the young man and his family that he is safe and unharmed. Lott, however, is still an idiot. It’s funny how conservatives sneer that liberals should always listen to what our military folks tell us...until those military folks tell us something that conservatives don’t like hearing.

In the past we’ve talked about various gun fondlers trying to march on Washington D.C. with their guns to prove some point about watering the tree of liberty and freedom and whatever other buzzwords pop into their heads (BENGHAZI!!!) only to get shut down by the District’s authorities enforcing its gun control laws. Over the weekend the executive director of Amnesty International tweeted his organization’s desire to put together a million-person anti-gun march on the nation’s capital sometime this summer, which presumably will have an easier time than the pro-gun marches, what with the marchers not being armed with AR-15s and all. As of this writing the announcement doesn’t seem to have hit the wingnut media yet, but we’re really looking forward to the fondlers hearing about this and the subsequent explosions of their noggins.

Just for shits and giggles, we have this pro-gun Oklahoma legislator, a man who once wrote a bill to create an official Second Amendment Day in that state, accidentally shooting another man in the face with his shotgun while the two were hunting pheasant at a reserve. “Gosh, I’m as safety [sic] as I can be,” exclaimed the bewildered nitwit, who couldn’t believe he’d fired a shotgun shell containing hundreds of pellets in a direction where another human being was, and subsequently blamed the sun for temporarily blinding him. No word yet on whether the national GOP will recruit him to run for Vice-President in 2016.

One last bit of tangentially gun-related news that made us laugh. Last week the wingnuts went ballistic over Mozilla’s ousting of its newly appointed CEO, Brendan Eich, after his $1,000 donation to California’s Proposition 8 a few years ago came to light. Ashe Schow, a truly execrable Washington Examiner writer whom we mostly know for recently agreeing -- apparently willingly (!) -- to be the butter on addlepated douche noodle Patrick Howley’s man-bread, scribbled up a short piece about the controversy in which she started by asking the question “When did America stop being the place for free ideas and free speech?” To which we say, we don’t know, Ashe! That's a question that a young and ambitious reporter could perhaps look into, because it sure is a big fucking mystery! 

Schow ended her piece by noting “Because diversity means weeding out anyone who disagrees, right?” As of this writing there is no word on when she plans to publish her vociferous defense of Dick Metcalf and his Second Amendment apostasy.

[ HuffPo / Raw Story / Twitter / The Oklahoman / Washington Examiner ]

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