Illinois Politicians Are All Sizzle, No Steak on Confronting Gun Violence

G overnor J. B. Pritzker, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, and other leading Illinois lights convened after another deadly July 4 holiday weekend at an upscale Loop steakhouse for the annual Chicago summer “gun violence is out of control” press conference.

It did not appear that any of the shooting victims or their family members had been invited for steak and the pinched attempts of our top politicians to convey empathy and resolve.

This year’s press conference, which in keeping with past years was loosely planned for some time in July, comes on the heels of a withering 109 residents being shot over the Fourth of July weekend.

This year’s problem, as understood by Governor Pritzker, is not that he and the rest on the steakhouse dais spectacularly failed in curbing this predictable carnage that causes so much devastation and suffering in the lives of their constituents. The problem, Pritzker explained, was that there is a group of Republican saboteurs in D.C. that keeps cutting the funding for lifesaving programs like “community-based violence intervention” or CVI.

Curiously, Pritzker and the rest of the men being entertained at the steakhouse, who control every budget and levy of consequence in Illinois, had been unable, themselves, to adequately prioritize funding for these urgent and crucial programs. In fact, they were there to thank Chicago’s business community for raising $100 million for CVI.

What is this new and exciting CVI program that is going to succeed where all else has failed? Well, it’s not new. Rather, it has been operating in Chicago since 1999.

If you asked them, CVI uses “people who understand the challenges unique to their community” and “utilize[s] knowledge to interrupt violence before it occurs.” If you asked a Chicago cop, CVI hires ex-cons to approach truly vicious men, men who have no problem indiscriminately shooting into a crowd to kill the one person who slighted them on social media, and negotiate the terms of their not committing murder.

The first, non-delegable duty of leaders in any society is to protect its members with force from the tyranny of evil men.

They can’t now turn to the police for help after having spent the last several years selling them out and discrediting them in the eyes of those who live in these affected neighborhoods and who need them the most.

So, as the bodies pile up, their straight-faced plan to keep residents and their children from getting shot at a summer barbecue is for felons to nicely ask avowed killers to stop.

The moral delusion and evasion here is perverse. Do you honestly think CVI would be the plan if 109 people got shot near the swanky steakhouse?

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the performance of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who did not disappoint if you were playing a drinking game where everyone drinks when Johnson utters some incoherent patchwork of pseudo-academic, quasi-mystical jargon to obfuscate what would otherwise be a distressing lack of substance.

Mayor Johnson wants to charge ahead with our 50-year, billions-and-counting dig for the magical “root causes” of crime. It’s a phrase that when uttered in succession with the words “education” and “poverty” is one of the central prayers of the Left.

Most crime, on the contrary, is not causally linked in a meaningful way to education and poverty no matter how many times the invocation is uttered.

If it were, why are the vast, vast majority of undereducated people living in impoverished areas not committing crimes? Why did crime more than double between the 1960s and 1990s in the U.S. at the same time that poverty rates fell from 25 percent to 10 percent; spending on education per pupil increased over 400 percent; and literacy, high school graduation, and college graduation rates increased dramatically? Why after 2008, when the economy crashed and poverty rates increased from 11 percent to 15 percent, did crime rates in the U.S. continue to fall until the hysteria and police scapegoating of 2015 and, then again, 2020?

Why do we all know the name George Floyd, but not the name Bryson Orr, a little 8-year-old boy who was killed in Chicago on July 4 along with his mother and another relative when gunmen opened fire at his house? (May perpetual light shine upon their souls.)

The truth, served well-done, is that the strange fire that the men in the steakhouse played with and let rage in 2020 as it warmed their political ambitions and kindled their “reimaginings” of the criminal-justice system continues to smolder in the form of bloodletting in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods long after they all got reelected.