UPDATE: Some of the commenters (see way below) are right. It is a little early to be doing the end-zone happy dance.
So I’m going to park my conclusions until a) the end of summer and b) a year from now. I am 104% confident I’ll be doing an end-zone happy dance then, and that will be largely attributable to carry permitting (and focusing law-enforcement on criminals, rather than law-abiding citizens.
Yep, I jumped the, er, gun.
For now.
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The murder rate in Chicago is off this year.
Sharply.
As in, 55 fewer than at this time last year. That translates into about a 40% reduction in the murder rate.
That’s not just a reduction. That’s a free-fall.
And while one can expect crime to get worse in the summer, this is a month on month comparison.
So what’s changed in Chicago in the past two years (2012 was horrible, 2013 merely very very bad)? Was in the police chief? The police’s methods? The number of gang-bangers? A sudden “come to Jesus” by the gang bangers?
No, nay, nope and uh-uh.
No – the only real change in Chicago’s legal landscape in the past year is that law-abiding citizens can get firearms.
Locked And Loaded: And the difference is drastic:
The first three months of 2014 have seen the fewest number of homicides since 1958 — six fewer than this time in 2013, and 55 fewer than this time in 2012, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The city is on track to have hundreds fewer deaths – perhaps a 30-40% drop – than in 2012.
Emanuel: Firing Blanks From A .25: The city of Chicago is trying to spin things otherwise, claiming it’s gotten illegal guns off the streets and has changed up its training – which reinforces the point Real Americans have been making all along; it’s the criminals, stupid. Make life complicated for criminals, and stop bothering the law-abiding citizen, and you get less crime.
It’s fun to watch the left – led by Media Matters, a Soros-sponsored attack-PR firm that prefers poor black inner city people to sit down and shut up unless they’re at the polls voting Democrat – try to spin their way out of this. Here was Media Matters after a particularly bloody weekend in Bear town last summer:
The recent bloody headlines out of Chicago relayed the sad tale of the city’s deadly weekend, where seven people were killed in shootings and more than 50 were victims of gunfire…the Chicago news triggered the usual response from conservative gun advocates, who love to mock the city’s homicide rate…Conservative conspiracists such as Rush Limbaugh even claim Democratic politicians, including Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel, want the city’s murder rate to remain high so they can use the killings to advocate for stronger gun laws.
Call it “satirical but accurate”.
Cut The Crap, Focus On The Results: Not satirical but still accurate is the fact that Media Matters and the entire left were wrong again, as always. And we – the Real Americans – were right.
And there are 55 families in inner city Chicago right now who are mighty happy about it. They may not know who they are. And that’s the way it should be.
Why are white liberals so blasé about dead black children?
It would be interesting to see if the breakout in reduction between gang on gan violence vs more innocent victims. If it is the latter, that would support our side’s view on arming of the law abiders saves lives.
Mitch, given that the first carry permits only went out March 1, isn’t it a little bit early to credit CC with this? Especially since most of the drop happened from 2012 to 2013, before any permits had been issued?
Now I’ll agree 100% that liberalizing gun policies is a good idea, and it’s also strongly likely that the McDonald decision helped by putting more guns in homes–if you break down homicide by location, you might find something very interesting there. I’d even think that thugs might be anticipating the carry law–thinking people could be armed before they are, as it were.
I just don’t think I can even make a good “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy because these data aren’t really “post hoc” yet.
Bike, you are correct, except that the whole point of a permit isn’t that you show a criminal a gun or a card; they just know there are more of them out there.
And I’ll re-check the numbers, but I’m fairly sure 2014 is a big drop from 2013, too.
I have to agree with Bubba — I don’t think we have a big enough sample size, especially since Chicago has also had a horrible winter, which could also explain any drop in the murder rate.
Let’s see what the numbers look like in April, 2015.
A while back, I’d listen to an online Chicago police scanner at work (yeah, but it was entertaining). Listening to daily chaos in mid-afternoon (as schools were letting out) was both interesting and really disturbing. It almost sounds like something out of a science fiction novel….a society in total breakdown.
If we can save just ONE life, or 55…
Hate to say it, but it’s the weather. The winter in the Midwest has been monstrous – as y’all know. Let ‘er warm up a bit and we’ll see.
To be honest, since the training is two days, the permit is $100, the gun costs….I’d be surprised if CC is linked to huge changes in Chicago simply because of the cost, and the fact that Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are, well, poor and cannot afford a permit.
Here’s what I would expect; people who were afraid to use firearms in self-defense in the home will no longer be so (2012-2013 data, plus some I hope), and hence attacks on homes will go down. For permit holders, I would expect some drop in crime in the suburbs and middle class neighborhoods, especially those uncomfortably close to the “hood”.
I would be very glad to be wrong, and find that poor neighborhoods benefited a bunch, but this is where my thoughts are now.
Uncommitted crimes are the most difficult to solve, but are frequently cited as either justification for some type of progressive but unsuccessful police or political initiative; “Just try and imagine how many more crimes would have been committed if we didn’t …”
Or offered as positive positive proof that something which may or may not be responsible for the decline were actually responsible. I’m sure CPD and Superintendent McCarthy have a whole bundle of reasons how they caused the drop. Just about every suggestion I’ve read here is a viable cause or contributor.
Additional proof that we and the MSM value life and the loss of it differently for some is apparent, at least to me, in our slavish drooling over the death of the South African model, allegedly at the hands of an Olympic athlete with prosthetic feet. How many young Black Chicagoans died similarly during the trial? Even the circumstances of her death are far from unusual or interesting. Looks, fame, and socioeconomic status do seem to lead …
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/?utm_source=Social%20media&utm_medium=Twitter%20button%20above%20story&utm_campaign=Reader%20Tweet%20from%20above%20story%2024675%20Apr%2008%202014%2007:00
or is this the reason?
Murders were down in Chicago but up in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City.
Do murderers migrate, maybe by Mega-Bus?
.
By Amtrak, Joe. And thus my dad’s advice when I visit Chicago–stay inside the loop or along the lakeshore–goes out the window, because Union Station is inside the Loop.