{"id":32842,"date":"2012-12-19T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T18:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=32842"},"modified":"2014-05-28T12:19:59","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T17:19:59","slug":"32842","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=32842","title":{"rendered":"Tragedy On A Dimmer Switch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The nation wracks itself in grief &#8211; justifably &#8211; over the deaths of 20-odd children in Connecticut. \u00a0I&#8217;d shudder to meet the monsters that don&#8217;t recoil in horror and outrage.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m \u00a0struck, though, by the lack of outrage over the carnage in President Obama&#8217;s home town, the town run by the machine that put him in office, the city run by his former Chief of Staff.<\/p>\n<p>In Chicago, <a href=\"http:\/\/homicides.redeyechicago.com\/ages\/\">since 2008, 622 children have been murdered<\/a>. \u00a0That&#8217;s almost thirty Sandy Hook classrooms full of kids. \u00a0They didn&#8217;t have the &#8220;luck&#8221; to look, largely, just like the children of our nation&#8217;s &#8220;elite&#8221;, our media, business and wonk classes &#8211; white, exurban, upper-middle-class. \u00a0The died in ones and twos, not in a bloody pile that became a media feeding frenzy. \u00a0They weren&#8217;t killed by children of privilege, shot by weapons that the dominant political class was trying to turn into a boogeyman and political wedge; they were mostly murdered by their neighborhoods&#8217; own criminal underclass, carrying mundane, mostly-stolen pistols and illegally-modified shotguns, almost none of them by any &#8220;assault weapon&#8221; anyone would recognize.<\/p>\n<p>No &#8211; they&#8217;re mostly black and latino. \u00a0They&#8217;re mostly from poor families, students at Chicago&#8217;s wretched public schools. \u00a0And they live &#8211; lived &#8211; in a city that has been the American left&#8217;s social laboratory for the better part of a century. \u00a0And they died in a city that is a fully-owned subsidiary of the American left, and a key part of its national power base, and a place that has made it harder for the law-abiding citizen to buy guns than to buy crack, heroin or a hooker. A city that trumpets the ambitions &#8211; and exhibits the failures &#8211; of everything American &#8220;progressivism&#8221; stands for.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re minority, they&#8217;re poor, they&#8217;re rhetorical guinea pigs in America&#8217;s biggest leftist lab.<\/p>\n<p>And they&#8217;re dying at the rate of seven or eight classrooms-full a year &#8211; not on one horrible bloody Friday, but\u00a0<em>every year, for years past and for years to come<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And outside their communities, their families, their neighborhood&#8217;s churches? \u00a0They die anonymously.<\/p>\n<p>And there is the American left&#8217;s concern for &#8220;the children&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s do make sure that&#8217;s part of the &#8220;Conversation about Guns&#8221;, shall we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nation wracks itself in grief &#8211; justifably &#8211; over the deaths of 20-odd children in Connecticut. \u00a0I&#8217;d shudder to meet the monsters that don&#8217;t recoil in horror and outrage. I&#8217;m \u00a0struck, though, by the lack of outrage over the carnage in President Obama&#8217;s home town, the town run by the machine that put him [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[297,294,298,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-favorites-culture","category-favorites-politics","category-favorites-rkba","category-gun-free-zones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32842"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32849,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32842\/revisions\/32849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}