By Rick Manning —
To quote the lead of a June 18 article in the Chicago Sun-Times, “13 people were killed and at least 43 more were wounded in shootings across [Chicago] between Friday evening and early Monday.” The dead included a three-year-old boy.
Yet there is a virtual national media blackout as the surging national homicide rate has been denied by the left and some on the right, as it doesn’t fit neatly into the recent calls for early release of tens of thousands more hardened criminals from federal prison, lax to no border enforcement, and a surge of around a million new immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries since President Barack Obama took office.
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Seeking the facts, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) compiled local law enforcement agency data for 2016 and compared it to 2014 and 2015 data to find out the truth, and it is stark. Overall violent crime and homicides are up dramatically in most major cities.
Clearly, something is going very wrong in our cities, and it is fair to ask if the embedding of Mexican drug cartels and El Salvadoran-based MS-13 gang members into our cities is combining in a lethal cocktail.
If the latest push of the left was banning handguns, this homicide wave would likely be national news, but with the recent shift toward continuing to empty the prisons along with defending illegal immigration, the staggering increases in murder rates are just another inconvenient truth that peppers local media headlines, without mention nationally.
The attempted mind-trick by the national media—hoping that the public will ignore local crime problem this election season—won’t work as sanctuary cities, the July 1, 2015, murder of Kate Steinle by an illegal immigrant, and drug violence are part of the fabric of local political discussions.
Most Americans don’t want the federal government intimately involved in local crime solving, but they do expect the federal government to do its job of securing the borders and allowing the prosecution of illegal alien criminals.
What they don’t want is the federal government opening the doors to their prison cells, releasing violent drug kingpins back onto the streets to make things even worse.
Rick Manning is the president of Americans for Limited Government.
