Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had roughly 399 students wounded, and 144 students killed during the 2008-2009 school year. If my math serves me right that’s about 12 children killed every month, and 2 children wounded every school day. Mayor Emanuel stopped publishing the numbers upon taking office to minimize the issue. Where are the cameras, the grief counselors, the national mourning, or President Obama’s tears for black and brown children being killed in Chicago on a daily basis! These numbers have been steady for the CPS over the last two decades.
Americans should not allow our gun laws to be changed because of a few deranged, mentally ill, socially alienated young men from affluent families. The facts are we have hundreds of thousands of young Americans coming back from war zones as combat veterans, and they have not picked up assault weapons and killed a civilian. The focus should be on funding mental health programs that were defunded under Pres. Reagan’s administration. We need to reactivate the policies that gave the states the ability to institutionalize mentally ill citizens.
Those of you who have followed my writings, debates, commentary and radio shows over the years know that I am not one for playing the race card. The disparity in news coverage and reporting by the MSM on the killings of black and brown students over the last four decades is reprehensible. I am numbed at this point to any new report about the killing our defenseless children. While the Newtown Connecticut shooting is tragic, sad, it’s no more shocking to me than the killings of thousands of black and brown school children across this country in urban areas since the 1980s. As an informed and concerned citizen I have noted the wholesale slaughter of Black and Brown children without as much as a whimper from the nation.
I was quoted by Anderson Cooper from a Huffington Post blog on air “if this type of carnage was going on in a white suburb we would have Black Water or the National Guard on the streets protecting our children.”
The hypocrisy of Americans not to address this issue of gun violence that has taken many young black and brown lives, in Los Angeles, Riverside County, Detroit, Oakland, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington DC, Newark, is the real tragedy. When I hear of a Newtown, Columbine, VA Tech it pales in comparison to me, when there are dozens of student killings in our urban centers on a daily basis.
Here we are in a supposed post-racial Obama era, and it seems to me that race and the color of one’s skin is clearly an issue. Why do I say that? I was told by senior-level administrators in the Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago school systems that over 70% of their students suffer some form of PTSD? Most of the children have witnessed, or know someone that was shot to death at an early age. There is not an outcry to provide a higher quality of life for these communities.
President Obama’s attempt to console the nation seems very hypocritical to me because in our Kenwood neighborhood, people are being killed two blocks from the president’s home frequently. In fact the violence was so heightened that a police board meeting was convened August 1, 2011. This is a copy of the article concerning a meeting.
The senseless murder of Derrion Albert only became a national news event was because Mayor Daley and Pres. Obama were in Oslo Norway trying to get the Olympics of 2016 for the city. The result was President Obama sent former CPS Superintendent and current Education Sec. Arnie Duncan, and Attorney General Holder, to review the issues and they promised to bring $30 million to the city to fight gang violence. That brought out Rev. Jackson and Sharpton to ride school buses while the cameras rolling. We (the public) do not know if the $30 million was received by the city, and if it was I’m sure it wasn’t used to protect black and brown students in the city given the continued killings.
However it appears to me that another student-killing tragedy in a white suburban neighborhood, committed by a mentally ill young white male, who profiles the same neurotic way has moved the forefront of the 24-hour news cycle. We have MSM commentators that know nothing about guns, gunplay, and gunmanship, except what they’ve see on television and in the movies. The same liberals or progressives totally ignore the carnage in black and brown communities across this nation. My intent here is to point out how when white students are murdered, it’s a tragedy in a news event, when black and brown students are murdered “it’s just a bump in the road.”
To Sen. Feinstein and other well intended politicians, I only this to say: None of you in Congress, nor President Obama, come close to the having the intellect and vision of the founding fathers. Please don’t make decisions for us based on your “naïve and idealistic” views of the world. When citizens are armed, they save lives like in Cong. Gifford’s shooting incident. The problem is not enough people are using concealed carry laws to protect themselves. Try to disarm the citizens in Detroit where the police department was reduced 50% or Pontiac, MI which lost its police department due to budget cuts. By the way Pontiac, MI is one of 10 most violent cities in the country. Guns don’t kill People, Criminals and Mentally Ill People Do!
About Post Author
