The Huffington Post had a story today comparing the homicide rate in Chicago to Kabul, which noted:
The directive for police to cover the Jarrett wedding arrives at a time where Chicago is facing a surge in its homicide rate. The Daily pointed out in a Friday column that more Chicago residents — 228 — have been killed so far this year in the city than the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan – 144 — over the same period.
The war zone-like statistics are not new. As WBEZ reports, while some 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 5,000 people have been killed by gun fire in Chicago during that time, based on Department of Defense and FBI data.
Chicago’s murder rate is also currently quadruple that of New York and double Los Angeles’ rate. Gun violence Friday evening into Saturday took the lives of at least one person — Antonio Buck, of the 5400 block of South Aberdeen — and wounded at least seven others, including a 16-year-old boy shot in the lower back around 11 p.m. Friday.
The story made the news because Laura Jarrett, the daughter of Valerie Jarrett, a White House adviser, had her wedding at her mother’s house, with President Obama and his family in attendance. This meant major security precautions, including between 100 and 200 Chicago police officers. The story contained a lot of information on the homicide crisis in Chicago.
Except, of course, the most politically incorrect information. Your Editor, who has read several of the stories concerning the murder rate in Philadelphia, was unsurprised: in a story about how many people are being killed in Chicago, one which compared it to the war zone in Afghanistan, there was not a single word written about just which Chicagoans were in the greatest jeopardy.
Naturally, it didn’t really take too much effort to find; the Google is my friend! Of 236 murders listed,1 through today, 49 of the dead were listed as being white, 1 as Asian, 8 unspecified, and 178 as black. The spreadsheet did not break out Hispanics, but your Editor, looking at the names of the victims, inferred that 36 out of the 49 whites listed as having been murdered were Hispanic.
Your Editor shall be blunt here: Chicago truly is a dangerous place . . . if you are a young black or Hispanic male. If you are someone else, you are relatively safe. And the statistics are so egregious that it takes the willful neglect called political correctness not to include that information in the story. When the PuffHo compared it to the deaths of American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, they failed to note that the Taliban don’t care to what race our soldiers belong; they aren’t looking for black soldiers or white Marines, but simply Americans in camouflage uniforms. In Chicago, race does seem to matter.
No problem can be solved unless it is properly identified; at least when it comes to the editors of the Huffington Post, identifying the problem isn’t really a nice thing to do.
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- Information accessed at 12:50 PM EDT on Sunday, June 17, 2012; this spreadsheet is frequently updated. ↩
And in another example of popular will going against supposed progressive conventional wisdom, roughly two-thirds of Floridians agree with the governor’s purge of non-eligible voters.
Just like with Passive-Aggressive Perry’s ridiculously repetitious contention that voter ID laws are “voter suppression” (despite roughy three-quarters of the public disagreeing with that view), again we see the public schooling the we-know-better-than-you radicals.
Yes, there’s no need for voter ID! None at all!!