Solutions, not hand wringing, needed from Trib editorials on Chicago violence

Solutions, not hand wringing, needed from Trib editorials on Chicago violence

There was one positive aspect to the Trib's latest editorial on Chicago's massive gun violence problem: 'Why is there so much shooting and killing in Chicago?' For the first time the Trib Editorial Board didn't lay the blame on City Hall for not investing in the South and West Sides, and on the affected residents for re-electing the mayor and aldermen. That is good because such calls are meaningless non-solutions to a century long problem of racism, disinvestment and neglect that cannot be governed away by City Hall. Many thousands of guns pouring into these economic wastelands serve as gasoline on the smoldering ruin of once vibrant neighborhoods, producing uncontrolled violence. Just like the lack of investment in jobs, housing, health care and schools, it's the lack of sensible regulation that allows permits this arming of the most vulnerable and fractured citizenry.

The Editorial Board needs to re-examine its governing mantra of less government, less taxes, less regulation and less involvement in addressing problems unraveling our social fabric. Instead of supporting candidates and policies aimed almost exclusively at widening economic disparity between the privileged and the forgotten, the Trib needs to begin representing the folks left behind trapped in poverty, despair, and violence. Rebuilding these communities with federal and state leadership is not government overreach. It is self interest rightly understood. Curbing the manufacture, sale and distribution of the guns that inflict war like casualties on innocents is not government tyranny. It is sanity.

The Trib laments 'Chicago's weekend from hell.' The residents of Chicago's ravaged communities, walled off from the privileged majority, lament their every day from hell.