"When you buy a condo, you don’t think you’re going to have a bike rack right in front."

"Who would want that?"

Chicago Public Schools provides "safe passage" maps for school kids...

... to help them deal with new school assignments after the closing of 47 schools and to soothe parental worries about children crossing rival gang territories and vacant buildings and lots.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said... “This is nothing new.... Kids have been crossing gang lines for years to go to school. We have a program in place that’s very clearly worked. We’re doing more of it this year based upon the school closings."...

Because so many schools closed this year, CPS added nearly $8 million to the program and is hiring an additional 600 people to escort students along designated safety routes....

"Mayor Rahmbo had already come under suspicion as being an advocate of privatization but his current move left little doubt."

"Emanuel’s demonstration demolition is meant to endear him to the elite privatization movement. The destruction of public education will make way for more neoliberal policies, and of course, some nice business opportunities for friends and contributors. The only force strong enough to oppose the corporate ‘reformers’ is the teachers unions, which has made them enemy no. 1. If the unions fail to stop the looters it will be open season on universal education throughout America."

Alarm is raised at FireDogLake.

"A baseball game between two Chicago public high schools was canceled Saturday when some parents from a North Side school..."

"... refused to let their children travel to the South Side for the game, saying they were worried about the safety of their kids."

"This is probably one of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had,” said [William] Wittleder, who has coached high school baseball for 10 seasons and is in his second year as Payton’s head coach. “It’s very heartbreaking. This is totally against what I believe in.”

"You know, if I was living out on a farm in Iowa, I’d probably want a gun, too."

"When somebody just drives up into your driveway and you’re not home, you don’t know who these people are, you don’t know how long it’s going to take for the sheriffs to respond, I can see why you’d want some guns for protection."

Obama, quoting Michelle (or purporting to quote Michelle), showing some understanding of principles of federalism related to the way people have different needs and different policy perspectives in different parts of the country.

Rereading the quote, I said: Why Iowa — of all places where people might have a preference for guns? Why Iowa and not, say, Idaho? Vocalizing the question made me instantly see the answer: They had to go to Iowa to campaign. Iowa's the big early caucus state. They know Iowa, but they don't know Idaho. Why would they?

By the way, how long does it take the police to respond in Chicago? They know Chicago....

I assume Obama likes to graciously acknowledge that there are some parts of the country — unsophisticated places — where people cling to their guns because that's all they've been able to figure out so far in their limited little lives. Show a little respect for these rubes before you proceed further, to school them on the need for gun control. But drag in Chicago, and it gets complicated. Chicago is the very place where he thinks the gun control is needed, the very point that must be explained to the blinkered farmers.

If you concede that you might want a gun when somebody comes up to your door in Chicago, it's no longer clear what the sophisticated people are supposed to think.

"Just don’t say the Chicago police picked on your child, when we were watching all the assault going on, especially by teen women."

A mob of 500 teenagers, supposedly organized via Facebook, hit the city's elite shopping district.

Why does Chicago have the least federal gun-crime prosecutions?

"The districts of Eastern New York, Central California, and Northern Illinois ranked 88th, 89th and 90th, respectively, out of 90 districts, in prosecutions of federal weapons crimes per capita last year..." — but why? Wayne LaPierre has pointed to this study, as if it shows why we don't need more gun laws and we simply need to get serious about the gun laws we already have. Chicago epitomizes a city with a gun violence problem, so why is it "dead last"? — to quote LaPierre.

From the first link, which goes to a U.S. News article:

[T]he U.S. attorney's office in the Northern District of Illinois maintains that federal weapons law enforcement is among the top priorities of their office. "We have a number of different methods of attacking gangs, guns, drugs and violent crime," says spokesman Randall Sanborn, who notes that many gun arrests are reviewed to determine whether the arrest should stay with the county or be brought to the federal level. "We look at which court the defendant is likely to get a substantially greater sentence... More cases that used to be brought federally are now staying in state courts because [they are] now able to get a sentence equally great or greater," he says....

While the districts that ranked lowest last year for federal gun crime prosecutions all contained major cities, the districts at the top of the list for its enforcement were almost exclusively rural. The districts of Southern Alaska, Kansas and Western Tennessee ranked first, second and third in prosecutions of federal weapons laws per capita last year.

Susan Long, a statistician and co-director of [Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal data], said the data revealed a stronger federal enforcement presence in rural areas than urban ones. "If taxpayers of [a certain area] don't pass strong gun control measures ... the feds pick up the ball," she said.

So Chicago ranks last in federal prosecutions because there's more state law regulating guns and there's more enthusiasm among state prosecutors about enforcing it. Street-level violence is more properly handled in state court. Unless you've got interstate webs of criminal activity, gun crimes shouldn't be cluttering up the relatively scarce federal district courts (which have to handle civil and criminal cases). What seems to be happening in Chicago is a preferable allocation of federal and state power.

The reason other areas have a higher proportion of federal gun-crime prosecutions seems to be that there's much less state-level enthusiasm about gun crimes and the feds are stepping in to fill the gap. Depending on what crimes are prosecuted, you might want to criticize the feds for oppressing the people in the states that — following their vision of government — have a more easygoing attitude about what people do with guns (perhaps because people around them aren't doing such bad things, as they are in Chicago). But you've got to perceive the way these sparsely populated places are getting proportionately more prosecutions and thereby driving places like Chicago lower on the TRAC list of federal prosecutions rankings.

"Do you know where Chicago ranks in terms of enforcement of the federal gun laws?"

"Out of 90 jurisdictions in the country, they ranked 90th. Why doesn't NBC News start with, 'Shocking news on Chicago. Of all the jurisdictions in the country, Chicago's dead last on enforcement of the federal gun laws'? Why doesn't the national press corps, when they're sitting down there with Jay Carney and the president and the vice president, why don't they say, 'Why is Chicago dead last in enforcement of the gun laws against gangs with guns, felons with guns, drug dealers with guns'?"

Why push for bad new laws when good old ones are not enforced? — asked Wayne LaPierre (on "Meet the Press" today).

"'Genocide,' one eulogist called it, lamenting that guns had 'become part of our wardrobe.'"

"Another exhorted the politicians in the pews, 'Don’t give us lip service.'"

In the pews were Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, Pat Quinn, and  Jesse Jackson. In the casket was Hadiya Pendleton, who lived to the age of 15.