Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Media

Chicago top cop skirts the gun issue

Not a day passes without our national and local newscasts demonstrating and encouraging the abandonment of common sense. For those in a position to be heard and believed, after all, the application of common sense might be confused with an impolitic political position.

Sept. 17’s 10 p.m. Chicago schoolyard automatic rifle assault — 13 wounded, including a 3-year-old — led to a news conference at which Chicago’s top cop, Garry McCarthy, dramatically provided the three reasons for Chicago’s latest in a ceaseless series:

“Illegal guns, illegal guns, illegal guns drive violence.”

His words made every national, local and radio report I saw/heard in the hours and full day that followed. It was presented and left to simmer as indisputable fact.

But McCarthy’s claim, at best, made only partial sense. After all, if we were to play “Bait Car,” placing a pile of illegal, fully loaded firearms on a street corner in a neighborhood overwhelmingly populated by those raised to choose right over wrong, chances are that no one would touch them, let alone grab one to later unload into a crowd at a playground.

Chances are that most of those pedestrians would call the police — immediately.

Yes, illegal guns fuel an epidemic of murder. Teens in the ’hood now regard them as gotta-have status symbols, posing with their guns on Facebook and through cellphone cameras.

The procurement and use of illegal weapons is an end result, often the final result, but it’s not, as McCarthy pronounced, the cause — not any more than cars cause DWIs or pens cause embezzlement.

But no one — certainly not our most media-centric black activists or our shake-their-heads-in-sorrow TV news stars — chooses to deal with the cause:

Yet another generation — another wave–— of kids with nothing and no one, and the immediate, prohibitive odds they face to avoid being the fathers or mothers of another child with nothing and no one — unless a gun and a street gang count as something and someone.

America’s most vulnerable, stuck-in-reverse culture begs for genuine leadership, truth-tellers. But all it gets — and even re-elects! — are crooked, self-enriching politicians and photo-op activists who very selectively show up to blame the police, the schools, the government and, of course, racist America.

Surely McCarthy, as he faced that phalanx of TV cameras, knew better. As a Chicago cop, he must know which kids are headed where from the moment they’re born. He must know that Chicago’s latest outrage culminated with the firing of an assault rifle, but that such episodes are loaded and triggered before the assailants can walk.

If only McCarthy had said something more meaningful, something like:

“We can keep blaming illegal guns, but they’re the final cause. The root cause — if we’re really looking to fix what’s wrong — lies in a senseless, success-proof culture that few wish to identify, let alone try to reverse, for fear of being called racist.”

And then McCarthy, having spoken common sense, would be fired.

Early in ABC News’s (with Diane Sawyer) day-after report on that shooting, ABC chose to exploit it for ugly, irrelevant self-promotion. It included video of a Chicago town meeting on violence that, as ABC’s reporter said, was moderated “by Diane in October.”

* * *

That Twitter quickly became an idiot’s paradise is neither new nor surprising. Finding the anti-social on “social media” takes no more than a minute.

On Sept. 21, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, over video of the previous night’s Miss America pageant — seen, of course, on ABC — reported that winner Nina Davuluri is an American of Asian-Indian descent.

But then Stephanopoulos reported that she had been targeted in bigoted tweets. Gee, what a shock. ABC even saw fit to display one in a graphic while Stephanopoulos read it aloud for emphasis.

Great, just what we need. ABC News providing promotion and more inspiration for fringe fools.