President Barack Obama has been chided for failing to keep his promise to visit the South Side of Chicago, which he dubbed “his Kennebunkport,” every six to eight weeks, [Obama's Chicago visits: Mixed feelings on infrequency of trips home, By Katherine Skiba and Becky Schlikerman, Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2011] But on Friday (February 15) he returns to one of the largest concentrations of black people in the world to push for more gun control. [Obama coming to Chicago to 'talk about the gun violence', By Ellen Jean Hirst, Naomi Nix and Jennifer Delgado,Chicago Tribune, February 11, 2013]
Obama will use the gun violence in Chicago, in particular the murder of 15-year-old Chicago public school “honor student” Hadiya Pendleton, whose majorette squad had participated in Obama’s inauguration festivities a few days earlier, as a symbol for restricting firearms all over America. Pendleton was gunned down not far from the Chicago residence of America’s First Family. Her four-hour funeral was attended by the First Lady herself. [Hadiya Pendleton funeral: Joyous memories, bitter facts about gun violence, By Dahleen Glanton and Bridget Doyle, Chicago Tribune, February 9, 2013] and Obama invited Cleopatra Pendleton, Hadiya’s mother, to Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
But the violence in Chicago and the “random” shooting of Pendleton—just one of the 51 homicide victims and 185+ gunshot victims in the city of Chicago in 2013 as of February 14—are a fatally flawed symbol of the need to force the American people to surrender the Second Amendment and their right to bear arms.
No—rather, the South Side of Chicago and the condition of the almost entirely black community there instead symbolizes why the Second Amendment must be protected at all costs.
Recall that Chicago was one of the first major cities to eliminate its citizens’ right to purchase handguns—in 1982, its city council passed what amounted to the strictest gun control laws in America. This coincided with Chicago’s black population overtaking the white population for the first time in the city’s history. Chicago was more than 85 percent white in the 1950s, but massive migration of blacks from the South and white flight from the city reshaped the demographics of Chicagoland.
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