The NRA has proof that gun safety legislation doesn't work in cities like Chicago.

[Robb]

Also, Trump has proof Obama was born in Kenya.

Chicago crime rate down overall, police say

April 2, 2013 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- A day after announcing a drop in the city's murder rate in March, Chicago police said overall crime in the city is also on the decline.

According to the police department, the city of Chicago saw an 8-percent drop in overall crime in the first quarter of the year 2013, compared to the same period last year.

That decline continues a trend from 2012 in which overall crime in the city dropped 8 percent since the previous year.

And since 2011, overall crime in the city is down 15 percent.

More info: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1262933

[hack89]

1. That drop in gun violence mirrors a similar drop throughout America

it is just a continuation of a national trend that has been ongoing for 20 years - every category of violent crime has seen significant decreases. As an example, America has cut the number of murder and manslaughter deaths by 40% since 1991. America is simply a safer place to live and getting safer every year.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

[Robb]

2. Which would explain why Chicago's murder rate only this month declined?

[hack89]

3. That's because of a lot of police overtime

they simply saturated the streets with cops.

It is easy to achieve short term drops in crime - every major of a big city running for reelection knows how to do it.

The gun laws were irrelevant in the drop.

Btw - I thought that Chicago's gun laws didn't work so well because they are undermined by the flow of guns from neighboring cities and states with lax gun laws. Not the case now?

[hack89]

4. So the gun laws have changed from the recent spike in gun violence?

what exactly changed?

[Robb]

5. Recent?

[hack89]

6. "It was the city's deadliest January in more than a decade."

After a year in which Chicago's death toll surpassed 500, the bloodshed has continued in 2013 at a rate of more than one killing a day. It was the city's deadliest January in more than a decade.

Now with this week's death of a 15-year-old drum majorette who had just returned from performing at President Barack Obama's inauguration, the mounting losses have put Obama's hometown at the center of the intensifying national debate over guns.

The slayings are no longer dismissed as an only-in-Chicago story about violent street gangs. They are almost a Sandy Hook Elementary School attack unfolding in slow motion: an honor student gunned down at a high school basketball game, two men in their 40s killed outside a hamburger stand, a woman whose bullet-riddled body was found early Friday in a van on the world-famous Lake Shore Drive.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/01/chicago-gun-violence-take_n_2600725.html

Yes - two months ago qualifies as "recent".

[DonP]

7. Chicago's murder rate is down from 2012 ... about the same as 2011, 2010 and 2009

2012 was an unusually high murder rate compared to past years. But this year, with much colder Spring weather than 2012, the rate is about the same compared to the 2011, 2010 and 2009 numbers.

Chicago Murders in March

2013 - 70
2012 - 120
2011 - 75
2010 - 75
2009 - 70

For a street cops eye view of what's really happening go here. http://www.secondcitycop.blogspot.com/

But if you want to buy Rahm's excuses for his lack of crime control you'll probably buy into why he needed to close the black and Latino majority schools, to allow his buddy's charter schools to flourish and profit, feel free to be gullible because he has a "D" behind his name.

[Robb]

8. I know it suits your argument to only look at the last few years, but it's also pretty transparent.

[DonP]

10. Last few years! Based on your own chart, Chicago has been from two to six times more violent

... than the rest of the country.

You really have a strange way of looking at numbers. But just keep drinking that Rahm Kool Aid, very tasty stuff.

Feel free to send him a nice contribution check for his next campaign too.

[pintobean]

9. I don't see where they credit gun laws

From a linked story on the decline in the murder rate:

The mayor and superintendent credit a variety of factors, including police strategies that target violence-prone neighborhoods, after school programs, and much colder weather than during the same period last year.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

11. I would be frankly surprised if city-level gun control did significant amounts of good.

The only laws worth passing are enforceable ones.

Restrictions on guns are very difficult to enforce on a city level. Nations have secured borders, so that if a nation says "no guns" or "no guns of this type" it can enforce it, but cities don't, and so people who want to ignore the law won't find it hard to.