An update on various gun legislation from the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:
SB 1007 SET FOR HOUSE VOTE THIS WEEK!!
Senate Bill 1007 is scheduled to be debated and voted on this week in the Illinois House of Representatives. This bill would ban the sale, possession and manufacture of a large capacity ammunition magazine. These magazines hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition.
LOST & STOLEN GUN LEGISLATION MOVES INTO HOUSE
House Bill 2760 sponsored by Reps. Madigan, Currie & Molaro is quickly moving through the Illinois House and will be coming up for a vote in the coming days.The bill is similar to HB1696 and allows the State Police the ability to revoke the FOID Card of anyone failing to report a lost or stolen firearm within 72 hours of discovering it had been stolen or lost.Reporting these weapons lost or stolen gives law enforcement the tools to identify individuals engaging in, profiting from such trade and distribution while making gun trafficking more difficult for criminals.
HB 4628 PASSES BOTH HOUSES;
AWAITS GOVERNORS SIGNATURE
House Bill 4628 which deals with a person 18 years of age or younger committing a felony with a gun that was sold or given to them by an adult. The bill would allow adults who are responsible for “selling or giving a concealable firearm” to a person under 18 years of age that use a firearm to commit a felony be charged with a similar felony charges. Currently, adults can face up to three years in prison.
The bill would also provide that if an adult provides a firearm to someone under 18 who does not have a FOID Card and the weapon is used to commit or attempt a forcible felony, that adult could face felony charges.
The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 54-0 and is expected to be signed into law by the Governor.
More funding is needed to assist the estimated 1,100 abused and neglected children who are at risk of growing up to be violent criminals, a group called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Illinois said Tuesday. It recommended an increase in home-visiting programs to assist 28,000 children in the state who are victims of abuse annually.
Disappointment cannot describe the feeling I had watching the CBS 2 Chicago/WBBM radio town hall on violence in Chicago. It has been literally a minute since it went off the air, but I couldn’t wait until the next day to write about this. Here you had two of the largest media outlets in Chicago giving light on a hotly debated subject, and they drop the ball. How did they drop ball you ask? With panelists and speakers ranging from Jesse Jackson, school board president Rufus Williams, Congressmen Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Danny Davis, police superintendent Jody Weis, Rev. Michael Pfleger and parents of murdered CPS students, what or who possibly could have been left out?
The youth
The youth
The youth
Two hours of rhetoric, grandstanding, insight, and ideas about what is wrong with young people today, how can they be saved, why are so many at risk, but not one youth is given the chance to speak on their own behalf. The irony of this is that right outside Kennedy King College, where the town hall took place, you will find young people between 55th and 79th & Halsted breaking curfew, hanging out on the streets. For every youth out there who are gang banging, dropping out of school, or dying, there are many more trying to do something with their lives and able to offer as much — sometimes more– insight than the leaders who continue to speak on our behalf. Each time the camera cut into the audience, I scanned it to find at least one young face but could see a person who looked like they were under 25.
Despite popular belief, young people have to something to say. They always have. We just don’t listen. We put up the wall at the first difficulty and conclude that they’re “different” or “not how they used to be back in my day.” But as a recently vilified pastor once said, “different does not mean detrimental.”
Besides ignoring the young people, regular community residents were left out of this talk. I’m talking about the residents who aren’t part of an organization. If we’re going to open up this debate, we need to knock down the doors and let everybody in. Forget about the cameras. Forget about the lights. Forget about the ad sponsors. And, hopefully, Mayor Daley can take part too.
In fact, here is my idea for a town hall: Mayor Daley and these same leaders go on a citywide tour of community centers, high school gyms and auditoriums , churches, etc. — maybe even Soldier Field if the demand is there– and open the doors to everybody in the communities. When I say everybody, I mean everybody. Community groups, youth, parents, gang bangers, addicts, the homeless, the tired, the rich, the poor and the huddled masses. Open the gates and just have at it for as long as everyone is willing. Find out why these kids are dropping out? Why are the gang bangers joining gangs? Why are addicts doing drugs? Why have some people stopped caring? We don’t have to worry about commercial breaks or interrupting CSI: Miami and Criminal Minds.
If there was one person at the town hall who brought this point home, it was teacher and lecturer Dr. Adolph Brown, III. Brown walked around the room until the very end disguised as the stereotypical young male many are used to envisioning: doo-rag and baggy clothes. Brown encountered only stern looks and silence from most of those in attendance, not an ounce of outreach or gratefulness for this disguised young person making the effort to attend this forum. As Brown revealed his suit and true identity under the baggy clothes, the audience was left silent and befuddled from their hypocrisy. After two hours of talk, Brown challenged them to action.
Will they answer his call? We’ll see at the next town hall.
I wanted to use this post to single out some of the excellent reporting my fellow Medill colleagues have been doing this week on issues related to this blog.
On Tuesday, Erin Halasz wrote about Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s proposed $150 million initiative that would invest in community development and summer jobs for young people in low-income communities. The money would be broken down in the following ways:
$30 million to create jobs for up to 20,000 teens and young adults
$20 million for after-school programs in high-crime areas
$50 million in grant money for organizations that help put people to work or redevelop high-crime areas
$40 million for local community development groups, financial institutions, venture enterprises and businesses or communities that can demonstrate immediate job growth from their projects
$10 million in grant money for local police departments to purchase equipment
While the plan sounds good on paper, doubts are still in the air, given the govenor’s track record of political grandstanding and not being able to come through on his promises. The financial troubles of the state are also worth considering. Mayor Daley, who last week announced his plan for youth summer jobs during his State of the City address, made his own doubts public regarding the governor’s plan.
Another angle on the governor’s proposal was followed up the next day by Josh Pollock. He looked at one of the groups that, surprisingly, was left out of the gov’s new funding: CeaseFire. In a year, CeaseFire has seen its locations shrink from 25 to only four, despite many successes. The sharp reduction in operations is due to state funding that was discontinued. CeaseFire now receives its money mainly from the Department of Justice and private organizations.
Today, Chloe Wiley covered a local organization near the Cabrini Green housing development that reaches out to give local kids an alternative to the streets. The Alliance for Community Peace is a faith-based organization that states in its mission:
seeks to improve academic performance and school attendance of students; to provide opportunities for demonstrating postive social skills,interactions, and relationships through educational, recreational, cultural, and other program activities, to adopt positive decision making skills that discourage negative risk taking behaviors through life skills application; and to develop meaningful work experiences leading to career and vocational fulfillment for students, adults, and families.
Big propos to all three for peeling the layers off this onion and doing the work many in our field still won’t do.
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (written by Northwestern faculty member Alex Kotlowitz) profiled the work of CeaseFire and Gary Slutkin, who I mentioned in an earlier blog post last week. The article goes in-depth to cover Slutkin and the outreach workers of CeaseFire; many of whom are ex-offenders and ganger members who Slutkin believes are the best antidote in preventing shootings in their communities.
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
Given more attention is Slutkin’s alternative model to fighting violence, a public health method that uses the outreach works as to fight what Slutkin calls going after the most infected, and stopping the infection at its source.
Despite a cut in funding and disputes over its methods, CeaseFire can claim concrete results in the work it has been doing. A soon to be released report by researchers hired by the Justice Department found the following:
But the study found that in six of the seven neighborhoods examined, CeaseFire’s efforts reduced the number of shootings or attempted shootings by 16 percent to 27 percent more than it had declined in comparable neighborhoods. The report also noted — with approbation — that CeaseFire, unlike most programs, manages by outcomes, which means that it doesn’t measure its success by gauging the amount of activity (like the number of interrupters on the street or the number of interruptions — 1,200 over four years) but rather by whether shootings are going up or down.
In March, two classmates and I spent a day with a CeaseFire branch on Chicago’s West Side. Here is a video from that story.
Action Now is launching a West Side anti-violence campaign at a town hall meeting of community members and government officials tonight at the Christian Valley Church on Chicago’s West Side. The town hall is aimed at opening a dialogue between residents and local officials on strategies to stem the growing tide of violence in west side Chicago neighborhoods.
Action Now plans to call upon officials to support the creation of a 100-block community saftey zone, and the implentation of strategies to get youth off the street and help re-intergrate the formerly incarcerated. Initiatives include:
Creating more after-school programs
Launching a summer jobs program for youth
Improving police presence on the street with foot and bicycle patrols
Establishing ex-offender re-entry program
Scheduled guests include 28th Ward Alderman Ed Smith, 24th Ward Alderman Sharon Denise Dixon and Cook County Commissioner Robert Steele.
When: 7:00 p.m., April 29, 2008
Where Christian Valley Church, 1237 S. Homan Ave., Chicago, IL
The paper of record brought its attention to the second city with a recent article on the deaths of Chicago students and the steps being taken to prevent more deaths from happening. It offers a very detailed overview for those who might not be familiar with the story, but ultimately stakes out familiar territory. We get the impassioned quotes from schools CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley, balance from an expert and community resident, and, last but not least, a student. In the end, the article asks nothing or challenges the reader or those being interviewed. I felt led on by the beginning of the article because I thought the focus of the article would stay with the community groups who are escorting Crane Technical High School students to school, but by paragraph four it had already moved on. Left out again is the fact that many of these shooters and gang members are as young as the victims or/and drop outs. Left out again is the mention of students trying to organize and lead in their communities, rather standing idle as politicians and other leaders do the talking. Left out again are more community groups and churches who are marching and leaving their doors open late to save those on both sides of the gun. Not given enough depth is the issue of poverty and outside factors that are at the root of this violence.
Props to CLTV and Alexander Russo for shining a different light.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a splash when he announced plans last week for ending L.A. Bridges, an anti-gang initiative under fire since the Riordan administration for failing to demonstrate clear results.
But in dropping the L.A. Bridges programs and shifting the money to his appointed “gang czar,” Villaraigosa put off yet again answering one key question: Are these programs, which last year received $13.2 million, successful in quelling violence and keeping kids out of gangs?
