For those who wish to discuss political matters arising out of the above-referenced mass shooting event, please feel free to post them here.
I don’t personally see how politics should enter into this at all. It was a despicable, inhumane act that can’t be defended or encouraged on political grounds. On any grounds.
The Right uses this tactic of introducing a political bent into every topic. I wish the rest of us would stop falling for it.
My comment is that I have a lot of friends in the U.K. and they have no idea where Highland Park is. It’s almost the exact distance from the Chicago loop as it is from Manchester to Liverpool in the U.K.
But, of course, gotta blow the Chicago dog whistle.
Unfortunately, it just works so well for the Right. They can whistle that tune again and again and again, and the followers come running. It’s Pavlovian, and the hooks are deep.
The only political issue I can see is the Mayor calling for a ban on assault weapons.
Has Fox etc tried to justify this travesty?
NPR said the suspect bought his guns " separate locations in the Chicagoland region."
This exchange was deemed too political for the breaking news thread:
Bailey has since apologized, which should cost him Trump’s support /s [I think]:
Thanks.
I was slightly surprised my post was viewed as political but I guess my name calling and comments about Bailey, the GOP nom for Illinois governor crossed a line. The remainder of my post was simply demographic information about Highland Park and noted they already have an assault weapons ban in place w/o any commentary. I wasn’t invested enough to take it to ATMB or making a political thread.
Hell, I had to remind myself where Highland Park was, even though I had been there in the last two years. I don’t expect them to know. And comparing American geography with European is silly. Our metro areas are much larger geographically. Highland Park is a suburb of Chicago. I live in Chicago, and I’d rather live here than Highland Park (and I have the means to do so), but the issue is more that they have a poor idea of what Chicago is like and a bad understanding of suburbs and how different they can be from their anchoring urban areas. But Highland Park is definitely “Chicagoland” and “Chicago” is how most would describe where they’re from if they’re outside the Chicago area.
That explains the drool.
It’s like that in MI too. Everything south of Flint is Detroit to some folks.
I agree with you. But if I’m a journalist anywhere in the world, I’d hope I knew that ‘Chicago’ is a very loud dog whistle anywhere and thus I’d take extra care when reporting. ‘Chicago’s Highland Park neighbourhood’ is inexcusable.
‘Highland Park, a very affluent city, is located 30 miles from Chicago’ is better.
Edit: I was also harshly critical of USA news showing a picture of Tower Bridge during the London Bridge terror attach.
What is it a dog whistle for? puzzled
I don’t know if this is political per se, but Highland Park has a very large Jewish population. (I’m Jewish, too, and from a nearby town.) More than one Jewish person I spoke to in the hours after the shooting assumed it was an anti-Semitic act.
Earned paranoia, I guess.
The American right likes to point to Chicago as an example of gun laws not working, because the city used to have highly restrictive gun laws but still had a high murder rate.
Of course, Indiana with its much looser laws is only a few minutes drive away, but why let facts get in the way of a winning narrative?
And it’s also a racial dog whistle. As a proud Chicagoan, I’m tired of it.
Well, it’s not a dog whistle “anywhere in the world” as you seem to be suggesting.
Chicago is just generally regarded as a lawless murder town. I see it on Reddit frequently.
Statistically, Chicago is #28 in its murder rate (St. Louis is #1)
Certainly not something to be ok with but not the lawless city it is often portrayed to be.
As mentioned above, I think the city gets painted that way because it did have strong gun laws (which have been overturned years ago now) but the right likes to still point and say how those laws never work.
Most of the crime is gang-on-gang related but that spills over.
I live in Chicago (and I do mean “in” Chicago…I can walk to the Loop in five minutes). Funnily enough, I re-connected with an old friend and had him over. He lives in a Chicago North Shore suburb (very near to Highland Park) and he was asking me about how bad the crime is in Chicago. The irony was not lost on us.
Also, it got pushed hard when Obama got elected, being from Chicago. And there was something about Obama that made him different from previous presidents.