Pete Buttigieg Needs To Deal With A Gun Violence Problem Right Now.
Until Pete Buttigieg announced that he was a
Presidential candidate, he only thing I knew about South Bend, IN was Notre
Dame. I went to graduate school in
Chicago and every time I drove back home to New York, I could see the Golden
Dome as we zipped past the campus on the interstate, but that was as close as I ever got to South Bend.
The city is an old manufacturing center, having been
the location of several major manufacturing companies that supplied parts for
the auto industry, and even before Buttigieg captured national attention with
his announcement, he was known for having pushed some economic redevelopment
plans that prevented South Bend from ending up in the downward spiral which
trapped other rust-belt towns.
In addition to the Golden Dome, the city also has an
annual music festival, several interesting museums, some pretty park space, all
the usual amenities of medium-sized population centers (roughly 100,000 people
live in the city itself, roughly another 200,000 folks live nearby) which are
larger than small towns but not yet major, urban sites.
Unfortunately, it now appears that South Bend may be
experiencing a life-style change which resembles many major, urban centers, and
I’m not talking about a life-style represented by the appearance of Starbucks
or a new shopping mall or a farmer’s market with ‘organic’ goat cheese selling
at $30 a pound. I’m talking about the
urban life-style known as gun violence which has seen 11 South Bend shootings
so far in June alone.
The good news about violent crime in South Bend is that
overall the number
of homicides have gone down. There were 18 in 2012, Buttigieg’s first year in
office, last year there were 9. The bad news about South Bend violence is the number
of aggravated assaults went from 235 in 2012 to 782(!) last year. Guess what
happens when two guys get into an argument and one of them pulls out gun? An assault turns into a shooting and using
a gun is a very efficient method for turning a bloody nose into a bullet lodged
in the head.
Right now, Indiana ranks 16th of all 50
states in the statewide murder
rate, with an overall score of 6 per 100,000 residents for the Hoosier State. I
always thought that Indiana’s murder rate was basically a function of street
violence in Indianapolis which, Indy 500 notwithstanding, has always been known
as a tough town. The nine murders which occurred in South Bend last year may
not sound like a lot of people, but it means that the city’s murder rate is 50
percent higher than the state’s rate as a whole. That ain’t good.
And it particularly ain’t good for Mayor Pete’s
Presidential campaign, because he has been proposing
the one gun-control law that Gun-nut Nation hates most of all, i.e., a national
gun-licensing system. Now it happens to be true that without a national gun
registration of some kind, all the other ‘reasonable’ gun-control schemes may
help reduce gun violence a little bit here and there, but the real big kahuna for
gun control is national registration, no ifs, ands, or buts.
You might want to believe that if South Bend continues
to be a murder-rich place, that this news could be used by Pete to underscore
the need for better controls over guns. Except that’s not how the world works,
at least the world as defined by the pro-gun noisemakers (Trump, Fox, NRA, et.
al.) who will lead the charge for the other side.
Because what they will say, I guarantee it, is that the
murder rate in South Bend points up the need for letting civilians walk around
with guns. And since gun registration will result in gun confiscation, nobody
will be protected and the crime rate in South Bend and everywhere else will
zoom straight up.
I hope that last week’s gun mayhem in South bend was a blip and not the beginning of a trend. Because if it’s the latter, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign could be derailed.
