I had a couple of interesting exchanges about gun control last week. One was a reasonable debate with a guy from the National Rifle Association who thinks Chicago (and everywhere else) would be better off if concealed weapons were legal. The other was with Mayor Daley, who didn’t like a question I’d asked him and suggested maybe he could make his point better by sodomizing and shooting me.
That’s when I asked the obvious question about whether he thinks Chicago’s gun ban has been effective: it’s clear people are getting and using guns in spite of it.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The photographers snapped away. People started cracking up.
I expected Edwards to pounce and I got ready to defend myself, but I didn’t need to. Edwards as much as told me he thought I needed to see the light, but he was also polite, thoughtful, and armed with facts. “I’m sure if we got into policy discussions about specific issues you and I would find a lot of areas where we disagree, yet here you and I are able to have a perfectly civil conversation,” he said. “You ask a question—and again I think a very reasonable question of the mayor—and not only is he unwilling to give you a straight answer but it’s this non sequitur that’s designed to really minimize the question that you asked.”
This isn’t really about me—I just happened to be the one who set the mayor off this time around. I’m sure I’m no favorite of his, but he regularly lays into other reporters, aldermen, and underlings for the same sort of transgression—daring to question him.
Mayor Daley once referred to former governor Rod Blagojevich as “cuckoo.” But Blagojevich sounded pretty rational the other day when he discussed the mayor’s gun-control policies on his radio show, according to a transcription posted by the Trib‘s Eric Zorn. “He’s basically trying to divert attention from the fact that in many communities in Chicago—unfortunately, disproportionately, the African American neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods—gun violence is intolerable, unacceptable, and out of control,” said Blago. “And so the mayor has a political tactic where he comes out there, starts screaming, gets red in the face, proposes gun control legislation to send to Springfield, and doesn’t lift a finger to get that legislation passed.”
