So says Rod Blagojevich on his radio show.
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.  He doesn’t used his political strength and muscle to pass the legislation. Just a bunch of baloney.
I don’t think he is either. That’s probably why we’ve never really had a gun control movement of any size in this country. Gun control is a political tool for big city politicians. Guns are a fantastic scapegoat for the crime and societal breakdown that happens in many of our inner cities. They give politicians an easy, convenient way of talking about the problem without having to level with people about nasty subjects like taking responsibility for yourself, your family and your communities, working with police to weed out bad apples, and rebuilding the good life. Those are difficult subjects, and politicians never want to tell people they can’t look for a solution to the problem of social breakdown in Government. There has to be a solution. There has to be an easy solution.
The great thing about gun control is you can never have too much of it. Chicago goes about as far as a city can go, but you can always blame it, in Daley’s case, on those intransigent downstaters and their insistence on not going farther. But the last thing Daley would want is for the state to actually pass something. At some point you run out of people to blame, just like in fiscal matters you eventually run out of other people’s money.
At some point the gig is going to be up. Pretty soon for Daley, Bloomberg, Nutter, Menino, and all the other big city mayors. Maybe they can switch to blaming the Supreme Court or the Constitution, but it doesn’t seem to me that’s quite the same tool they’ve been using. That’s probably why Daley is losing it. Heavens forbid he level with voters about having to make hard decisions to bring the city’s crime down.
Daley’s serious about keeping control of his little fiefdom. The thing he’s upset about is the intrusion of outside forces into it. Unlike his daddy, he doesn’t have influence much outside of Chicago so he really can’t ‘muscle’ anything through in Springfield especially since he’s pretty much universally despised by people who don’t rely on them for their jobs/positions.
There’s some truth to what Blago is saying (there’s often a grain of truth in it if you’ve got a bullshit screen with small enough openings to sift for it) but most of it is bull. Did you see what he said Daley should do to get serious? He wants him to have Harry Osterman try to pass some gun control. What a concept!
For those who don’t live in Illinois and aren’t familiar with Mr. Osterman, he’s a rabid anti-gunner who scrambles and maneuvers to get assault weapon bans and other measures passed every year. He has come within a few votes several times. For Blagojevich to suggest that setting Osterman loose to get the job done is a solution only shows that Blagojevich is no expert. The guy is a professional son-in-law. He’s slippery and shameless, but that’s not the same thing as cleverness.
As one of Don’s fellow Illinoisans and member of several of the same activist groups, I’ll have to disagree with the premises that Daley doesn’t care to get gun control, and that he doesn’t exert his muscle to get it.
Daley truly does believe in gun control, and devotes large amounts of energy to it. Yes, he, like so many other big-city mayors uses it as a smokescreen to cover up his own mismanagement and corruption, but he is definitely a true believer.
And muscle he does. There are few gun shops in Cook County and he is always trying new ways to close out the remainder.
The official bugbear for incoming guns isn’t Downstate, incidentally, it’s Indiana and Mississippi.
And those reps down in Springfield do indeed feel the heat from the Fifth Floor. These votes are awfully close, as Don says, and lots of Senators and Representatives are accustomed to getting calls from Senate President Cullerton and Speaker Madigan, also rabid anti-gunners.
Given that half the state’s population lives within fifty miles of the Loop, it’s not a far reach for campaign and legislative help to be traded.