The roots of Chicago's violence run deeper than handguns and unemployment

John Maki (Bio)

Filed under Politics, Tuesday July 08, 2008

Editor's Note: Today marks the start of the Citizen's expansion into commentary on local news and policy. With Chicago receiving more and more national media exposure, it's important that the city's lingering issues aren't swept under the rug. Toward that end, we've spent the last month lining up a number of contributors from the public, non-profit, academic and private sectors and will begin publishing their perspectives on local matters alongside our reporting. If you'd like to contribute an editorial to the Citizen, contact us at windycitizen@gmail.com with a proposal.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that an individual has a constitutional right to possess and carry a firearm for self-defense. Mayor Daley was quick to denounce the finding. Others have since weighed in on the issue locally. To make sense of what it means for Chicago, I spoke with a uniquely qualified expert on violent crime in the city, David Carter. Carter grew up in Chicago's housing projects. He was on his way into a life of drugs and violence by the time he reached his teens. He served a five-year sentence for armed robbery before he hit 20. Shortly after his release from prison, Carter killed a man with a knife. He was sent back to prison and served 15 years of a 30-year sentence for homicide.

Carter is now 52 and has been out of prison for almost 15 years. He has a hard time finding stable employment and constantly struggles with homelessness, but he has made himself into a model citizen. When I ask Carter what changed him, he becomes philosophical.

"Since I was a kid, I wanted everyone to be scared of me, but I was scared of myself. I realized that if you want to be a true gangster, you have to fight yourself, learn who you are, learn to love yourself. I didn't love myself because I didn't even know who I was. And you can't care for other people until you love yourself. It is the love of self that leads to a love and concern for others. And when I learned to love myself, I realized I didn't want to hurt anybody no more. "

When politicians, pundits, and policy wonks talk about preventing gun violence and crime, they never talk about issues like self-love. But Carter does. And since he has actually lived out the transformation from violent criminal to law-abiding citizen that city officials want to make happen across the city, I think he might know something the experts don't.

I asked Carter what he thought of the Supreme Court's decision. Having heard him speak on the negative effects of growing up surrounded by guns and violence, I expected him to agree with Mayor Daley's ferocious criticism of the Court's holding, that any decision that could lead to more guns would only be a bad thing for the city. But Carter said he was on the side of the Court. "What the Supreme Court did," said Carter, "is just say that ordinary citizens can have a gun to protect themselves in their home. And that's not a problem. The problem is the street criminal."

Carter also dismissed Daley's idea that allowing more ordinary citizens to possess firearms could lead to more gun violence in the city. "The Mayor says this Supreme Court decision is going to lead to everyone having a gun and shooting it out like it's the Old West. The truth is that a lot of us already live in the Old West. Where I'm from, when someone is not being shot at, they can't drive to work because of high gas prices, and they can't afford housing because rent is so high and there's no work. It's chaos."

As Carter explained his view on people's right to protect themselves, he paused for a moment and then told me, "You know, if you really want to stop all this killing and shooting, you wouldn't focus on the guns. That's just a distraction. When I was a kid, we didn't have the kinds of guns kids have now. But we used chains, bricks, pipes, things like that, which are all a more brutal way to kill a person. Guns are never the real problem."

If guns are not the real problem, I asked, then what causes so many people to shoot and kill each other in Chicago? "It's stupid stuff, really," said Carter. "Somebody calls you a punk, so you got to hold your ground. Turf wars, gang initiations, it's all the same thing. People want to feel like they're a somebody because they really feel like a nobody. That's why," Carter continued, "You got to teach people to love themselves."

And how could Chicago do that, I asked? "The best thing anyone or any city can do," Carter explained, "is to be a living example of change. This includes people like the Mayor and other government officials. The city charges one of the highest sales tax rate in all the country, but what are they doing to be examples of change? Take a look at the prison system. It's not interested in rehabilitation. People in prison spend 22-23 hours a day in their cell. That's not rehabilitation, that's torture. People on the street know that, they know what's coming for them if they get caught doing something they shouldn't be doing. Knowing the torture that is waiting for them in prison just makes people more violent, more desperate not to get caught. You also got to ask, what kind of person is the prison system creating and then putting back onto the street?"

Carter's line of thinking made me wonder if he agreed with Tio Hardiman, the executive director of CeaseFire, an anti-violence group. Hardiman recently said that the way to decrease gun violence is to create more job opportunities for people at risk. Carter said that he thought Hardiman was right, but at the same time, the problem is a lot deeper than jobs. "Jobs can be part of the solution-but 9-5 Monday through Friday on minimum wage won't cut it. Ultimately, you got to address the lack of self-esteem. But that's a hard thing to do when a person's hungry."

Is it going to get better, I asked? "Not the ways things are going," Carter said. "It's going to get worse. Any real solution has to come from within the community, from the inside. For too many people, the city is just a place where they can make money. It is not their community. As long as that's the case, nothing is going to change."