If guns are like viruses, then a suburban murder wave is coming. “Residents of suburban low-crime areas are much more likely to own handguns than those living in the city,” according to a recent press release by the Metro Chicago Information Center, taken from its 1991-95 polling data. “Sixteen percent of suburban residents [and 25 percent of downstaters] own handguns, compared to 11% of city residents….Even residents of Chicago communities with the highest murder rates (over 5.5 per 10,000 population in 1993) are less likely to own handguns than residents living in suburban low-crime areas. Only 9% of people living in those communities own handguns.”
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The federal government is too big, except in my district. According to Sangamon State University political scientist Jack Van Der Slik in his new book One for All and All for Illinois: Representing the Land of Lincoln in Congress, suburban U.S. representative Dennis Hastert “is an active partisan whose [committee] seat on Government Operations is a perfect spot for a critic of big government, while his Energy and Commerce spot provides a good defense for his district’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.”
“I left for many reasons, one of which was a clear understanding that in a short time nobody would be interested in science there,” Russian emigre physicist and superconductor expert Alexei Abrikosov tells UIC News (April 12). He left Moscow in April 1991, and is now an adjunct professor of physics at UIC in addition to his senior scientist post at Argonne National Laboratory. He says his prediction has been borne out. “All the institutes and universities [there] are broke and think about survival rather than improvement.”
