“The number of murders in [Chicago] ebbs and flows with little respect for gun control laws,” argue Daniel Polsby and Dennis Brennen in the Palatine-based Heartland Institute’s policy study number 69 (October 30). “For example, the number of murders in the city started falling before passage of the city’s 1982 gun control ordinance. Five years later, the number of murders in the city began to climb steadily. By gun control’s tenth anniversary in 1992, the number of murders in the city was back where it had been a decade before gun control.”
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December). “There’s nothing I relish less in the morning than wet gloves, frozen fingers, and time wasted on the frosty, icy or snow-caked surfaces of a car. I remember the morning after the first heavy frost of this fall when, body still in shock from the sudden shift of seasons, I decided to afford myself the ‘luxury’ of driving. In the time it took me to search for a scraper and not find one, then use my fingernails, a credit card, and finally a kitchen spatula to clear the windows, shivering all the while, I could have been halfway to my destination and toasty warm on my bike.”
Yeah, great, but can I find my way around? According to a recent UIC press release, “The layout of each floor [of the university’s new Molecular Biology Research Building at Polk and Ashland], with labs and offices lining the 500-foot-long outside walls and supply rooms and support facilities in the interior, suggests the repeating, ladder-like structure of an untwisted DNA molecule.”
“Chicago is already suburban in density if not in form,” James Krohe Jr. reminds us in Illinois Issues (November). “It ranks 70th in population density (measured in people per square mile) among the world’s 75 most populous cities….In fact, when it comes to paying for expensive services like the CTA, Chicago isn’t nearly crowded enough. Alas, a City Hall that can’t figure out how to recycle newspapers is not likely to get it right when it tries to recycle neighborhoods.”
