I was browsing through “the Irish Sporting News” a few days ago. For the uninitiated, this dated slang expression refers to the obituary columns. The term probably had its origins in the propensity of the Irish to consult the obituaries in order to attend wakes and funerals in decades gone by.

Still, once you are of a certain age, you check the daily obituaries to make sure that
you are still breathing and to fulfill your obligations towards others.

In any event, what struck me was the obituary for an elderly gentleman who had passed away in his nineties. What caught my attention was that this person was listed as a proud graduate of Crane High School.

Crane has been in the headlines too often lately for the escalating gang violence that has been occurring there on an almost daily basis. One teenager shot and killed another student in a gang related quarrel over a baseball cap recently. The police department responded by promising to provide even more police officers to patrol the streets that border the school grounds. Absenteeism has been up sharply after the most recent shooting at the high school which is located in the 2200 hundred block of West Jackson.

Richard T. Crane High School was not always synonymous with such urban crime. In an early age, another impoverished group resided in the near West side
neighborhood that the school serves. Once upon a time, the area was largely populated by Russian Jewish immigrants. Many of these people were merchants and
the peddlers who worked along Maxwell Street. Although the immediate vicinity was not considered to be much more than a ghetto, the crimes occurring in
the slum neighborhood seldom shocked the entire city. There were occasional charges of labor union racketeering, ballot boxes being stuffed and election day violence at the polls during the Twenties, but there were no stories of teenagers killing each other over such trifles as a designer baseball cap or an
expensive pair of gym shoes.

Despite being impoverished and oftentimes socially ostracized due to anti-Semitism, many of the first generation children of the Russian Jews were eager to obtain an education as a means of improving their economic and social status. They managed to do so without the benefit of much in the way of government sponsored social welfare programs and subsidized public housing. The seven campuses of the City Colleges of Chicago trace their origins to the establishment of first junior college that was an annex to Crane High School. One of the working class students who attended Crane Junior College was Arthur J. Goldberg, the son of a Russian born peddler who sold vegetables from a horse drawn wagon. Goldberg obtained a college scholarship that permitted him to
attend Crane. He went on to become a noted labor lawyer and eventually served as the US Secretary of Labor before being appointed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by President John F. Kennedy.

The current Supreme Court term includes an interesting case being heard on appeal from the District of Columbia. For the first time in seventy-one years, the high court agreed to hear a case concerning the Second Amendment. Preliminary reports suggest that a majority of the Court is prepared to issue an
opinion reaffirming that an individual right to gun ownership is included in the Bill of Rights.

Our former State’s Attorney and current Mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been spending huge sums of money on legal fees trying to
collect civil damages from gun manufacturers on the basis of product liability theories.

According to this lawsuit, which has been rejected at every turn, guns are inherently dangerous and cannot be sold to any end consumer safely.

People do not kill, guns do, so let’s ban guns by making it prohibitive for any firm
to manufacture weapons. Chicago has nothing to show for this politically correct litigation other than huge legal bills.

The outrage concerning the shooting at Crane High School has lead to predictable calls to ban the sale and ownership of guns. This is becoming the norm
after every gun related tragedy. Nobody calls for the abolition of
automobile ownership after every traffic fatality despite the fact that more persons die
of injuries sustained in car collisions ever year than of gun violence.

None of the opponents of private gun ownership has the forthright honesty to seek to repeal the Second Amendment directly. Most of the successful efforts to restrict gun rights have occurred as the result of legislative subterfuge,
usually at the municipal level. The current litigation pending before the Supreme Court threatens to invalidate hundreds of such laws.

Restrictive gun laws in the District of Columbia have utterly failed to curb crime while
effectively disarming law abiding citizens. When guns are outlawed,
only outlaws with have guns as the saying goes.

How is it that previous generations of Chicagoans managed to survive with widespread gun ownership being the norm? In 1900, an estimated crowd of ten
thousand spectators assembled to watch the Cubs play the Philadelphia Phillies
in a doubleheader at the West Side Grounds (near Polk and Wolcott
Streets).

According to newspaper reports, more than one thousand fans celebrated the Fourth of July and the Cubs winning both contests by firing their revolvers into
the air. No injuries or arrests were reported. I am indebted to the late Sun-Times columnist Eddie Gold and his collaborator, Art Ahrens, for this anecdote. The former ballpark was located on what is now the campus of
the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Cubs moved to Weegham Park in 1916. The stadium was subsequently renamed Wrigley Field.

The late, lamented Chicago Daily News has an impressive archive of glass plate photographic images of Chicago available from the Chicago History Museum for examination. What is striking about these photos is the number of depictions of public high school students drilling with rifles as part of their daily educational curriculum at the Chicago Public Schools. It was not uncommon for high schools to include pistol and rifle ranges in their buildings. Marksmanship was available as physical education elective and many
military cadet programs were offered to students. Remarkably enough, none of the students from
these past generations went on a murderous rampage. What has changed on the West side?

The fault lies not in the guns, but in ourselves. Liberalism means never having to accept responsibility. Crimes need to prosecuted and commentators must stop apologizing for criminals and blaming society for their unlawful acts.

**
Daniel J. Kelley is a contributor to the Chicago Daily Observer.