Where the immigration and gun rights debates meet

I have, for the most part, kept this blog out of the debate about illegal immigration, because Armed and Safe is pretty exclusively about gun rights, and how those are violated by gun legislation (this post is about the closest thing to an exception). Generally speaking, I think any connection between the immigration debate and the gun rights debate is fairly tenuous. Today, though, I'll discuss a tragic intersection of the two issues.

This past Monday, Schanna Gayden, a 13-year-old honors student in Chicago, was killed in broad daylight, for the "crime" of being on a playground that marked the battle line between two rival gangs. The shooter proved to be not much of a threat to his enemies in the other gang, but was lethal to the innocent child.

Predictably, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley blamed America's "gun culture." This, of course, is the same Chicago Mayor Richard Daley who over a year ago decreed that Chicago become an immigrant "sanctuary city," in which police and other officials are expressly forbidden from checking into the immigration status of the people with whom they deal (that last link is to an article about the fact that the entire county of Cook may join Chicago in abetting illegal immigration).

What does Daley's (and by extension, Chicago's) contempt for U.S. immigration laws have to do with Schanna Gayden's senseless killing? One of the two suspects, and the leader of the gang responsible, is in the U.S. illegally. Mwenda Murithi, of Kenya, came to the U.S. on a student visa in 1999. That visa expired long ago, but here he remains, only to order the shooting that killed the young girl.

Murithi, who in the eight years he has been in this country has accumulated 28 arrests, including four felonies, has clearly had plenty of dealings with Chicago police, but since they have been ordered to not care about his immigration status, deportation was never in the cards for him (and since our "justice" system allows people with such lengthy crime dossiers to run free, he was not in prison here, either).

Schanna Gayden was not killed by America's "gun culture"--responsibility for her slaying lies at least in part with Daley's mandated contempt for our national borders.