Chicago, Where Citizens Go to Die

If there is any issue free of political dispute, it should be reverence for human life. With President Donald Trump vowing to send the National Guard to major cities to stop murderous the criminality plaguing them, political leaders — mostly Democrats – are loudly pledging to block his initiative by any and all means. Doing so demonstrates they have lost the capacity to care for the wellbeing of their fellow citizens, a most essential value.

Chicago is a city where citizens go to die. Tellingly, simply seeking information by googling the word “Chicago” automatically produces “Chicago shootings this weekend 2025” as the top result Evidently, the Windy City is now best known not for its breathtaking skyline or tasty deep-dish pizza, but for its deadly violence. The Labor Day weekend’s tally of carnage this year: 58 people gunned down and eight dead. With 44 shot and six killed over the July Fourth holiday, the latest round of violence was only unusual in its magnitude.

Even before the gunfire had subsided, though, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, announced he’d be signing the “Protecting Chicago Initiative,” which he described as “the most sweeping campaign of any city in the country to protect ourselves from the threats and actions of this out-of-control administration,” referring to Trump’s government. In sum, rather than formulating a plan to safeguard his city from the ongoing murder and mayhem in the streets, Johnson enacted a strategy to thwart a presidential action meant to keep the peace.

Lawless and Violent Cities

Chicagoans could be forgiven for believing their ears had deceived them — were it not for similarly antagonistic statements from a fellow Democrat, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Earlier, he had responded to Trump suggesting he would deploy U.S. troops to “straighten out Chicago” by contending, “It is illegal, it is unconstitutional, it is un-American.”

The constitutionality of sending federal troops into state or city jurisdictions hinges on the applicability of the Insurrection Act, which grants the president authority to mobilize federal troops or the National Guard in limited situations, including “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that local authorities fail to suppress.

Notwithstanding a federal judge’s recent ruling that those conditions were not met before the National Guard was deployed in California earlier this summer, Chicago could arguably qualify: The city has led the nation in murders for 13 consecutive years.

Scientific Link

How has one of the nation’s greatest cities fallen into such a state of barbarism? To be sure, numerous factors contribute to the pervasive criminality, but the city’s longstanding Democratic Party dominance – and its members’ current aversion to religion — cannot be overlooked.

Links between political and religious allegiance are revealed in a recent study by the Pew Research Center. With U.S. adults evenly divided between the two major parties at 46% each, the study finds that 61% of highly religious respondents identify with the Republican Party, while only 32% align with the Democratic Party. Conversely, 27% of those polled who claim low religiosity belong to the GOP, while 67% declare themselves Democrats.

Cook County, where Chicago is the county seat, is a solid Democratic stronghold, voting 70% Democrat in 2024. After its deadly holiday weekend, Trump was only slightly exaggerating whne he called it “the murder capital of the world.”

Clearly, the statistical correlation between individuals who both gravitate toward the Democratic Party and who harbor an irreligious disregard for human life is evident in the nation’s third-largest city, where killing is commonplace.

It is little wonder, then, that politicians like Johnson and Pritzker feel empowered to reject federal assistance meant to perform the primary role of government: to preserve the lives of its citizens.

In 1798, John Adams famously wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Modern-day politicians who cite the Constitution while forswearing their common-sense duty to fight criminality demonstrate that they — and their constituents — are losing touch with what it means to act as “a moral and religious people.”

It is not by accident that the United States has risen during its relatively brief history to become first among nations. Rather, it is respect for human life – meaning esteem for one another — that has allowed peoples of all the world’s faiths and cultures to meld into one nation of Americans.

It is beneath Chicagoans and residents of other U.S. cities to elect as their leaders those who demonstrate greater allegiance to a political party — be it Democratic or Republican — than to their God-given duty to protect their fellow citizens.

Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer at The Washington Times.