I’m going to double down on a segment of a post made by Miguel the other day on Camiella Williams.

For the record, The Trace is an anti-gun propaganda news site, backed by Michael Bloomberg.

It published an article titled “A Young Chicago Woman Has Lost 23 Loved Ones to Gun Violence. She Wants You To See Their Faces.”  The article starts with Ms. Williams going through her social media account showing all of the people she knew that were lost to gun violence.  It is a tear jerking tragedy.  This poor girl who loses everyone close to her because of guns.

Except, that we find out that poor Ms. Williams is not just an innocent bystander in all of this.

“Not so long ago, gun violence could have consumed her life as well. Williams joined a gang in elementary school, bought her first handgun in sixth grade, and began dealing drugs in high school. It wasn’t until she was 19, when she was pregnant with her child, that she decided to break away from the dangerous trajectory that she had set herself upon as a girl on the city’s South Side. Her path from street life to graduate school has taken 10 years.

‘If I didn’t have my son,’ Williams says, ‘I don’t know where my life would have been.’ But she can guess. Either the gang disputes she often encountered might have lead her to kill someone. Or someone would have tried to kill her.”

Ms. Williams was very much a part of Chicago’s gang culture.  More than a culture, it is an open war.  There is a reason that these sections of Chicago are often referred to as Chiraq.  It is an appropriate parallel, with rival gangs fighting over territory much like rival extremist sects in the Middle East.

Much like everything else the antis do, they focus on the guns, not the bigger issue of gang violence.  Back to Ms. Williams, we find out that she and her friends violated pretty much every state and federal gun law they could.

“Williams soon fell in with a group of teenage boys that belonged to a local gang. When she was in fifth grade, two of them taught her how to shoot. For target practice they would set up light fixtures on a backyard fence where one of them lived.

Williams doesn’t know exactly how her friends got hold of their weapons, but she says it was never too hard to buy or borrow a gun in that part of the city, where today a handgun can be purchased for as little as $25.”

At this point the article causes me to lose all sympathy for Ms. Williams, describing how her life goal was to become a drug kingpin at an age where she couldn’t get into PG-13 movies on her own.

“A year later, in sixth grade, Williams got her first gun: a loaded 9mm pistol she bought from a friend with $25 of her allowance money. After school, she’d rush home and stuff the heavy weapon in her backpack before heading out. She’d pull it out of her pack to scare kids in the neighborhood. ‘That power, that fear that other people had, I got a rush off that,’ she says.

By high school, Williams had begun to sell marijuana. ‘I wanted to be the female [Pablo] Escobar,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to sell drugs and get cars.’ Over time, she acquired two more guns, a .38 and a .22. Increasingly a target for rival gang members — many of whom attended her high school — she felt she needed the weapons for protection.”

When I was in the Sixth Grade, the most criminal thing that I did was stay up later than my parents on Saturday nights to see boobs on HBO.  This girl was selling drugs and brandishing guns.

But don’t worry, the article tries to make Ms. Williams into a tragic victim.

“She didn’t imagine it ever going beyond that. ‘My friends were not out killing people,’ she says.”

Oh really?   Color me skeptical, but there is an old expression: lie down with dogs wake up with fleas.  Meaning… if you are a member of a gang, selling drugs, carrying illegally obtained guns, cavorting with people engaged in likewise crimes, you are morally culpable for anything that occurs because of that… like drive-bys and gang murders.  This girl was no tragic bystander, she was a willing participant in a gang war.

Ms. Williams get pregnant, gets very close to getting killed herself, drops out of the gang, and becomes an anti-gun activist.  A touching story of redemption … that only a bunch of myopic, anti-gun liberals could love.

Neither Ms. Williams nor anybody else associated with The Trace comes close to addressing the real issue here, the gang culture that is tearing inner city Chicago apart.  Chicago is on the path of having the bloodiest year ever.  Sure, maybe the guns used by gangs in Chicago come from Indiana and Wisconsin.  But let me tell you something.  I lived in Indiana and Illinois.  Indiana, which has much more lax gun laws than Illinois does not have anywhere near the murder rate of Chicago.

It’s not the guns stupid.  It’s the culture.  It is a culture where a man get’s shot in the back for wearing the wrong hat on the wrong street corner while trying to visit his mother.

But the antis don’t want to address the root cause of Chicago’s murder rate.  Why?  Because it’s a difficult problem to fix, it requires being judgmental about other people’s way of life, and it’s not a means by which they can exercise their desire to control people they don’t like.

In this article, we get a good peek into the problems in Chicago.  Poor, (predominately) black kids who turn to gang life and drug dealing, which gun violence is a large part up.  We almost have a moment of clarity.  But no… never mind the hopelessness, poverty, self destructive behavior.  It’s the guns.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why this will never get fixed.