Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country.  It also has some of the worst gun crime in the country.  However, if you needed a reminder that it's people, not guns, who kill, on Saturday night, two thugs killed a man the old-fashioned way: they beat him to death.

Jose Téllez, a married father of three, lived in Gage Park.  This is one of Chicago's older neighborhoods.  It started as an actual park in the 1870s.  By the early 20th century, developers started building bungalow-style single-family homes.  The neighborhood used to be home to working-class families with roots in Eastern Europe and Ireland.  However, it's now primarily Hispanic.  Since at least 2012, it's been a solidly Democrat neighborhood.

On Saturday, Téllez was engaged in a quintessentially all-American activity: he was putting up Christmas lights on his Gage Park home.  That's when two men set upon him and, using blunt objects, brutally beat him to death.  As of now, the police have not arrested anyone for the attack.

Offhand, I can think of a whole bunch of reasons for the attack, many of which are quite far-fetched (e.g., aliens from Mars took him down).  The most likely scenarios, though, are what we've gotten used to seeing in Democrat cities: gang members killing people over money, turf wars, failures of respect, or gang initiation rituals.  And although Téllez was engaged in a charming domestic task and although his niece described him as a "loving husband, father, brother and son," that doesn't mean he didn't have dark corners of his life that came back with a vengeance.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that, in Lori Lightfoot's Chicago, no one is safe.  There's a complete breakdown in law and order, thanks to defunding the police, attacking the police, electing a prosecutor who refuses to prosecute, disarming law-abiding citizens, and using racist condescension to give a pass to minorities for the crimes they commit.  All of these factors add up to a toxic soup of crime and dysfunction.  (And no, I'm not blindly accusing a minority, whether Black or Hispanic, of murdering Téllez.  However, there's no doubt that the leftist justice system intentionally gives a pass to minorities.)

The Constitution envisioned a minimally invasive government, one that allowed a free people maximum control over their lives.  However, the Founders also understood that self-governance requires certain core values and individual self-control.  Indeed, they were quite explicit about that fact.  John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Image: Jose Téllez.

Leftists have assiduously cultivated a population of immoral people.  They have aggressively destroyed the traditional controllers of vice in America: the Judeo-Christian faith and middle-class values.  In their place, they've substituted race-hatred, class envy, and complete disdain for the criminal justice system.

In addition, especially when it comes to Blacks, leftists have used ideology and propaganda to cause Blacks to internalize the same conditions that the slave culture used to keep Blacks on the plantations.  Slavers opposed education, marriage, and the nuclear family, and the right to bear arms, because all of those things encouraged slaves to rebel.  No wonder that, after 1865, Black community leaders encouraged Blacks to get their shot at the American dream by getting educated, marrying and raising families, and arming themselves.  (Martin Luther King, Jr. was a strong Second Amendment proponent.)

However, beginning with Johnson's Not-So-Great Society, leftists have assured Blacks and other minorities that education is a White thing meant to destroy Black history and character, that marriage and the nuclear family are White attacks on minority freedom and integrity, and that guns are inherently evil rather than tools that protect a free people.  And of course, BLM has completely undermined the rule of law in Democrat-run communities, allowing the predators free reign (and I used that word intentionally) over people who just want to live their lives in peace.

That's how you end up with a culture in which a man hanging Christmas lights for his family is set upon by two men and pummeled to death.

The government will not fix this problem.  Leaders in minority communities must push back at a racist leftist ethos that implies that minorities are incapable of achieving an education, having stable families, or demonstrating self-governance and self-control.  When minority communities rid themselves of these race-hustlers and again commit to excellence, men like Téllez should once again be able to hang Christmas lights in safety.

Hat tip: Peter von Buol.