Jesse Jackson has spent his life deflecting reality

SCATTERED SHOWER OF JOURNALISM? CNN CONFRONTS JESSE JACKSON OVER CHICAGO’S HIGH GUN VIOLENCE DESPITE DRACONIAN GUN LAWS

Longtime listeners of Glenn Beck know the radio host has a recurring bit he does when the mainstream media — seemingly out of nowhere — performs a tough interview or asks tough questions. He calls it “scattered showers of journalism.” And it was pouring on the CNN set on Friday.

During a segment on Chicago reportedly hitting the sad milestone of its 500th homicide in 2012 (there is now a discrepancy), the Rev. Jesse Jackson was asked to explain how gun violence in Chicago can be so high despite the Draconian gun laws. Additionally, the host pointed out that if such gun laws were enacted on a larger scale, couldn’t we expect a similar rise in violence in other big cities?

Jackson squirmed, and even oddly tried to blame gun ranges for the massacre: “You know, I think about Newtown, for example, they have three or four gun ranges. Now, there are no gun ranges in Chicago.  [They] have almost no unemployment. … Newtown is so different than the complexity of the urban crisis.”

But the host didn’t back down.

“Rev. Jackson, I’m going to make one more turn at this question, because the original question was, Chicago has some of the strictest and most tough gun laws in the country,” he said boldly. “If this level of gun laws doesn’t work in Chicago, and you still have the guns coming from outside the city in, and now you got 500 homicides this year, what is the argument to extending this nationally and to other cities?”

Jackson responded that “the guns are not coming from Chicago,” but the host noted that Chicago still isn’t working as a model for gun control considering 87 percent of the homicides were gun-related.

“Chicago is in a bubble as the manufacturer — we’re a target market for gun flow. And they exploit the poverty and the pain,” he said, before expanding the blame on “lack of education and lack of dreams.”

In other words, he seemed to admit that stopping violence isn’t really all about guns.

Watch the exchange below via Mediaite: