Friday's print column

Greetings from Chicago, the “murder capital of America,” a toddlin’ town that’s “gaining a national reputation for violence,” the site of a “mini-Holocaust” on the streets due to our “epidemic of gun violence,” all in the recent words of TV talking heads.

Chicago has become the go-to reference for anyone looking to evoke the everyday horrors of the streets in contrast to such high-profile but unusual incidents as the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in suburban Orlando, Fla., last year.

“Since Trayvon Martin was killed, 500 people have been killed in Chicago alone,” said talk-show host Larry Elder during a guest appearance on CNN Tuesday evening.

The previous night on the same network, in a video montage related to the umpty-whillionth panel discussion prompted by Zimmerman’s acquittal, an unidentified woman said “Nobody’s talking about what happened in Chicago last week; 62 people were killed.”

Nobody was talking about it because it didn’t happen. No one on the show bothered to correct the assertion — the actual number of murders in Chicago in that week was 10, police said — probably because it felt so right.

Chicago had the most murders of any city in America last year, 506, and was the site in late January of a heartbreaking killing that made international news — when Hadiya Pendleton, 15, a King College Prep honor student, was mistakenly gunned down in an attempted gang hit just days after she’d returned from performing in Washington, D.C., at presidential inaugural festivities.

But even with its 17 percent spike in murders in 2012, Chicago was far from the deadliest city in America. Our murder rate, 18.5 per 100,000 residents according to preliminary FBI data, was 21st in the nation, better than Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, to name a few.