Can gunshots be Democratic or Republican?

In the scheme of things, fear of getting shot is a bigger hinderance to voting than the GOP's new ID law. William "Bill" Bender reports:

I just returned from a polling place on Johnson Street in Sun Village, a watch-your-back neighborhood in Chester's East Side, where more than a dozen shots rang out after the polls opened this morning.

"We have a lot of people who walk here to vote. We want to protect them but how can we?" asked Ashaki-Imani Prince, a judge of elections. "They'll be afraid they might be shot."

The voting booths are located inside a garage that already has a couple bullet holes in it – including one that went through the front door into the back wall – from a previous shooting.

Of course, comments began flying from mommy's basements all across the Delaware Valley, blaming the incident on...Democrats. For example:

Chesters problems are actually fairly recent. The city was doing fine until the mid 80's when the manufacturing jobs left. Since then the city has voted nothing but Democratic, yet still expects Hope and Change to come to them. The only positive thing going in the city is the soccer stadium, which was paid for by tolls on the DRPA bridges, unethically. -- towlie

Call me crazy, but isn't the biggest issue here the fact that "the manufacturing jobs left." That would tend to create more poverty and more crime. Digging deeper, I think every level of government that would have been in charge when that happened in "the mid '80s" (Reagan, Heinz and Specter, Weldon, Thornberg, county and local government) was Republican at that time. So a) how could you blame the Democrats and b) can you blame people who've lost their jobs for voting for the other party?

What am I thinking? It's all Obama's fault.googleoff: all