That strict gun control in Chicago has obviously worked. America’s third largest city had 762 homicides in 2016, the most in two decades and more than New York and Los Angeles combined. It also saw 3,500 shooting incidents, which is 1,100 more than it had in 2015. From WGN:
According to the Chicago Police Department, there were 762 murders in the city in 2016 and 3,550 shooting incidents with 4,331 shooting victims. A department spokesman says more than 80% of the fatal and non-fatal shooting victims were previously identified by police as being likely to be involved in an act of gun violence, either as a victim or an offender.Most of the murders occurred on the city’s South and West Sides.
The police department also “recovered 8,300 illegal guns in 2016, a 20 percent increase from the previous year.”
It does not help that Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson remains delusional about guns and the gun laws in Illinois. From The Associated Press:
He also said it’s becoming clearer to criminals that they have little to fear from the criminal justice system.”In Chicago, we just don’t have a deterrent to pick up a gun,” he said. “Any time a guy stealing a loaf of bread spends more time pre-trial in jail than a gun offender, something is wrong.”Johnson, who has for months complained about Illinois’ lax gun laws, said he thinks more and more gang members are arming themselves because the price for being caught is small compared to other large cities. He said gang members he has spoken to consider the court system “a joke.”
Um, okay, bro. LAX gun laws?! Is he insane? First off, for the longest time, no one could purchase a firearm in the city. In 2014, a judge ruled that unconstitutional and reversed the law. But of course the Chicago officials have done all they can to make sure Chicago citizens have a tough time purchasing firearms legally to protect themselves. They restricted gun shops to certain parts of the city and videotape every purchase. A citizen can only purchase one gun every 30 days.
The state of Illinois requires a person to undergo a 16-hour test to obtain a conceal carry license, which is one of the longest in the nation. The purchaser must also wait 72 hours for a handgun and 24 hours for a rifle or shotgun.
How can he blame the lax gun laws when officials have kept gun shops 99% out of the city?! This just goes to show that criminals will find a way to obtain a gun no matter how many laws stand in their way.
But as Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author on The War on Cops, points out in The New York Post, the stats also go in hand “with the de-policing and decriminalization movements sweeping the country.” The officers have backed off since “maintaining control of the streets constitutes racial oppression.” She wrote:
Arrests are down 28 percent this year in the Windy City, the lowest since at least 2001, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and less than half what they were in 2010. Drug arrests are down by half. Pedestrian stops were down 82 percent by early fall.—The department is de-emphasizing Broken Windows policing, Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times over the weekend, to target what’s “really hurting Chicago right now, and this is the gun violence.” Making low-level narcotics arrests likely wouldn’t affect the gun violence, he said.But that distinction between serious crime and an allegedly less urgent breakdown in public order is specious. The best way to get gangbangers under control is to maintain street order.In Baltimore, drug arrests plummeted after the Freddie Gray anti-cop race riots in April 2015. Shootings exploded as a result. After the Obama Justice Department blasted the Baltimore Police Department in August 2016 for its practice of “clearing the corners” of large groups of teens, small business owners and residents in West Baltimore begged the cops to clear the corners again, because crime and drug-dealing had spiked so much.
Johnson admitted that the release a video in November 2015 of officers shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald has caused friction between citizens and cops. Back in October, Johnson also admitted that his cops have second-guessed themselves in fear of becoming the next viral video after a cop did not defend herself against a man who beat her unconscious.
It’s also fitting that President Barack Obama, one of the most anti-gun presidents we have endured, will deliver his farewell speech in Chicago on January 10. After all, he has called on Congress to use Chicago’s gun laws as an example when drafting new anti-gun laws.
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