CHICAGO — The mass shooting at an Oregon community college last week thrust the debate over the nation’s gun laws to the center of the presidential race. At least some of the Republicans who are running have pointed to Chicago
CHICAGO — The mass shooting at an Oregon community college last week thrust the debate over the nation’s gun laws to the center of the presidential race. At least some of the Republicans who are running have pointed to Chicago as proof that gun control doesn’t work.
The city has a reputation for having some of the country’s strictest gun laws yet it has experienced an increase in homicides and shootings this year, which Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina say proves their point.
“If you look at places like Chicago … it’s got some of the single toughest gun laws in the United States and it’s a disaster,” the billionaire businessman Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in August.
Christie, who is New Jersey’s governor, echoed the sentiment Sunday, telling ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that homicides are up in cities like Chicago and New York, which he said have “some of the most aggressive gun laws.” Meanwhile Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said last month that “Chicago would be an example” of how places with some of the most “stringent gun control laws” also have the “highest gun crime rates in the nation,” according to Factcheck.org.
But Chicago’s gun laws aren’t as tough as their reputation suggests. They once were, but courts have overturned or gutted many of them in recent years, forcing a city that once banned handguns and gun shops to allow them both.
Chicago’s vanishing gun restrictions
Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was determined to keep handguns out of residents’ hands and he fought every legal challenge to Chicago’s gun restrictions during his 22 years in office. But the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a big blow to Chicago’s gun laws in 2010 when it struck down the city’s handgun ban.
Chicago quickly enacted a gun ordinance that proponents said included some of the nation’s toughest regulations, but it was forced to scrap some of the provisions that most angered gun rights advocates.
Then after a federal appeals court struck down Illinois’ last-in-the-nation concealed carry ban in 2012, gun rights advocates took aim at Chicago’s decades-old ban on gun stores. The city lost that fight, too, and last year passed an ordinance allowing gun stores.
Where are today’s guns coming from?
Even though gun shops can operate within Chicago’s city limits now, none have opened up yet. That means that every gun that is owned legally or illegally in Chicago came from somewhere else. Just how many is unclear, but Chicago’s police department seizes more illegal weapons than any other in the nation — nearly 20 a day for a total of 5,500 so far this year.
So, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed an ordinance to allow once-banned gun stores in the city, he simultaneously released a city report that blames gun sales elsewhere for much of Chicago’s street violence.
According to the report, nearly 60 percent of recovered guns that were used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 through 2013 were first sold in states with more lax gun laws. Neighboring Indiana was far and away the biggest source, with 19 percent of all recovered guns having been sold there first. But they came from far and wide, with Mississippi being the second biggest source, at 6.7 percent.
Crime, but enough punishment?
Anyone who has attended one of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s news conferences about gun violence knows it drives him crazy to hear about how Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the U.S. He says it simply is’t true.
That may not change anytime soon, either. Two years ago, several black Illinois state lawmakers blocked a bill backed by McCarthy and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that would have imposed stiffer prison sentences on those convicted of illegal gun possession. The lawmakers viewed it as little more than a recipe to lock up more blacks and Latinos.
