Chicago is the gun control capital of the United States. It has long been characterized by politicians like Barack Obama who not only view concealed carry laws with disdain, but even oppose the individual right to keep and bear arms.
Obama even opposed the right to use guns for self-defense in the home while he was a state senator in Illinois.
And although Chicago’s de jure gun ban was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the summer of 2010, legislators, city council members, and others who share Obama’s anti-gun passions are doing everything they can to keep a de facto ban in place.
Now, if the hypothesis of gun-grabbers like Obama was correct, these bans and other legislative anti-gun measures should make Chicago a shining city on a gun-free hill–a place where gun violence is as rare as a Hale-Bopp Comet sighting.
But alas, the reality is that the only people being denied guns under Obama’s scenario are law-abiding citizens. And this means criminals are beginning to understand they can carry out their misdeeds with a impunity, as the citizens they accost or attack have no weapons with which to fight back. As a result, Chicago is on track to have more than 500 gun-related deaths for this year alone.
Each month has had its own horror story, beginning with the news in June that gun-related deaths in Chicago had already surpassed troop deaths in Afghanistan for 2012. During the first three weeks of August 2012 there were more murders than there were in all of August 2011. And September saw weekends where nearly two dozen were shot and 6 were killed, and by October the murder rate for Chicago was 28% higher than it was the year before.
Yet even though Obama’s gun control is such a demonstrable failure in Chicago, during the Oct. 16 debate he intimated he wants to enact more gun control on the federal level if he gets the chance–new gun control measures that would not only ban assault weapons but focus on certain classes of handguns as well.
Just think, this means that if Obama wins a second term the whole country will get a chance to enjoy the same kind of peace and tranquility Chicagoans enjoy on their gun-free streets everyday.