The death toll from Chicago gun violence is so high that it is skewing national murder figures, making violence appear more ubiquitous than it actually is.
Breitbart News reported that the death toll in Chicago had already passed 730 for the year by December 6. And the Chicago Tribune reports that the number of murders in Chicago reached 755 by December 21. When these numbers are added to the murder figures of other cities, they raise the overall perception of violence considerably — particularly when it comes to the number of homicides.
According to The Washington Post, the Brennan Center of Justice expects “the homicide rate for the country’s 30 biggest cities… to go up by 14 percent this year.” But that increase does not tell the whole story; namely, that “the killings in Chicago account for an astounding 43.7 percent of this overall increase in [homicides].”
In other words, if year-end numbers do in fact show the anticipated “14 percent” jump in homicides nationally, the deaths in Chicago alone will account for nearly half of that increase.
This means Chicago’s failed gun control experiment is affecting us all by making murder numbers appear higher across the nation than they actually are. These elevated numbers give Democratic politicians an opportunity to claim concealed carry is not effective, to claim more intrusive government policies are necessary to keep us safe, regardless of which city or state we call home.
Baltimore has witnessed approximately 299 homicides year-to-date, and Washington D.C. has witnessed approximately 128. When combined with Chicago, the death numbers in these three Democrat-run, highly gun-controlled cities account for well over 50 percent of the murder spike that will be credited to America’s 30 largest cities.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.