Thirty-eight people were shot, at least eight fatally, in gun-controlled Chicago over Memorial Day Weekend.
The murders are in line with what the city has witnessed over the past few years. ABC7 reports there were seven murders over the Memorial Day Weekend in 2017 and eight during the same weekend in 2016.
Chicago’s overall murder rate is slightly lower than it was last year at this point. USA Today reports there have been 191 murders year-to-date, whereas there were 237 murders at this same time last year. However, the murder rate is still high enough that it puts Chicago “on pace once again to record more homicides than any other American city. ”
In fact, “Chicago still has tallied nearly as many homicides thus far in 2018 as New York City (106) and Los Angeles (92) combined.”
This violence is occurring in a city where gun control has been the go-to solution for crime for decades. The city banned handgun ownership in 1982, only to see the murder rate skyrocket. The Chicago Police Department reported there were 850 homicides in 1993, 930 homicides in 1994, 921 homicides in 1991, and a startling 940 homicides in 1992. Yet the city’s leaders refused to lift the handgun ban, doing so only when the ban was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010.
Even now, city and state leaders push for more gun control as the solution to the violence in Chicago. On March 8, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the Illinois House passed a bill designed to require 18-20-year olds to hand over theretofore legally purchased and possessed “assault weapons.” More recently, on April 3, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the Chicago suburb of Deerfield actually empowered their chief of police to confiscate residents’ “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines and destroy them.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.