By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Despite court losses to the Second Amendment Foundation, Illinois State Rifle Association and others in gun rights legal actions over the past 14 years since the landmark McDonald ruling by the Supreme Court, Illinois still has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, yet Chicago remains a slaughterhouse.
This was underscored over the weekend with the slayings of nine people including a 5-year-old who was fatally wounded while seated in her father’s car Sunday, according to Fox News. Another 30 were wounded, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
As Memorial Day weekends go, this one might be considered “average” in terms of body counts. The popular website Heyjackass.com includes a history of Memorial Day weekend carnage dating back to 2014, and most of them have murder counts in the 7-9 range, although in 2023, 14 people died and in 2022, 10 people were slain. The average number of people wounded on a Memorial Day weekend is 42, the website said.
So far this year, according to the website, 177 people have been fatally shot and another 833 have been wounded. Overall, there have been 207 murders so far this year in the city.
According to Fox News, the 5-year-old was killed at about 3 a.m. The report said a Jeep Cherokee pulled up beside the parked car and someone inside opened fire. A 24-year-old man in the car was wounded.
Last year, according to WLS News, the local ABC affiliate, Chicago police reported a 51.7 percent homicide clearance rate, which means slightly over half of the murders were solved.
Even The Trace—the Michael Bloomberg-backed gun control news organ—last December looked at the Chicago homicide situation declaring only 20 percent of homicides result in an arrest. In a February report by CBS News it was revealed, “Cases are listed as cleared – not because they’re necessarily solved, but because prosecutors declined to charge a suspect when there is not enough evidence, or because the wrong person was arrested for the crime.”
While tragedies such as Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and Lewiston, Maine and other mass shootings grab national headlines, often for days, the continuing carnage in Chicago does not get the same level of national attention. Is it because the situation in the Windy City defies the gun control narrative? The same might be said of the homicides in Washington, D.C. There, according to WUSA News, last year saw a 36 percent rise in homicides from 2022, with 274 murders posted, most of them involving firearms, despite the fact that the District of Columbia has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the country.
It appears tough gun control laws, which make it very difficult for law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms in certain jurisdictions, are not living up to expectations. Yet, when confronted with the failures of such laws, anti-gunners contend it is because the laws do not go far enough, rather than admit their current statutes are essentially failures as crime fighting tools.
