The New York Times carries a strange-for-them article proving that Chicago’s handgun ban and subsequent package of gun control measures doesn’t work. Of course, they can’t say THAT. So the headline reads City’s Restrictive Gun Laws Are Rarely Enforced. Dare I say it, the majority of the article is a fair and balanced look at Mayor Daley’s mob’s abject inability to do anything about gun crime via its Draconian anti-gun ordinances. It’s a story of few arrests and even fewer convictions, with a side order of buck passing . . .
When someone is picked up with an illegal weapon, the Chicago police and the Cook County state’s attorney — and sometimes federal law-enforcement officials — decide whether to bring felony charges, which fall under federal and state laws. Violating a city ordinance is not a felony . . .
The police have rarely arrested anyone solely for violating the city’s gun ordinance. From 2005 through 2009, there were fewer than 100 arrests a year, on average, in which a violation of the ordinance was the most serious charge, according to the police department.
You may recall that Chicago has an estimated 100,000 plus illegal guns on the street. A fact that reveals the City’s gun control ordinances for what they are: political window dressing. Laws that restrict law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms whilst doing sweet FA to reduce gun crime.
The Times is not insensitive to this glaring conflict between Chicago’s ultra-strict gun control laws and the Windy City’s out-of-control gun crime. Of course, the paper can’t say THAT. So they attribute the money shot—at the very end of the piece—to a critic of the current system . . .
[A retired policeman named] Mr. Sherman said he recently tried to register under the new ordinance, along with 255 others as of mid-August, a police spokesman said, adding that 156 applications have been approved. Mr. Sherman’s was not one of them; he was told he had to undergo a new round of training on a shooting range.
The original intent of the handgun ban was to make it more difficult to get a firearm in Chicago. Now, Mr. Sherman said, weapons are so much easier to obtain illegally that the gun laws only make it more cumbersome for citizens to register firearms.
“Why don’t I just do like these punks on the street have done,” he said, “and put my guns away and pull them out and use them when I want?”
And that’s exactly what the majority of these illegal gun owners are doing..
