(courtesy chicagotribunecom via We Are Done Asking Twitter account)

I’ve written before about the difference between feeling safe and actually being safe, but it’s a concept around which most in the anti-gun population will never be able to wrap their heads. Their entire argument is based on emotion, so asking them to think rationally about the issue is like asking a cat to recite a Shakespeare sonnet. A new poll was released on Monday reinforcing this disconnect between logic and emotion in the Windy City, as apparently 55% of Chicago residents feel “less safe” now that concealed carry is legal.

According to the Chicago Tribune, 55 percent of poll-takers said they felt “less safe” with the law permitting licensed gun owners to bear hidden weapons in public. Meanwhile, 15 percent said they felt “more safe” and 30 percent said they were indifferent.

The numbers coincide with a rise in Chicago shootings this summer — headline-making cases include the tragic death of 11-year-old Shamiya Adams — and a decline in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s job approval rating. The Trib reported last week that his rating slipped from 50 percent around this time last year to a current low of 35 percent, revealing significant dissatisfaction with how the incumbent Democrat — up for re-election this February — is handling the city’s myriad problems, crime being one of them. The mayor blames “economic stress” for his poor reviews.

There are two problems here.

First, despite Chicago residents having been conditioned over decades to fear “concealed carry killers” thanks to the civilian disarmament extremist crowd, people with a concealed carry permit are FAR less likely to commit a murder than even the police. In reality, Chicago citizens would be more justified in their lack of perceived safety if Rahm Emanuel put more cops on the streets as opposed to legalized concealed carry, but the population has been so well conditioned to think that all guns are evil and all gun owners are criminals that their perception of the situation in no way matches up with reality.

The second issue is that the NBC article conveniently correlates the availability of concealed carry permits with a “rise in Chicago shootings this summer.” I’ll give you a hint: no one involved in those incidents had a concealed carry permit. If someone with a legal concealed handgun permit went on a shooting spree in Chicago we’d hear about it non-stop from the Moms Demand Action crowd, but they have been oddly radio silent on this issue. NBC, just like the gun control establishment, believes that guns cause crime, and if we could just remove all firearms from the world then we would have finally achieved that utopian ideal where everyone is naturally good and kind to each other.

There’s just one problem: life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short. There really is true evil in the world, and the availability of firearms (on balance) does vastly more to allow individuals to protect themselves than contributes to the commission of crimes. But, of course, NBC doesn’t see it that way. To NBC and their ilk, firearms are a talisman of evil — a magical item that forces the holder to commit crimes. Without that firearm, those same criminals would have been perfect law-abiding angels helping old ladies across the street. I think not.

Perception is reality. It doesn’t matter if the crime rate plummets and murders become few and far between — we still have our rights on the chopping block so long as the public perceives our ability to defend ourselves as a threat to their safety. There is one silver lining to this story, namely that the percentage of people in Chicago scared of concealed carry is only 55%. While it’s a solid majority, it’s not everyone. With some luck, hopefully they too will start to realize that law abiding citizens are not the issue and come around on the gun rights issue. A man can dream, anyway…

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84 COMMENTS

  1. I was in the Loop yesterday. There is a LOT of stupid clueless people walking around with headphones/earbuds on oblivious of danger. I’ve talked/argued with numerous idiots who are anti carry. The level of disconnect is incredible. You can’t fix stupid…

    • I don’t personally think that there is as much of a “disconnect” as some of you think there is. I would be willing to bet that since quite a few of Chicago’s residents actual profession is slightly less than legal, that they genuinely ARE afraid of everyone being armed. Can’t get shot if your “customers” are not armed…

    • If you don’t live in the gang controlled south and west sides your chances of being a murder victim are pretty slim. A crime victim a bit higher and certainly you have to watch out when you are in the borderlands between the state of nature and civilization.

    • The 55% figure is probably a pretty good estimate of the number of Chicago residents that exist on the back side of the bell curve, and reliably vote for the Democrats.

      And if this comment has offended any resident of Chicago, I deeply regret that you are stupid enough to take offense at the truth.

    • Don’t be so sure of the intelligence of the people of Chicago. I can’t find a link to the poll they’re talking about but I bet that they didn’t poll more than 1000 people in a city of over 3 million, and I bet the questions were worded badly to get the result they wanted.

  2. I’m perfectly okay with the people of Chicago choosing to be stupid. The same creatures who gave us Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, the Daleys et al deserve whatever they get.

    • Karma, bitches. Your life expectancy in Chicago ain’t much longer than third grade, unless you’re an evil Democrat 1%er.

  3. The carrying of guns is the criteria for judgment.
    Up until now only or the vast majority of gun carriers were criminals.
    And indeed carrying a gun made you a criminal.
    It is a lot to ask for people to disconnect their long held association between two when that assessment has been true for so long.
    They feel less safe because they don’t know how to psychologically separate gun carriers into good guy/bad guy camps.
    So it maybe they feel less safe because they know there are now more guns out there and they can’t tell who is who.
    Without that skill it does feel less safe.
    In their heads, more guns equals more criminals until they start hearing about DGU’s in Chicago. That will start to create a differentiation between good and bad.
    Gotta give them some time.

    • +1
      Years of propaganda will not be overcome by a brief experience with the truth. Let’s see what the poll is like in a year or two.

  5. “55% of Chicago residents feel “less safe” now that concealed carry is legal.”

    55% of Chicoms are brainwashed.

    Still, I would expect to see a much higher number of brainwashed in a communist stronghold.

  6. My cat is insulted. He informs me that he CHOOSES not to recite Shakespearean sonnets.

    (Actually, he’s on my lap purring.)

  7. If I was living in Chiraq, I’d be a bit more concerned with the information in the Chicago Magazine articles (“The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates”) from a couple of months back.

    Part 1

    Part 2

    • Chicago cooking the books on crime stats just like NYC. Nobody is surprised.

      Since they are either incapable or indifferent to actually doing the job to fight the gangs, the remaining alternative is to cook the books so they can all get raises and make headlines.

      Given how corrupt major urban centers of government happen to be, nobody is surprised.

    • Thank you for the links. Excellent article that does a good job digging below the surface, revealing the depth or corruption in the CPD and city gubment in general.

  9. I am sure people will change their opinion as Chiraq police budget gets cut further, officers off the street, and the local choir members move east towards the lake. . . . .

  10. Chi-Town (NY, NY [pick a dumb liberal city]) better catch a clue (your real estate is small, and even if you pack it full of people you don’t represent another square inch of America and you don’t decide for the rest of us). Let your population spill-out into the heartland, and they will be conservative (or at least more conservative) in short-order.

    If you live in a Blue state you may be part of the Problem. If you have a (D) after your name [or are rino or liberal], the problem is part-of-you.

  11. 85% of ALL murders in Chicago 2.7 million people are in a subset of 170K people (6.2% of the population). Lowest income, lowest educated, black on black violence. As long as they’re culling their own, the remaining 93.6% are not going to worry about it. And police don’t care because it keeps them, judges, lawyers, correction and parole officers employed.

    That’s what happens when illegal immigrants (speaking no englas) robs them of their jobs, welfare checks passed out like candy and drugs are easily available.

    • I dunno. Seems like every spring, once it gets good and warm, there’s at least one weekend of thefts and bullying along the Magnificent Mile, and often the people they interview will flat out admit they feel invaded.

      But, yeah, general attitude is “it doesn’t touch me, so I don’t care.”

      • Yep…tell that to the guy stabbed in the HEAD by a homeless a##hole in a Gold Coast restroom.

  12. Come on people of Chicago, wake up and smell the coffee! Can you not realize that a legally CC’ed firearm may save your worthless carcass someday!

  13. It’s all conditioning. They fear guns, but they don’t know why.

    This article reminds me of a conversation I had with a couple of gun-ignorant friends who moved from New York to Florida right after Sandy Hook. We were sitting outside in a crowded outdoor mall talking about concealed carry (I was trying, in vain, to explain how it can help deter and stop a mass shooter). They replied that they would just “freak out” if they knew someone around them were carrying a gun. They openly acknowledged that the though would be terrifying to them.

    My response: “If? I guarantee you that there is someone within eyesight carrying a gun right now (I was not referring to myself).” I then took them through some simple statistics: There are just under 20m people in Florida. 20% are under 18 (carry age is 21) and of those over 18, 1.5m have felonies (and they’re concentrated in far less “nice” areas than where we were). That means there are (very) roughly 7m non-felon men in Florida, over the age of 21. There are roughly 1m carry permits in Florida, held overwhelmingly by men. So, it’s probably safe to say 1 in 10 men walking around us has a permit, and if just 10% of them carry regularly, then out of the couple hundred people walking around us, odds are quite good that someone here has a gun. In fact, at every place you’ve been with a large crowd since moving here, there’s probably been a gun. You just didn’t know it.

    That realization blew their minds. Then, by happenstance, a guy walked by, and I could the outline of an IWB holster at 4:00, something non-gun people would never notice. “Speak of the devil. There’s one right there.” What followed was not a freak-out but a realization that the conditioning they experienced since birth was a load of crap. We then had a multi-hour conversation about guns and why gun control is irrational non-sense.

    • I live in Florida as well, and use the same (though in simplified form) argument. Go outside your door in Florida in a city or town, and there is a fair chance that a legal gun owner/carrier (don’t forget vehicle carry is A-OK without a CWFL here) is within 100 meters of you.

    • OMG…math & applied logic, light one’s hair on fire and scream into a rabbit hole. Makes dam sense to me.

    • There is another tactic that you can spring on the people in Illinois and especially Cook County. Tell them that the murder rate in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan is roughly equal to the murder rate in Illinois. Then tell them that those three surrounding states have prolific concealed carry. Finally, ask them why the good people of Illinois and Cook County, who have no criminal record, are going to be more barbaric than the people of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan who have no criminal record.

      This approach forces them to acknowledge that good people are good people and will act/react just the same in Illinois and Cook County as they do in the surrounding states. And that means concealed carriers will not make them less safe.

      On the off chance that your conversation partner is convinced that the good people of Illinois and Cook County are more barbaric than the good people of surrounding states, then tell them that they should get their concealed carry license to protect themselves from the good people in their state.

      This truly is an argument that you cannot lose when you follow that approach.

    • Nice work! You may not have succeeded in fully converting them (yet), but you’ve shown them the light and they’re in a good state to begin their journey.

  14. Everyday worldwide, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS are spent on advertising for a reason. Very simply, propaganda works. As Goebbels said,

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

    http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/goebbelslie.html

    • Ole Abe said (para phrased) Fool some all the time, all some of the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

      And with a population having guns….and enough becomes enough, then rule 303

  16. According to the Chicago Sun-Crimes newspaper, only 0.33% of Cook County residents had applied for a CCL as of the end of July. The vast majority of them won’t carry on a regular basis because all the stupid “prohibited areas,” (including the mass-transit system that everyone uses) make it darn-near impossible.

    If everyone legally carrying in Chicago today was wearing a blaze-orange jumpsuit, you’d be hard pressed to find one.

    As for that poll – well, Chicago citizens are the people who continue to elect the liberal leaders who have run their city and state into financial insolvency. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer, if you catch my drift.

    • You hit on what I was thinking. Despite concealed carry being legal, how many people can reasonably attain a permit and a gun? With all these barriers, I doubt many people are carrying, so this fear of legal concealed carriers is WAY unjustified and has ZERO correlation to the crime spikes.

  18. “… we still have our rights on the chopping block so long as the public perceives our ability to defend ourselves as a threat to their safety rolls over and does nothing when politicians pass laws that violate our state and U.S. Constitutions.”

    There, fixed that for you.

  21. “This just in. 40% of respondents to the Chicago Tribune’s poll on Concealed Carry found to have felony records, rendering them intelligible to own firearms. The other 15% of negative responses likely complete morons.”

  22. Two points:
    -if I still lived in Chicago (and I’m glad I don’t, even though I’m stuck at O’Hare as I write this), I would say I feel significantly less safe now, but it has nothing to do with concealed carry and everything to do with reduced police presence and the cozy relationships between the gangs and the Machine;

    -I suspect a close look at the survey would disclose a significant survey bias either in the population surveyed or in the construction of the survey itself.

    • Well, how else would you construct a survey to find the answer you’ve already determined fits your narrative?

  23. “The second issue is that the NBC article conveniently correlates the availability of concealed carry permits with a “rise in Chicago shootings this summer.” I’ll give you a hint: no one involved in those incidents had a concealed carry permit.”

    I listen to the local Leftist radio every morning while doing horse chores. Chicago station WBBM AM

    Have noticed since conceal carry law went into effect, reports of “gang shootings this weekend” have been completely replaced by “gun violence” or just “shootings” this weekend.

    Think that’s a coincidence? No.

  24. The people of Illinois and Chicago are good/rational people. The media, as usual, dwells on the gang warfare. The Nation sees that as ” everyday life in Chicago”. And. . . . well, it is. It is a progressive liberal run city. What does that mean?? It is a city that believes it’s citizen’s belong to the state. Gang warfare is encouraged and perpetuated. That way, the gov’mt can control the population by claiming they protect. A simple balance of gang violence vs jailed non- people. Mindless drones. Bees. Ants. Chicago politics have made the beta United States Socialism experiment a success. And then put it into production with OBlablama. Scary stuff. Very Scary stuff.

  25. And survey says:

    It’s been proven you can easily get the answer you want from a survey IF you “phrase” the question properly.

    Kind of like eyewitnesses, notoriously wrong.

    I call this survey BS.

  26. It was a newspaper poll. Hardly scientific, unless I missed something. All it means is the MDA folks sent out an email to their “members” and none of the pro gun groups caught on in enough time to do the same.

  27. The correlation of perceived safety and satisfaction with political figureheads is VERY interesting, on a couple of levels…

  29. Having formerly lived and worked in Chicago, I can say that 50% of the people there are complete facking morons. Not sure how to account for the other 5% in this survey…

  30. I must be rarer then hen’s teeth because I live in Chicago. I have my permit and carry as often as I legally can. I feel much safer carrying and having a permit, especially after coming close to getting robbed a few months before my permit was issued.

    I think most people in the city don’t worry about their safety because they adopt an attitude of “it’ll never happen to me , I live in a good neighborhood” Well that sounds great in theory until you hear gunshots and realize a 14yr old kid has been murdered less than two blocks from your “nice neighborhood” Violent crime is in every Chicago neighborhood

    Not everyone in Chicago is Antigun and I think if crime keeps increasing and people get effected on a personal level they will change their tune.

  32. 2 things come to mind for me here… 1) WHY? Chicago has only added what 6-8 total CCW holders! They are trying to put up as many barriers as possible to prevent people from getting them. 2- and more important) So WHAT!? I don’t CARE how exercising MY right makes other people FEEL. No one bothered asking me how i FELT when Obamacare was passed, or when weed was legalized in CO, or 2A rights were infringed upon in the same state. THIS kind of logic makes me throw up. THIS is how we end up focused on things like the name of a pro football team that has existed for 75 years without complaint- and i don’t even like them, btw. How you FEEL? “TOUGH S**T!” I say!

  36. ” PERMIT TO CARRY GUN NOT LICENSE TO SHOOT”

    No,It’s your license to die as an armed person.

    • gun owners who are not gang members or criminals are safer than non gun owners. members of their households are also about 15% safer

  37. You must ask the question “How was the poll taken and how was the question put to the people who answered” Like most polls done the results the pollster wants to get is easy to obtain. I am sure the NRA could do the same poll and come up with a very different conclusion.

  38. With the latest numbers on deaths caused by guns and this is the total number that includes suicides, accidental deaths and murders for 2011 , the most resent year that figures are out to the public, being 32163. Now, that is a large number but when you take the number of guns owned in America being 310,000,000 and do the math it means out of all those guns only .0001% will be the cause of a death in America. Now, do the same math on the number of hammers that cause a death in the same year and realize that no one commits suicide by using a hammer then what we need to do is outlaw hammers in America not guns. Oh, by the way deaths by blunt force of a hammer or other similar object is .0008% according to FBI figures.

  39. hmmm… how safe do people who did not carry before it was legal feel now that they still don’t carry after it has become legal? ummm… wait, i pretty much lost interest already.
    illinois didn’t get a perfect bill, but did get one. and many folks who wouldn’t carry before will now. and more will follow.
    the feeling while being out in public is palpable. hang on, what’s the opposite of paranoid?

  40. I believe if a second poll was taken with the same respondents of this poll and they were asked if any of their family have been convicted of a criminal act , I believe more people in this poll would answer yes. so really this poll being taken in this city is really irrelevant . you have to look at the statics ,the crime rate sense the implication of concealed carry the crime rate has gone down. Chicago has large population of blacks and the majority of criminals acts there are committed by blacks .so I believe by asking these people this question , they are trying to protect their family . I also believe if the same situation was in a white dominate city , they would most likely answer the same way

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