President Barack Obama on Tuesday visited his hometown of Chicago to talk gun control. And in lamenting that gun crime is out of control in a city with some of the nation’s toughest gun controls, the president hinted at coming measures to punish lawful gun owners for the actions of criminals.
Obama called on law enforcement agencies throughout the nation to join him in campaigning for “common-sense” gun reform in a speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“It’s time to be honest — fewer gun safety laws don’t mean more freedom, they mean more fallen officers,” Obama said, according to prepared remarks. “They mean more grieving families, and more Americans terrified that they or their loved ones could be next.”
According to the president, lax gun control in rural areas throughout the nation is undermining efforts to stifle violent crimes via draconian firearm restrictions in places like Chicago. It’s just too easy, Obama contends, for criminals to travel to areas just outside the jurisdiction of Chicago gun laws and make gun purchases.
“I refuse to accept the notion that we couldn’t have prevented some of those murders, and suicides, and kept more families whole,” Obama said of national gun deaths.
According to the president, the only way to fix the problem is to enact tough federal gun laws that would eliminate disparities in firearm restrictions among the states.
It’s not surprising that Obama would choose his hometown as a venue for a renewed gun control push.
Despite being one of the nation’s unfriendliness places for responsible gun owners, nearly 400 homicides, most of the gun-related, have already occurred in Chicago this year.
And in response to some Chicago residents’ proclivity toward criminal behavior, activists in the city began calling for regulations to punish responsible gun owners in outlying areas for months.
In August, I told you about a group of Chicagoans suing nearby local governments, claiming Chicago residents have a “civil right” to force the city’s strict gun control laws on other locales.
In the lawsuits, the Rev. Michael Pfleger claimed that respect for the 2nd Amendment outside of Chicago’s crime-ridden city limits violated Chicago residents’ civil rights by allowing gun sales.
He, working with partnership with the Coalition for Safe Chicago Communities, based his claim on a 2014 “study” from the City of Chicago titled “Tracing the Guns: The Impact of Illegal Guns on Violence in Chicago,” which found that the majority of firearms used in Chicago crimes aren’t bought within the city limits.
No kidding.
As I wrote when the legal challenges first emerged:
The plaintiffs in the case are making a pretty bold argument — and an insulting one to Chicago residents — in claiming that gun sales outside the city violate the Illinois Civil Rights Act, which prohibits local governments from using “criteria or methods of administration” that have “the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of that person’s race.”
Minority neighborhoods in Chicago are less desirable places to live because of respect for the 2nd Amendment in nearby areas which, the suit says, encourages minority residents of Chicago neighborhoods “to seek and obtain guns” for crimes. That causes “a disparate and terrible impact on African Americans who live in neighborhoods afflicted by such illegal gun use ….”
Unfortunately, what Obama and activists like Pfleger can’t seem to understand is that no gun shop outside of Chicago is selling firearms without first conducting background checks. And respectable gun sellers have a great incentive to make sure they aren’t selling firearms that will later turn up at Chicago crime scenes.
In other words, nothing that makes it harder for law abiding Americans to purchase firearms is going to make it less dangerous to walk around inner-city Chicago. In fact, if the liberal utopia pipe dream of Australian-style gun confiscation became reality, firearms would still be used to spill blood on Chicago streets. It might actually get way worse.
Consider this. Chicago has long taken the nation’s failed war on drugs extremely seriously. But late last month, 75 people overdosed in Chicago in fewer than 72 hours.
About 80 percent of the illegal narcotics flooding Chicago streets come from Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, according to reports.
Drugs are illegal in every U.S. state, city and community, yet there’s an endless flow of illicit substances coming into the country from Mexico — where, it’s worth mentioning, both most guns and drugs are illegal — and into Chicago.
That provides at least a hint of where Chicago criminals might get their weapons if U.S. laws attempt to prohibit the ownership and sale of firearms in the U.S.
If Obama were honest, he’d call his push what it really is: a campaign for Mexican-style gun control.
How’s that working out?
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