After Weekend Of Gang Violence, Chicago Tribune Attacks Right To Carry

We just saw another weekend full of tragic violence in Chicago with at least 34 people shot, six of them fatally. That number is actually down slightly from Labor Day weekend when more than 40 people were shot and eight were murdered in the city. Gang members and street criminals illegally using guns in the commission of their crimes are driving the violence, but the Chicago Tribune is focusing instead on concealed carry holders in a front-page story that highlights the rare cases of concealed carry holders who’ve been involved in crimes.

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The number of concealed carry license (CCL) shootings has been steadily rising over nearly six years since it became legal to carry a handgun in Illinois — along with concerns that a lack of rigorous oversight is resulting in more shootings that are not justified. There have been more than 60 shootings by CCL holders, 23 in just the last year, according to a database compiled by the Tribune.

So, since concealed carry became the law in Illinois back in 2014, the Chicago Tribune has identified around 60 cases in which someone legally carrying a firearm pulled the trigger. Not all of those 60 cases involved criminal activity, by the way. Many of the cases cited by the Tribune were actually defensive gun uses. In fact, charges were filed in just 12 of the 62 cases found by the Tribune over the past five years, though there were also a couple of other cases in which a concealed carry holder was killed by law enforcement after committing a crime.

With more than 300,000 Illinois residents licensed to carry, that amounts to less than 0.02% of concealed carry holders in the state that have been involved in a criminal shooting of any kind, at least according to the database compiled by the Tribune. Are concealed carry holders driving the violence in Chicago? Not even close. So why is the paper choosing to run a front-page story hyping up the danger of concealed carry in the state?

Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center — a Washington D.C.-based group in favor of gun control — said she expects these kinds of “bad” shootings will increase in Illinois as time passes, based on what has happened in other states.

“In Illinois now that you’ve had (concealed carry) a few years,” she said, “it is similar to what you saw in Florida. The really bad things started happening after the law had been in place several years. It’s not overnight. It takes a while for people to start getting their licenses and having a critical mass of people carrying weapons.

“People feel more comfortable carrying their guns and feel somewhat more emboldened to use them,” she explained. “And also, as time goes by, they’ve all individually had more opportunity to use them.”

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There are more than 1.2 million Floridians with concealed carry licenses, and do you know what’s happened since its Right to Carry law went into effect in 1987?  Homicides and violent crime have dropped by more than 50 percent in the state, which neither the Chicago Tribune or the Violence Policy Center’s Kristen Rand bother to point out. Instead, the paper tries to make the case that maybe carrying a firearm for self-defense is just too dangerous for most folks.

Figuring out whether pulling the trigger is the best thing to do in a tense, quick-moving situation is not easy. Some criminologists question whether an average person — even trained — can do this. The so-called “good guy with gun,” they said, is an oversimplification.

“It’s a caricature, really,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama who has studied mass shootings. “Sometimes the person who commits murder doesn’t realize they’re going to commit the murder until six seconds before it happens, and then it’s too late. But they were a good person until that point.”

Kiona Grant said she has attended part of a CCL class but is not yet licensed. She said her trainer drilled this message in their heads: “You have to be in imminent danger. You have to be able to prove your life is in imminent danger.”

But she said she understands now that this is hardly a guarantee.

“You can sit and teach these things,” she said. “You really don’t know, once the person leaves your class, is the person going to do the right thing?”

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This is absolutely idiotic. Again, what the Tribune has found is that, since 2014, less than one-half of one percent of all concealed carry holders in Illinois have misused their firearms or used them in the commission of a crime. The paper found two murder cases, and a couple dozen more involving everything from non-fatal shootings to negligent discharges. Just this year there’ve been 598 car accidents that have led to the deaths of 645 Illinois residents. Now imagine the Chicago Tribune arguing that despite driver’s education, it’s just too darn dangerous for people to get behind the wheel of a car.
You could take away all 306,000 concealed carry licenses in Illinois and you wouldn’t make a dent in the state’s violent crime. In fact, Chicago saw higher homicide rates in the 1990s, back when city residents weren’t allowed to legally own a handgun, much less carry one for self-defense. The drivers of violence then and now aren’t legal gun owners but gang members and career criminals who are well known to law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and the good people living in bad neighborhoods. If the Chicago Tribune wants to do its part to make the city safer, the paper should focus on the actual problems, instead of trying to make the case that we’d all be better off if the only people carrying guns were criminals and cops.

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