If gun control laws actually worked to stop violent criminals from committing crimes instead of preventing law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights we wouldn’t be seeing stories like this one out of Chicago.

24-year old Steven Kelsey was convicted of his first felony as an adult back in 2015. As the website CWB Chicago reports, Kelsey was first charged with attempted murder before ultimately being convicted of illegal gun possession and aggravated discharge of a firearm.

Placed on parole, Kelsey was soon arrested again on charges of unlawfully possessing a weapon as a felon. Remarkably, he was sent back to prison and wasn’t released until June of last year, when he posted a $10,000 bond and was allowed to return home as long as he was subject to electronic monitoring.

For a little more than a year Kelsey managed to keep himself out of trouble, but according to prosecutors that all changed just a couple of weeks ago.

On July 12, a 44-year-old woman was enjoying her lunch break inside her locked car in a parking lot in the 200 block of East Marquette. While looking at her phone, she noticed someone tried to open her driver’s door, which was locked.

She looked up and saw a man wearing a ski mask pointing a gun at her and ordering her to get out. Another man was outside her passenger door.

The woman complied with the carjackers’ demands, and they drove away with her Dodge Charger. The hijacking was captured on video, Grupca said.

Two days later, officers from the Illinois Department of Corrections found the woman’s key fob in Kelsey’s pants pocket while conducting a parole compliance check at his home, according to Grupca. The woman’s hijacked Charger was parked in an abandoned garage two doors down from Kelsey’s house, Grupca said.

Data from the sheriff’s office showed Kelsey’s ankle monitor leaving his house and moving to the hijacking site at a speed “consistent with being on foot” and then traveling away from the crime scene at a pace that appeared to be in a vehicle, according to Grupca.

He said the victim could not identify Kelsey because the armed hijacker was wearing a ski mask, but she did say the gunman was shorter than her and provided other descriptors.

According to CWB Chicago, besides Kelsey’s adult felony convictions he also has three juvenile convictions to his name; two counts of possessing stolen vehicles and one conviction for aggravated vehicular hijacking. It’s unclear whether any of those charges resulted in him spending time behind bars as a juvenile, but for now he’s been ordered back to jail after having his parole revoked.

Anti-gun politicians like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have broadly ignored the issue of repeat violent offenders in favor of castigating and trying to criminalize law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in self-defense. In recent days Pritzker has moved to give the Illinois State Police wide latitude in denying FOID cards (required to legally possess a firearm in the state) in response to the shooting in Highland Park on the Fourth of July, but has paid almost no time and attention to the disturbing fact that as violent crime has increased across the city of Chicago, arrest rates have starkly declined.

The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.

The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.

The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops — in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.

And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.

… There also was a plunge in the number of arrests are for so-called index crimes, which include homicide, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated battery.

Officers made arrests in fewer than 6% of those crime categories that were reported last year, the lowest level since at least 2001, the Sun-Times analysis of Chicago police data found. The trend has continued this year, according to figures through early June.

Chicago criminals are literally getting away with murder (and non-fatal shootings, home invasions, robberies, and carjackings) while the anti-gun politicians in charge of the city and state are targeting those law-abiding residents who want to legally own and carry a gun to protect themselves. That’s not the only reason why residents are choosing to pack up and leave, of course, but when legal gun owners are Public Enemy #1 and career criminals are an afterthought at best to the politicians running the state, it shouldn’t come as a shock or surprise that hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans are looking for a better (and safer) life beyond its borders.