Under Illinois law and Chicago Transit Authority policy, carrying a concealed weapon in the city's public transportation system is prohibited. Those rules have a chilling effect on the right to keep and bear arms, but they don't seem to be having any impact whatsoever on criminals in the Windy City.
Earlier this week Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke launched a task force aimed at improving public safety on CTA property; a move that would be entirely unnecessary if violent crime wasn't a continuing issue on Chicago's buses, trains, and stations. Not every criminal is illegally carrying a gun when they engage in a robbery and assault, but the prohibition on lawful carry means riders are unable to defend themselves with a firearm when they're threatened with a knife, ,gasoline, or even brute force.
A menace who brutally attacked women on the CTA trains across the city for several months in 2024 received a nine-year prison sentence on Tuesday, according to court records. Darryl Alexander, 35, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of aggravated battery and one count of criminal damage to government property in exchange for the sentence from Judge Anjana Hansen.
Prosecutors charged Alexander with attacking five women on the city’s transit system between August 1 and October 8, 2024, crimes he allegedly committed while on probation for attempting to rob another woman on a train downtown.
The recidivism rate in Chicago is another issue altogether, but suffice it to say that there are plenty of arrests on CTA property that involve individuals who are a familiar face in the Cook County jail and courthouse. 48-year-old Joseph Wright, for instance, was recently busted for having a gun at a Red Line station; a discovery prompted by Wright's decision to spark up a pot-filled cigar in the public setting.
Burke's office charged Wright with possession of a firearm by a repeat felony offender, felon in possession of a weapon, and possession of a firearm on public transportation, but despite his lengthy criminal history a Cook County judge decided to let Wright remain free until his court case has concluded so long as he wears an ankle monitor. That, by the way, will count as time served if and when Wright faces sentencing, with every day spent on electronic monitoring treated as a day behind bars.
On rare occasions, riders do fight back against the lawlessness in the CTA system. CWB Chicago reported this week that several bystanders beat a man and threw him onto the tracks at a Blue Line station after he allegedly shoved a woman off the platform and onto the rails below.
Prosecutors said 44-year-old Robert Rhodes-Chambers attacked a 43-year-old woman on the platform around 11:30 p.m. on May 10. He allegedly punched her in the back of the neck and shoulder with his fists before pushing her onto the tracks.
... But before officers could get to the station, two witnesses allegedly turned on Rhodes-Chambers.
According to the police report, the men attacked Rhodes-Chambers, threw him off the platform onto the tracks, and continued beating him there. Officers arriving at the station summoned an ambulance to take him to Mt. Sinai Hospital for treatment, records show.
Rhodes has a previous criminal history as well. Back in March he pleaded guilty to violating a protective order, and was slapped with a sentence of 12 months of conditional discharge; a sentence that's basically unsupervised probation.
Scrapping the CTA's status as a "gun-free zone" wouldn't solve all of the crime problems on the transit network, but it would at least allow people to better protect themselves. So long as soft-on-crime Democrats are running the show in Illinois, there are going to be public safety issues. And unfortunately, so long as those same anti-gun Democrats are in charge, the CTA is going to stay "gun-free," at least in theory. A federal lawsuit challenging the prohibition was successful at the district court level, but that decision was overturned by the Seventh Circuit and the Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal earlier this year.
I took issue with SCOTUS's decision at the time, and I will continue to highlight the crimes that plague the CTA going forward because I think the Court was dead wrong not to take the case and strike down the Illinois law and CTA policy preventing concealed carry licensees from being able to carry in Chicago's buses and rail cars. Sure, there might not be a circuit court split on the issue at the moment, but that's a minor concern compared to the chaos and violence in Chicago's public transit system that good people are subjected to on a daily basis.
