Chicago’s “weak link” in public safety is not gun control but Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s adherence to the stale and ineffective strategies of the gun prohibition lobby.

Emanuel told reporters yesterday that his answer to the city’s current bloodbath is to ban so-called “assault weapons,” which do not appear to be involved in many, if any of the recent shootings and homicides. He also asserts that “comprehensive background checks” would prevent violence, a notion so demonstrably untrue that CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb called it a “perpetuation of an urban myth.”

“If the city could round up every one of these shooters,” Gottlieb said, “they would find that none of them acquired their guns through legal channels, and thus were never subject to a background check, and Emanuel knows it. For him to suggest, much less believe, that his city’s crime problem would disappear by banning guns and expanding checks on law-abiding citizens is at best delusional.

“Mayor Emanuel knows that Chicago’s problems are with gangs, not guns, and a criminal element that will ignore any new law or regulation Chicago enacts,” he added.

The only idea Emanuel suggested that makes even partial sense, Gottlieb noted, is one that can be traced to a program his organization and other gun rights groups championed called “Hard Time for Armed Crime.”

“Mayor Emanuel wants to lock up people for a minimum of three years when they commit crimes with firearms and make them serve at least 85 percent of their time,” he said. “That’s a strategy that was developed by the firearms community. If he’s going to steal our idea, he ought to at least give us credit.”

“We’re pretty sure Mayor Emanuel is trying to lay political groundwork to blame the new concealed carry law, brought about by a successful gun rights lawsuit in federal court, if Chicago’s bloodbath continues,” Gottlieb concluded. “He seems more interested in perpetuating the crime problem than eliminating it. Banning guns and blocking citizens from exercising their self-defense rights doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked and it’s a loser in court. Rahm should think out of the box or get out of town.”