Public officials in Chicago have a long and storied history of blaming everyone else for their inner turmoil.

In particular, they claim lax gun control laws elsewhere facilitate criminal activity in the Windy City. Guns are purchased elsewhere, then trafficked into the city where they're then sold illegally.

Never mind that guns could be bought or sold illegally elsewhere and trafficked into Chicago, too. That doesn't seem to enter in their minds, in part because it's inconvenient to the gun control cause. Why place the blame elsewhere when you can do that and advance a pet policy at the same time?

But one man was recently sentenced for gun trafficking into the city, and I couldn't help but notice something interesting about him.

A 20-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking guns from Mississippi to Chicago.

On October 1, 2024, United States District Court Judge Sharion Aycock sentenced Stewart, Jr. of Chicago, Illinois, to 120 months in federal prison for the charges, in addition to three years of supervised release.

...

Investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives discovered a large number of firearms found in crimes in Chicago, Illinois, that had been purchased in the Northern District of Mississippi.

Investigators found that some of the guns had been purchased as recently as a day before they were used in a violent crime.

But do you see the interesting point here?

Aycock is just 20-years-old. Most guns used in crimes are handguns.

He couldn't legally purchase such firearms himself and since some were initially bought just a day earlier, it's unlikely that these were stolen guns that made it into the hands of Chicago criminals. But because of his age, he damn sure didn't purchase them lawfully. He couldn't.

That means someone else had to buy them on his behalf. That's a straw buy and it's illegal.

Which leads me to ask those Chicago city officials just what would have stopped this trafficking scheme. After all, he broke gun control laws as it was. What good would more gun control laws actually do?

The answer, of course, is nothing. 

People who are going to illegally traffic guns into Chicago will illegally obtain those guns through any means necessary. The problem is that Chicago has a high demand for illegal firearms. They have too many criminals wanting too many guns, thus making it profitable to take on the risk to traffic guns into the city.

If Chicago officials would spend less time blaming everyone else and more time addressing the issues that lead to this crime, they wouldn't need to place the blame elsewhere because there wouldn't be any blame to be placed.

But that would involve actually doing something, and blaming others is so much easier.

Yes, this is childish behavior, but that's what we get from the leadership of our larger urban centers. This is normal. This is what we've come to expect and we're rarely surprised.

This was someone who couldn't lawfully obtain the guns he has been convicted of trafficking. If that doesn't explain the stupidity of Chicago's officials trying to put the onus of everything on everyone else and the supposed lack of gun laws, I honestly don't know what it will take.