Illinois has taken on a massive number of gun control laws over the years, making it one of the most anti-gun states in the nation. You need a special permit just to be eligible to purchase a gun, as just one example.
All if it stems from Chicago. The McDonald decision meant they couldn't just blanket ban guns in the Windy City, lawmakers figured they needed to do everything they could just short of that.
But hey, if it works, that's all that matters, right?
Well, no. Rights matter, and Illinois tramples all over those.
Then we have this kicker: The laws aren't doing jack squat. Just look at the death toll this past weekend as an example.
Chicagoans are living in a gun control paradise. At least 21 people were shot over this past weekend, proving once again that harsh gun laws protect nobody while empowering violent criminals.
Breitbart reported that five of the 21 Chicago shootings were fatal this past weekend, with one casualty only 17 years old. Yet Chicago has some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the nation. The tragedy of the continued extreme death toll in Democrat-run Chicago illustrates a fact the Founders knew well, which is why we have a Second Amendment; “gun control” laws benefit only would-be tyrants in charge and criminals on the street.
As Thomas Jefferson wisely observed about restrictions on gun ownership, “For an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” Chicago is the perfect illustration of that.
Jefferson wasn't a perfect man, but he was a smart man.
Here's the thing, all the laws in Illinois don't stop the illicit trade in firearms. Chicago officials even know this, which is why they keep trying to blame states like Indiana for their problems.
But if gun control works as advertised, Indiana's gun laws couldn't affect Chicago's violent crime. Illinois law would prevent that all on its own.
What it does do, though, is keep law-abiding citizens from getting guns as easily as those in other states. These are people who represent no threat at all to anyone except the criminals.
21 people were murdered with a firearm on the streets of Chicago. That's more lives taken than you see in most mass shootings, all despite the plethora of gun laws on the books in Illinois.
But this isn't news, either.
Time and time again over the years, myself and virtually every other writer covering the Second Amendment has made this point. We've shown this over and over. The problem is that the media won't repeat it. The problem is that the anti-gun forces out there are too invested in making more laws like the ones that failed in Chicago that they literally can't afford to let people know that they don't work.
They don't care about stopping crime. They don't care about stopping violence. They only care about taking guns out of your hands.
That's the goal. That's the endgame.
21 people were murdered in Chicago over the weekend in a city where owning a gun lawfully is no trivial matter, yet let's also understand that 21 people being murdered over a weekend is nothing new. Pointing it out is dismissed, trivialized, or ignored, all while calling for the exact same laws to be put in place everywhere.
I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in failed policies. I'm not interested in ideas that, at best, tell violent criminals to just pick up a different weapon and not to worry because their intended target won't have a gun to defend themselves with.
That's the most optimistic take on these laws. This is what happens if they work flawlessly.
They will never work flawlessly. They haven't anywhere else they've been tried and while I believe in American exceptionalism, we're not that exceptional.
