Chicago Didn’t Enforce Gun Laws Reports New York Times

Irony in the Windy City indeed. We’ve been continuing to report that Chicago had had for years one of the strictest gun laws on the books in the country and yet has seen a wave of gun violence. Mayor Richard Daley, among others, pointed the blame at guns.

The Supreme Court overturned the city’s gun ban earlier this year, a move that Daley has been trying to find a way of fighting at all costs. But in another example of true irony, it is being reported by The New York Times that the gun ban in Chicago wasn’t all that well enforced.

The Old Gray Lady noted this weekend:

“But court records show that relatively few people were convicted of violating the laws, and even top city officials have questioned how useful they are in deterring crime.

“Since 1982, when the city tightened its gun ordinances to include the handgun ban, there have been just 2,201 convictions under the laws, according to data obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative from the office of the Cook County Circuit Court clerk. That works out to an average of about 79 convictions a year.”

What we are seeing here is that the laws then probably only kept law-abiding citizens, those such as Otis McDonald who fought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, from having guns. But criminals simply ignored the law and mostly went unpunished. The final irony is that Daley of course put all the blame on guns in general, rather than the criminals.