Close all the gun shops!…The Chicago Way Out

Jazz Shaw:

By now you may have heard that a federal judge has overturned yet another Chicago gun ban, requiring Mayor Rahm Emanuel to allow gun shops to open in the next six months. While this may seem like common sense and good news to defenders of the Second Amendment, not everyone was happy with it. One such pundit is a guy who I somehow wind up reading nearly every week on one topic or another, LZ Granderson of ESPN and CNN, among other venues. While I rarely, if ever, agree with him, he does frequently at least make the effort to acknowledge that other points of view exist.

Following the judge’s decision, LZ launched into his own analysis of what he clearly feels is a “complicated” issue. He opens with a typical, tragic story of people being gunned down in the Windy City and then gets to the meat of the issue.

Of the 1,375 guns used in crimes between 2008 to 2012, one in five was legally purchased from one shop about 20 miles outside of the city. Also, a Chicago Police Department report found that 30% of the 17,230 guns recovered between January 1, 2008, and March 31, 2012, were bought in Cook County, where Chicago is located. Many more were bought elsewhere in Illinois. And nearly 60% of those guns were bought outside Illinois, in states with weaker gun laws, such as Indiana and Mississippi.

The guns aren’t always legally purchased by individuals with clean records and then illegally sold to criminals. Sometimes the gun shops are burglarized. In 2012 thieves broke into a store in a northwest suburb using a sledgehammer and took 200 guns. That year, 501 people were shot to death in Chicago.

It is disingenuous for gun rights advocates to dismiss the effectiveness of a city’s gun ban without acknowledging that guns are coming into the city from other areas, including the suburbs, making it easy for criminals to game the system. But the onus is still on pro gun-control politicians — like Emanuel, like San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — to make an airtight case against what many see as infringement on the Second Amendment.

And fair or not, people being shot and killed in cities with tough gun laws on the books does not help their case.

In a way, I’d love to get on the phone and interview LZ about this column because I’m genuinely confused. It clearly seems to be an opus in favor of allowing Chicago to ban gun shops, but as he makes his case, Granderson seems to shoot down each and every one of his own arguments as he goes. (And for what it’s worth, this seems to be a common theme among those who attempt to argue in favor of gun bans.)

He points out that one in five of guns found to be used in the commission of crimes were all bought at one gun shop outside the city. But in nearly the same breath he notes that more than half of the guns (60%) came from outside the state. So precisely what is the rationale being provided to ban gun shops in Chicago if criminals will simply have them brought in from elsewhere? Once again we see a law which proves essentially useless in deterring criminals and only serves to prevent – or at least make it more difficult for – law abiding gun owners to make a purchase. And those aren’t the people you’re ostensibly trying to stop.

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