The Examiner
Myth #3: Chicago's homicide rate proves gun control laws do not work
Myth number three relies on myths number one (Myth #1: Chicago has the highest murder rate in the country) and two (Myth #2: 2012 was a record homicide year for Chicago) as its
foundation and then argues that because Chicago is the murder capital of
the United States and because last year was a record year for
homicides, then the city's strict gun laws must be a failure. Following
this logic, they argue that gun control is actually the reason the
murder rate of Chicago is at a record high and that gun control is the
reason Chicago is the nation's deadliest cities. Of course, because the
entire argument is built upon piling one piece of misinformation on top
of another, it crumbles upon further analysis. A number of right-wing
sites including the National Review and Breitbart News advance a
variation of this argument, citing the 1982 Chicago handgun ban as a
failed policy. Of course, this argument is based on the myths above.
Once you acknowledge that Chicago's homicide rate is not among the top
cities in the nation but that it sits at number 41 in the country and
that the city's homicide total has dropped from nearly 1000 a year
before the ban was put into place to around 500 a year now, it is hard
to argue that the city's strict gun laws are a failure. With a homicide
rate that may be on pace to be its lowest in fifty years,
the dirty truth might be that the gun laws in Chicago are actually
preventing the carnage from being a lot worse. To see what Chicago might
be without its gun law in place one could visit New Orleans, Detroit or
nearby Gary, Indiana for some field research, but there is no guarantee
that the researcher would survive the experiment, because those cities
are not nearly as safe as Chicago.
