AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot used Joe Biden’s trip to Illinois today to press the president on “common sense gun control” as the city’s violent crime rate has been soaring in recent weeks, after an already turbulent 2020. It turns out Lightfoot only spoke with Biden for a couple of moments before the president entered Marine One and flew off to an event promoting infrastructure in Crystal Lake, Illinois, but she got her photo op, which was really what this was all about.
It’s not Biden, after all, that’s preventing gun control legislation from passing in Congress. It’s the fact that it can’t get 60 votes in the Senate, and Democrats can’t get 50 votes to kill the filibuster. When it comes to Biden’s executive actions, it’s hard to believe that Lightfoot could find much to complain about; Biden’s already trying to broadly redefine firearms regulations to allow for backdoor gun bans of home-built guns and AR-style pistols without a vote in
(AP Photo/Philip Kamrass, File)
Ordinarily, I try to shy away from writing about stories that pop up in college newspapers, no matter how egregiously bad they might be. These are journalism students, after all, so I tend to grade their anti-gun nonsense on a bit of a curve. However, I was pleasantly surprised today to see some actual journalism being done by a couple reporters for the
Daily Egyptian, which is the student newspaper for Southern Illinois University. Reporters Jason Flynn and George Weibe pose a simple question about violent crime and Illinois gun laws; “If the [firearm] mortality rate is so low why does the state have such high firearm related arrest rates?”
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
Imagine if all it took to reduce the soaring number of shootings and homicides in Chicago was a little more gun control. It seems pretty silly, given that the vast majority of individuals committing violent crimes in the city aren’t legal gun owners to begin with, but Illinois gun control activist Kathleen Sances, who runs the Gun Violence Prevention PAC Illinois, swears that if Democrats in control of the statehouse in Springfield just pass one piece of legislation, things will start to turn around in the city.
That piece of legislation is cynically called the Fix the FOID Act, though it doesn’t offer much actual improvement to the fundamentally flawed law that requires all residents to obtain a Firearms Owner ID card before they can legally possess a firearm. Instead, it raises the fees for those hoping to exercise their Second Amendment rights, while treating them like criminals by making them provide fingerprints to the state police. According to