In recent months, a rash of shootings have brought the city of Chicago national notoriety. With a final tally of 506 murders in 2012, more than any other American metropolis, the city has been dubbed by lazy journalists everywhere as “America’s murder capital.”
This has caused gun-rights advocates to hold Chicago up as the smoking gun in the gun-control debate. Look at Chicago, with its restrictive gun laws, they say in the comments section of every online article about guns. Chicago’s murder rate proves that gun laws don’t work.
Gun laws don’t deter criminals, the argument goes. Gun laws only prevent law-abiding citizens from being safe. As Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, was quoted saying in a recent New York Times article, “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens, and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey.”
Virtually all Americans on both sides of the gun debate agree that that criminals — people who wouldn’t pass an NICS background check — should not have access to guns. In fact, a recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that even 93 percent of gun households, and 85 percent of those living in a household with an NRA member, supported universal background checks for all prospective gun buyers.
And this is where the Chicago pro-gun argument crumbles. Because more than 80 percent of Chicago’s 2012 homicide victims had criminal records. The people whom we all agree should NOT have access to guns are overwhelmingly the ones being killed by guns in Chicago.
Eighty percent of 506 is 405. That means, at most, only 101 people who could pass a background check were murdered in Chicago in 2012. So you could fulfill gun-lover fantasies and arm every law-abiding citizen in Chicago with a concealed weapon, and even if the results defied all the data and that approach somehow saved some lives, it’d barely make a dent in Chicago’s homicide rate.
Meanwhile, people like Newt Gingrich would have you believe that because of gun restrictions, Chicago is such a murderous place that many people are afraid to even visit it. In a recent appearance on ABC News, he said:
“Well, I think it’s amazing that we’re having all this discussion about gun control. The President’s hometown of Chicago is the murder capital of the United States … Vice President Biden doesn’t seem to want to go there … It’s illegal to have all the guns that are killing people in Chicago. If gun control works, Chicago ought to be safe.”
I’m guessing that Joe Biden isn’t exactly shaking in his boots. Because when it comes to murder, it’s pretty safe to be a white guy in Chicago — even if you don’t have a Secret Service detail. According to the 2011 Chicago Murder Analysis from the Chicago Police Department (CPD), 19 non-Hispanic whites were murdered in the city in 2010. In 2011, 20 were.
Chicago is a city of over 2.7 million people, nearly 32 percent of whom (864,000 people) are non-Hispanic white. Using 2011 numbers, 864,000 ÷ 20 murders = 43,200. So if you’re non-Hispanic white in Chicago, you have a 2.3 in 100,000 chance of being murdered. That’s less than half the overall U.S. homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000.
Chicago’s violence is intrinsically linked with poverty, drugs and gangs. And it is mostly a murderous place for those who are young, male, poor, black or Latino, and living in bad neighborhoods. According to the CPD, more than 90 percent of 2011 murder victims in Chicago were male. The average age was 28. More than 74 percent of murder victims were black, and almost 19 percent were Latino. And CPD officials estimate that more than a quarter of the victims came from warring factions of just one gang.
The 2012 Chicago homicide victims tracked by the Red Eye were concentrated in a handful of communities in the South and West Sides. Places like Austin (with 37 murders), Englewood (20), Greater Grand Crossing (23), Woodlawn (21), Chicago Lawn (22) New City (24), and Roseland (18) were killing fields. Whereas several well-known neighborhoods where white professionals congregate — including the Loop, Lincoln Park, North Center and Lincoln Square — had a combined zero murders.
As a longtime Chicago resident, I have very little experience with Chicago’s gang-afflicted neighborhoods. But I see the parents in these neighborhoods cry on television when their kids get shot. And I have never seen any of them, or their community leaders, argue that the problem is that there just aren’t enough guns in their neighborhoods. It’s mostly old white guys who don’t live in Chicago — guys like Richard A. Pearson and Newt Gingrich — who say things like that.
We need to protect the people in these neighborhoods. The kids who grow up to be the criminals responsible for these murders must be held responsible for their actions. And too many of them aren’t. But as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, we’re also doing very little to give the kids in these neighborhoods the positive alternatives that most other Americans take for granted.
African-American and Latino males who are freshmen in Chicago Public Schools have only a 3 percent chance of getting a bachelor’s degree by the time they’re 25. It’s harder for these kids to get a good education than to join a gang. And it’s tougher for them to get an asthma inhaler than to get a gun.
While improving inner-city education and healthcare is an important but difficult battle, a lot could be done to stop the influx of guns right now. Chicago could enact stronger penalties for illegal gun possession, which now results in an average six-month sentence.
Neighboring communities could help stop the flow of guns into the city, since nearly 20 percent of Chicago crime guns are traceable to one gun shop just a few miles south of the city’s border. The state of Illinois could enact commonsense laws to prevent gun trafficking — without denying law-abiding gun owners their guns. It could require firearm registration, restrict purchases and sales of multiple firearms, require reporting of lost or stolen firearms, and regulate private firearm transfers.
Nearby Indiana could enhance its laws similarly, instead of having some of the weakest in the nation. And at a national level, we could actually try to keep guns out of criminal hands, instead of allowing 40 percent of legal gun sales to take place without any background check at all.
And those who keep arguing that Chicago’s murder rate means that gun laws don’t work could do a few things too.
For one, they could stop disingenuously ignoring the examples of New York City and Los Angeles. They are the only two U.S. cities with more people than Chicago. They both have fewer murders than Chicago. And they are located in states — New York and California — with more restrictive gun laws than Illinois.
They could also stop calling Chicago the nation’s murder capital, since that’s really only a fitting moniker if true is false and math is hard. On a per-capita basis, Chicago’s not even in the top ten.
That’s right, ten cities in the U.S. with populations exceeding 250,000 had higher murder rates than Chicago in 2011. And so did 10 more between 100,000 and 250,000 in population. Twenty cities in the U.S. are more murderous than “America’s murder capital,” the supposed smoking gun of gun-control failure.
What’s America’s real murder capital? New Orleans. That city struggles with some of the same gang, drug and poverty issues that violent Chicago neighborhoods do. It also has some of the loosest gun-control laws in the nation. And in 2011, it had more than triple the murder rate of Chicago at 57.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. If you really want to find a smoking gun, that’s probably the first place you should look.