Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is at it yet again. In spite of having some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, after gun violence in his fair city peaked last weekend he’s calling for… wait for it… increased gun controls. “Having effective gun control is essential to providing safety around the city,” Emanuel said (apparently without irony) at a press conference. Claiming that Chicago’s gun laws need to be different than those elsewhere in Illinois, Emanuel said that “gun control is essential.” To fix the problem, he’s calling for . . .
…a special session of the City Council next week to get them to vote on an updated assault weapons ban and approve stiffer penalties for those who commit gun crimes. So let’s see if I have this right…Chicago’s gun controls apparently don’t slow down gang-related gun crimes at all, so the solution is to add even more controls on the guns the gang-bangers don’t use? What exactly is this guy smoking?
The CCRKBA is wondering the same thing and they’re rippin’ Rahm a new one for his idiotic statements. Chairman Alan Gottlieb called the idea that “comprehensive background checks” would prevent violence, a “perpetuation of an urban myth.” He added, “If the city could round up every one of these shooters, they would find that none of them acquired their guns through legal channels, and thus were never subject to a background check, and Emanuel knows it. For him to suggest, much less believe, that his city’s crime problem would disappear by banning guns and expanding checks on law-abiding citizens is at best delusional.”
But don’t worry about Chicago’s crime problem. Illinois State Representative Monique Davis has the solution. At a press conference in Springfield, she stated, “I am requesting with this press conference that Gov. Patrick Quinn order the Illinois National Guard (and) the Illinois State Police (to) come to Chicago and work with our mayor Ron (sic) Emanuel to provide safety for the children, especially.” Oh, and she wants to be sure there’s a special commission set up to oversee this because “we don’t want them to have us fearing them also.”
Meanwhile, in Detroit, an aide to Representative John Conyers was caught with a gun in her purse going into a federal building. What happened? “Officers let her off with a warning — no ticket, no fine, no jail time.” If it had been any one of us, we’d be cooling our heels in the nearest federal holding cell for an indeterminate amount of time while the FBI served up a search warrant to toss our house looking for the rest of our weapons.
Paul Helmke, ex-president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, is certain gun control will pass if it comes back up for a vote in the legislature. Without regulations, he opined, ‘anybody who wants to get a gun can get a gun easily… The world isn’t divided into good guys and bad guys. People are going to get drunk, people are going to get angry, people are going to make mistakes, and when they’ve got a gun, the rest of us pay the price.” Once again we see that that antis are certain the entire population shares their seeming problem with impulse control and plan to punish us all for their own psychological shortcomings.
Remember our friends at The Journal News in New York and their little stunt of publishing information on gun permit holders? They’re at it again. In May they requested data on legal firearm owners “in relation to a ‘news event'” claiming it’s to determine if handgun ownership patterns have changed in the past six months. This time they asked for “statistical data, as well as names and addresses of gun permit holders from Rockland, Putnam and Westchester counties.” According to Fox News, “the paper said it plans to produce a static map using new information to show how the distribution of pistol permits has changed since the paper published its map in December.”
And finally, a breath of common sense out of Newtown, Connecticut. First Selectman E. Patricia Llodra says the town will stop accepting offers for outside events paying tribute to the victims at Sandy Hook. She told the New York Times: “I think it’s hurtful to people who have experienced the magnitude of this harm to have this in their face all the time. We are a town with 300 years of history. This is a piece of significant history to our town, and we need to learn to incorporate that into who we are but not have it be the only thing that defines who we are.”