Last week, the Supreme Court declined to step in and block enforcement of Illinois’ “assault weapons” ban and magazine capacity limits while the full case works its way through the courts. This isn’t the bad news that many gun rights supporters think it is. More likely, a temporary delay of the inevitable. The high court is likely waiting until the case is fully heard on the merits before it weighs in on the subject of gun bans and ammunition restrictions.
Still, anti-gun governor J.B. Pritzker couldn’t help himself, taking a premature victory lap at the news. He issuing the following statement . . .
I hope he enjoys it…for now.
As for Illinois being a “lone island in a sea of states with weak gun laws,” when it comes to firearm-related homicide rates, Missouri is the only bordering state with worse numbers than Illinois. And Missouri is that way due to the crime in two blue cities located nowhere near Chicago.
The focus on Chicago is because of the 1,091 firearm-related homicides in Illinois in 2022, 809 of them happened in Cook County. In other words, the greater Chicago area had 79% of the Land of Lincoln’s homicides even though Cook County makes up only 41% of the state’s population.
If Chicago became its own state, the rest of Illinois would see the homicide rate fall from 8.6 per 100,000 to 3.8 per 100,000.
The Illinois assault weapons law basically punishes the rest of Illinois for the long-running failure of Pritzker’s party to do anything about Chicago’s persistent violent crime problems. And no amount of gun control is going to change that any time soon.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by TTAG from tweets posted by Konstadinos Moros.