By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
If the murder rate continues at its present pace in Chicago, it could be the bloodiest year for body counts since the late 1990s, according to WBBM News, the local CBS affiliate.
By the end of October, more than 600 people had been slain and more than 3,600 had been shot. That is more than many states racked up in all of 2015, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for that year. WBBM said if the killings continue at their present pace, Chicago could post 726 murders by the end of this year.
There were 78 homicides logged just in October, prompting the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms to say the carnage is a “testament to the failure of the city’s strict gun control policies.”
According to WBBM, there were more murders only during the month of August, when 90 people were slain. October wrapped up with a bang, when 20 people were shot on Halloween.
In a blistering message to the news media, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb suggested that “the continued slaughter is proof that the city’s strict gun control laws are an abject failure.”
“This continuing savagery in a city that stubbornly resists every attempt to reform its restrictive gun laws, which only discourage and disarm law-abiding citizens, is a testament to the failure of gun control,” he said.
Police Supt. Eddie Johnson acknowledged that “It’s our repeat gun offenders that are driving all this violence, and until we get tough on sentencing gunmen – holding them accountable – we’re going to keep seeing this cycle keep continuing.”
More than 20 years ago, CCRKBA was part of a coalition that pushed “Three Strikes and You’re Out” and “Hard Time for Armed Crime” legislation to take recidivist violent criminals off the streets. Gottlieb was part of that effort.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised to hire 970 new police officers over the next two years, WBBM reported. But that’s only a partial solution to what many observers see as a city in chaos, if not anarchy. It is rare that police are on the scene when a violent crime occurs, and Gottlieb contended that it is time for the city to take another tack on dealing with violent crime by removing obstacles to law abiding citizens who want guns for personal protection.
“Maybe it’s time for Chicago leaders to take a lesson from Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke or Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey, or even Detroit Police Chief James Craig,” he contended. “They’ve encouraged their citizens to be legally armed as a deterrent to violent crime.”
On the last weekend of October, Chicago reported 17 slayings, which nearly matched the number of homicides posted in Seattle for the entire year at that time. Seattle Police at the time told TGM that there had been 18 criminal homicides in the city by the end of October.
