Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
The editors of the Chicago Sun-Times are clutching their collective pearls over the fact that Illinois residents are daring to defend their right to keep and bear arms by taking on the state’s new gun and magazine ban in court; a legal fight the paper absurdly declares a “callous attack” on a “sensible law”.
Emotional appeals on the part of gun control activists are nothing new, but I have to say the Sun-Times op/ed is truly extraordinary in its attempt to demonize those Second Amendment supporters who believe their constitutionally-protected rights are being violated by the ban and are taking the legal steps afforded them as citizens to challenge the new prohibitions.
When a gunman with a weapon of war stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and gunned down 20 small children and six adults, many people thought our nation might finally come to its senses about gun violence.
But, no. Here we are, a decade later, and cold-blooded gunslingers continue to burst into cherished places of safety and kill and maim as many people as they can.
No one can go to school, to church, to work, to a concert, to a celebration, to a park or to a movie without fearing they suddenly will be targeted by a slaughterer wielding deadly weapons.
This unconscionable state of affairs was highlighted in by the Sun-Times’ Tina Sfondeles, who reported that the lawyers who helped strike down New York’s concealed carry law are now challenging Illinois’ new and sensible limits on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines in an National Rifle Association-linked lawsuit. The Illinois State Rifle Association has filed its own federal lawsuit and others have been filed in state courts.
These callous attacks on the new Illinois law are occurring just as 18 people were killed this week in the California communities of Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay. Just as a South Shore mother and her daughter were killed Monday afternoon in a shooting in which three others were wounded. Just as 12 people were injured in a mass shooting Monday inside a Baton Rouge lounge.
California has its own “assault weapons” ban in place; one that didn’t prevent either of the shootings that the Sun-Times editors reference as justification for Illinois’ ban. In fact, of the four crimes that the Sun-Times references, only one has been confirmed to have involved an “assault weapon”; a 9mm pistol defined under California law as an “assault weapon” used the Monterey Park shooter and apparently lawfully purchased decades ago.
It’s telling that the Sun-Times editorial board chose to throw in crimes in which so-called assault weapons weren’t used to try to justify the state’s ban. The simple truth is that rifles of any kind aren’t often used in crimes, whether we’re talking about bolt-action rifles or semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15. Handguns, by far, are more commonly used, but the Supreme Court has already taken a handgun ban off the table. Now anti-gunners are just trying to ban whatever they think they might be able to get away with, untroubled by the fact that they are targeting the lawful exercise of a fundamental civil right and completely unhinged in their arguments.
Why do we sit by as the law is twisted to give gunmen the right to kill us? Why must we, as Americans with revered ideals that are the envy of the world, allow the forces of gun violence to see us as nothing more than potential fodder for their weapons?
Do our lives and health mean nothing more than that? Do some lawmakers, some high court justices and gun manufacturers not see how the under-regulated arsenal of firearms in the hands of those willing to use them grinds up lives?
America now has more guns than people. Has that made us safe? Or are people dying every day?
Last time I checked murder is still illegal in Illinois, despite the Sun-Times’ claim. As for the safety of the American people, all you have to do is look at more than a year’s worth of crime statistics to understand that violent crime is still far lower today than it was just a few decades ago. There were 695 homicides in Chicago last year, according to police; a number that’s still unacceptably high but far lower than the 939 homicides reported in 1992 or the 970 murders in Chicago in 1970.
More guns doesn’t equal more crime. If it did, our crime rates would rise each and every year. Instead, violent crime across the U.S. plunged between 1991 and 2020, before the the double whammy of COVID and widespread civil unrest sent crime rates soaring. The Sun-Times editors may not like these facts, but they look like clowns when they completely ignore the data.
I think the real reason why the Sun-Times editors are so vociferously opposed to any legal challenge to the state’s new ban on “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines is that they know these lawsuits are likely to be successful. And the reason for that is simple: they infringe on a fundamental, constitutionally-protected right. That doesn’t mean that the Second Amendment advocates taking on the prohibitions are callous or uncaring when it comes to crime. Many of them have been victims themselves. They simply don’t believe that the ban is constitutional, or that infringing on their right to self-defense makes any of us safer.