During a 36-hour period over the weekend of April 11, 35 people were shot in Chicago, causing four fatalities in a city with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country.
Chicago Police responded to 26 separate shooting incidents over the weekend, but over half the shootings occurred in only a 12-hour period on Saturday.
Several of the incidents featured multiple shootings with multiple victims. Many were gang related.
Chicago’s murder rate had been down over last year’s rates and some have errantly pegged the drop in murder rates to the fact that Illinois has finally joined the other 49 states by implementing a concealed carry law. But Chicago murder rates have been somewhat lower for several years and the new firearms law is only a few months old. Since few citizens have yet received their licenses it is a bit absurd to peg any crime statistics to the new law.
However, this has not stopped Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy from claiming that it is law-abiding gun owners that are the problem in Chicago. He so hates Illinois’s new concealed carry law that he hinted he is ordering his cops to shoot concealed carry license holders on sight without giving them time to inform officers of their situation.
In an interview last year given to a Chicago African American radio morning show, McCarthy laid out how he intended to train his officers to react to legal concealed carry license holders.
“I don’t care if they’re licensed legal firearms, people who are not highly trained… putting guns in their hands is a recipe for disaster. So I’ll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we’re going to have tragedies as a result of that. I’m telling you right up front.”
Not long after that interview, McCarthy appeared on another Chicago radio show and revealed a shocking ignorance of the U.S. Constitution where he said he should be allowed to ban weapons so people cannot have a nuclear bomb or a rocket launcher.
During that interview McCarthy also said that legal gun owners are “corrupt” and are part of what is wrong with America.
This is the same Police chief who essentially called legal gun owners rich, “racists” who live in “gated communities.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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