Fact: Most Guns Used in Chicago Shootings Are Bought Legally In Other States

By Colin Taylor Posted on January 11, 2016

Whenever the issue of gun regulations and reform comes up, conservatives immediately point to shooting epidemic ongoing in the city of Chicago as proof that “gun control” doesn’t work and that the city’s strict gun laws are actually contributing to the nonstop shootings, which reached as many as eight per day earlier this year and totaled a jaw dropping 2,986 victims last year – and the city has claimed another 88 in the first eleven days of the new year.

Take FOX’s Steve Doocy, who had the gall to ask “are these cities, their liberal policies, actually killing Americans?” Republican front-runner Donald Trump told the media that “you look at Chicago. It’s got the toughest gun laws in the United States. You look at other places where they have gun laws that are very tough, they do generally speaking worse than anybody else.” Illinois State Rifle Association leader Richard Pearson angrily argues that “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey.”

They couldn’t be further from the truth. University of Chicago Crime Lab associate Philip Cook did a study of 7,000 guns recovered from gang members and found that the vast majority of them came from Republican states with recklessly lax gun laws: “I think that it’s more likely that if Chicago did not have tough gun laws they would have higher rates of gun violence than they do have.”

60% of the weapons came from out of state; and 20% of those came from neighboring Indiana. Crime lab researcher Sarah Emmons lamented that “you can be in the city of Chicago and be closer to a gun show in Indiana than you are to downtown…having such dramatically different regulations in such close proximity makes it really, really easy for folks [to bring illegal guns into Chicago].”

It just goes to show that the primary promoters of gun violence in Chicago are not their strict laws but by the outrageous lack of oversight in the rest of the nation. One hole in the dam is enough to undermine the whole system of regulations and background checks; and in red America, it’s more like a sieve of violence flooding from rural areas to inner cities.

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http://www.occupydemocrats.com/fact-most-guns-used-in-chicago-shootings-are-bought-legally-in-other-states/