Illegal Guns in Chicago

From the city where there were nearly 470 murders last year, a story about the (already completely illegal) guns favored by the city's gangsters.

From that hierarchy, a few patterns emerge. The city’s criminals, for instance, prefer semiautomatic pistols to revolvers and generally seek out cheap junk guns. What’s also notable is the type of gun that doesn’t appear among the top models seized. In 2014, Chicago police recovered only three assault weapons associated with criminal incidents. “Often there’s a misimpression about the importance of assault guns and assault weapons, and it’s important to point out how rare that is,” says Phillip Cook, an economist at Duke University who studies underground gun markets. “The guns being used in Chicago for crime and murder are by and large very ordinary pistols.”

Indeed, they're not even especially powerful pistols, if you take a look at the chart. Aside from the one .357 Magnum, none of these firearms are capable of defeating even lightweight IIA body armor. The .357 can be stopped by full scale Type II armor. Glancing at a popular police body armor online store, it appears that they chiefly sell the even stronger IIIA and III armors.

So we have the tools we need to deal with this particular threat. Neither new laws nor new tools are necessary. As the NRA recently pointed out, the Federal government even has the laws it needs to send these drug gangsters away for as much as a decade each if they are caught with a gun.



This should be a solvable problem with existing laws. If anything, Chicago should move to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves rather than looking for new restrictions on guns. They have the tools and the laws they need. We just need the President to do his actual job, rather than scheming for new restrictions on the rights of honest Americans.