The Patriot Post® · Chicago Mayor: It's a 'Gun Problem'

By Thomas Gallatin ·

As the summer of violence drags on, aided and abetted by Democrat mayors who have in some cases literally marched with and promised capitulation to the Marxist Black Lives Matter radicals demanding that police be defunded, many of these mayors are now scrambling to assign blame for spiking violence in their cities. Naturally, they’re not looking at their own misguided policies, but at outside, unrelated factors.

Case in point is Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who recently blamed the city’s surging murder tally of 430 already this year on “out-of-state guns.” Ah, it’s a “gun problem.” Lightfoot insists, “We are being inundated with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons — that is hurting cities like Chicago.” Talk about making up an excuse entirely out of whole cloth.

Literally everything Lightfoot claims about the supposed lack of gun-control laws and regulations in neighboring states is false. Lightfoot knows it, of course, but she and other anti-Second Amendment Democrats are desperate to find something to scapegoat for the spiking crime in their cities. This excuse is as absurd as blaming the rioting in Portland on President Donald Trump’s decision to send in federal agents to protect federal buildings — after the city endured weeks of rioting.

It’s telling that these leftist politicians who tout draconian gun control as a primary means for ending violent crime are the ones who oversee communities in which the crime rate invariably rises. So, rather than genuinely examining the data and admitting the obvious — that gun control does very little to stop criminals — these Democrat politicians blame their own city’s problems on other areas of the country where Americans’ Second Amendment rights are protected. If Lightfoot’s assertion was correct, then why are we not seeing these same high crime rates in the states where these illegal firearms supposedly come from? The truth is that law-abiding citizens who are free to arm themselves are a greater deterrent to crime than are feckless gun-control policies.