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1 in terms of the tightness of its gun laws. The center has given California an A rating and ranks it No.
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"The whole state's laws are pretty strong." "We generally think of California as having the strongest gun laws in the country," said Hannah Shearer, a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The city also had had a gun registry program since 1968, but ended it in 2013 when the state passed a law allowing the concealed carry of weapons. At one point, it did have much tougher laws - it had banned handguns in the city limits, but a 2008 Supreme Court ruling declared that ban unconstitutional, and a 2010 ruling reaffirmed that. But it's not true that Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the country.
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The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which tracks gun laws nationwide, has given the state a B+ for its gun laws.Ĭhicago itself has some tough laws - there is an assault-weapons ban in Cook County, for example. The state is one of seven that requires licenses or permits to buy any firearm, and it's one of five that requires waiting periods for buying any firearm. It is true that Illinois has tougher gun laws than many other states. The Two-Way Las Vegas Massacre Prompts Musician To Call For Gun Control: 'Enough Is Enough' That's roughly on par with Philadelphia and much higher than Los Angeles or New York. It also had a relatively high number of guns recovered - 243 per 100,000 residents. The rate was 25.1 per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 14.7 in Philadelphia and just 2.3 in New York. That helped make the gun homicide rate in Chicago particularly huge compared to other similar cities. Gun homicides in the city rose by 61 percent between 20. In 2016, homicides in Chicago sharply rose, mostly as a result of gun homicides, as the University of Chicago crime lab found in a January report. It's also true that Chicago has suffered a massive amount of gun crime recently. It's also true that there were more than 4,000 shooting victims in Chicago in 2016. It also packs the added rhetorical punch of being closely linked to President Obama, whose actions Trump has worked hard to undo.īut while gun violence in Chicago is high, the rest of this common talking point doesn't really hold water. This can sound like a potent talking point - it is a huge city with a notorious crime problem, which Trump already used regularly to talk about creating law and order. The right-wing site Breitbart has on many occasions posted articles with headlines containing the phrase "gun-controlled Chicago." Politics A Familiar, Partisan Response In Congress To Las Vegas MassacreĪnd the rhetoric goes beyond politicians. Pointing to Chicago to suggest that gun laws don't work is not a new talking point - Trump claimed Chicago had "the toughest gun laws in the United States" in a 2016 presidential debate his fellow Republican candidate Chris Christie likewise pointed to Chicago as a place with high crime despite tight gun laws. "I think if you look to Chicago where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year they have the strictest gun laws in the country. "I think one of the things we don't want to do is try to create laws that won't stop these types of things from happening," Sanders said Monday. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn't give a definite response to these questions, but her statement showed a White House hesitant to create new regulations. In the wake of the horrific shooting in Las Vegas this week, the White House faced questions about whether President Trump would support stricter gun legislation. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders conducts the daily press briefing at the White House on Monday in Washington, D.C.
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