Despite some of the strictest gun laws in the country, by Sunday morning of Memorial Weekend, Chicago saw 40 citizens shot and four dead.
Viewed as a microcosm, “44 people” were shot over the entirety of Memorial Weekend 2015. Forty had already been shot with two days remaining in Memorial Weekend 2016. According to the Chicago Tribune, there were four fatalities among the shooting victims. Those fatalities include “a 15-year-girl shot to death as she rode in a Jeep on Lake Shore Drive near Fullerton Avenue.”
Chicago has instituted an “assault weapons” ban, a “violence tax”–which raises the price on every gun sold at retail–and strict limitations on the number of gun stores and the locations of those stores. Moreover, the New York Times describes Chicago handgun restrictions as being so strict they allow city leaders to “get as close as they could get legally to a ban without a ban.” But all these gun controls have correlated with a surge in gun violence rather than a reduction.