By Rebecca Leber on
Jun 17, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Hadiya Pendleton's family
grieves after she was shot and killed in January. Credit: AP
Chicago saw 46 people shot the weekend following the
six-month anniversary of the Newtown shooting, which happened to coincide with
Father’s Day weekend. During one of the bloodiest weekends of the year, Chicago
Tribune reports that seven people were killed, with the youngest victim being
a 15-year-old boy shot dead by police.
While mass shootings are
more likely to attract the headlines — by ThinkProgress’ count there have been
14 since December — everyday gun violence in the U.S. adds up to a Newtown
every single day (Slate counts more than 5,000 gun deaths since December).
Gun advocates tend to use
Chicago to argue that gun violence laws are not effective. Chicago has some of
the strictest laws in the nation — it had a ban on handguns until 2010 — but
the city has long suffered from violence that is on an uptick the past two
years. The total number of weekend’s shootings is actually slightly down
compared to the same period last year, when 53 had been shot.
But as a city, Chicago is
not isolated from areas with noticeably laxer laws. It is part of a
state that has weaker gun violence laws, where a full 43 percent of the guns
seized from Chicago crime come from. The rest of the seized guns were trafficked
from other statesnot typically known for their gun violence
prevention. Just in May, a convicted felon shot a man by arranging for someone
to buy his hangdgun from a strip mall 40 miles away.Loopholes in federal law leave areas with
strict gun laws more vulnerable to these straw purchases.
President Obama made a plea
for federal law to catch up in February, before the Senate
filibustered the most serious congressional attempt to address gun violence.
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