When the Supreme Court takes up gun violence in its next term, we hope the justices will remember Chicago’s real-world experience over this Fourth of July weekend, when
104 people were shot and at least 19 killed.
We all need to take a step back from the sometimes facile exercise of looking at trends — how many shootings this year compared to last year, let’s say, or how many shootings in Chicago compared to other cities — and think hard about what just happened.
More than 100 Chicagoans were shot on what should have been a pleasant holiday weekend.
When the Supreme Court reconvenes in September, it is slated to decide whether to give people greater rights to carry firearms in public. The court could settle on a range of options, but gun violence opponents worry, for good reason, that the new conservative majority will upend a New York law at the heart of the case. If the court strikes down the century-old law, which places restrictions on who can carry guns, the result could be a scaling back of laws across the country, including in Illinois, designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
Gun advocates argue for their unfettered right to carry guns wherever they wish, arguing that this would make everyone safer. But guns are already everywhere. If more guns made us safer, we would be the safest nation on Earth.
Instead, gun shootings in the U.S. this year, as of Tuesday afternoon, have claimed 22,676 lives, according to the
Gun Violence Archive. In New York on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo
declared a disaster emergency because of the extreme gun violence there.
More than 100 people were shot in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend. We can’t go on this way.