Chicago: The Model of Gun-Crime Prevention

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 23, 2023

 

When selecting a site to host a quadrennial presidential nominating convention, the criteria the president and his party consider are primarily logistical. Does the site have adequate hotel space and meeting halls? Can the infrastructure around them accommodate the attendees? Are there any obstacles to providing for security? And so on. Conventional political considerations regarding what the site says about a party’s national ambitions are a factor, but not nearly the most important.

 

Today, Democrats are narrowing the list of potential 2024 convention sites, with Atlanta, Ga., and Chicago, Ill., emerging as the leading contenders. Both cities have all the necessary infrastructure and a compelling (but distinct) political story to tell. The New York Times has, however, focused on one particular aspect of the effort to lobby Democrats out of the most obvious choice.

 

Chicago’s advocates are promoting their city not on its own virtues but because the alternative — one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities situated in an electorally vital swing state — fails to reinforce the hysterical myths the progressive activist class has cultivated around the horrors of life in modern Georgia.

 

Without the slightest hint of irony, this Times dispatch alleges that Georgia’s gun laws — specifically, its concealed-carry statutes — render Atlanta an unsafe environment in contrast with Chicago.

 

“Georgia’s lenient gun laws could make it extremely difficult to keep firearms away from the delegates,” reads the Times summary of the argument posited by Chicago’s boosters. Times reporters Jonathan Weisman and Maya King swiftly bat this one away, noting that the U.S. Secret Service can enforce security protocols that supersede state law in the name of national security. Nevertheless, Georgia’s gun laws create “a tense environment,” according to one security consultant. And the surge of gun violence nationally has produced “headlines” which allow “Chicago boosters to spotlight their city’s tough gun control laws,” even though some of the toughest of those laws are stalled pending the review of the courts.

 

The proposition here is that, by selecting Atlanta as the host city, Democrats would tacitly endorse Georgia’s concealed-carry laws and all the terrors that emanate from them. That’s madness, but let’s follow the thread. If that is true of Atlanta, it must also be true for Chicago. Therefore, by selecting the Windy City in 2024, this logic implies that Democrats would also be taking ownership of Chicago’s baleful status quo.

 

Like much of the country, gun violence has declined in Chicago relative to the nightmarish pandemic years. But there were still 2,832 shootings recorded in 2022, and overall violent crime increased relative to 2021. “The number of people who have access to guns now, it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing,” Damien Morris, a Chicago-based violence-prevention-program officer, told Crain’s reporters in October. “Carjackings are more prevalent than at any point this century, and shootings near downtown tourist hot spots have pushed crime to the forefront of Chicago’s civic agenda,” that report continued. Moreover, arrests by Chicago police have declined by a staggering 83 percent between 2006 and 2021, even as reports of street violence increased.

 

When it comes to violent crime, Atlanta is no paradise. But the 170 murders the city experienced in 2022 compares favorably with Chicago’s 695. Mass violence attributable to concealed-carry permit holders is not unheard of, but it is statistically rare to the point that it is a minor concern for law enforcement. What keeps security professionals busy are the unregistered, illegally concealed weapons that are responsible for Chicago’s murder rates. Indeed, when Atlantans are confronted with their city’s crime rates, residents worry that their city is “catching up to Chicago,” “getting like Chicago,” or “turning into Chicago.”

 

These data are insignificant when confronted with the myths Democrats have erected around the state of Georgia. Indeed, we’ve seen this movie before.

 

Abetted by a compliant press, Democrats have convinced themselves that Republican governance in the Peach State has transformed it into a racist hellscape, with Brian Kemp playing the role of Bull Connor. The party pressured private firms into abandoning the state — the most famous of which was Major League Baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game — to protest what Joe Biden called the onset of “Jim Crow on steroids.” Despite the performance enhancements, Georgia’s “Jim Crow 2.0” laws failed to perform as their hysterical detractors insisted they would. No one seems to have learned any lessons from that humiliation and its potential to alienate voters in what has become a winnable purple state.

 

Both parties are, to some degree, hostage to the fantastical narratives cooked up by activists speaking to an unrepresentative audience on social media. This condition has led both coalitions to sacrifice persuadable voters for fear of sapping their most fanatical supporters of enthusiasm. But at a certain point, a rational party with a self-preservation instinct should be able to see the box canyons into which its activist class would lead them. If Democrats cannot see that making Chicago an exemplary model of gun-crime prevention is an insane proposition, their party has lost the plot.