The July 4 mass shooting at a parade in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park which killed seven and wounded 30 was deeply disturbing and tragic, as all such incidents are. A suspect has been taken into custody and charged today. Again a cry is rising for more gun control. But the media and the public need to understand that the ongoing emphasis on mass shootings and gun control is a losing strategy. It’s easier to strategize smartly if you have a clearer view of the landscape. There are four things crowding the viewfinder:
#1: Many people are using mass shootings for political ends, as a justification for greater gun control. But the fact is that only four percent of homicides in Chicago so far this year, three percent last year, and three percent of national firearms deaths in 2020 occurred through mass shootings.
2022 is no different from prior years: The vast majority of homicides in Chicago and firearms deaths nationally, do not occur due to mass shootings.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times “Homicides in Chicago” database, 321 people have been killed in Chicago up to noon of July 5 this year. Of those 321, 279 have been black, 17 white, 43 Latino, 1 Asian, and 1 “other.” Meanwhile, The Gun Violence Archive tracks mass shootings in the United States, which it defines as any shooting where at least four people are either wounded or killed. And through noon on July 5, there have been 20 mass shootings in Chicago in 2022, killing a total of 12 people and wounding 85, according to the archive’s compilation of data.
So that’s almost double the number killed in the Highland Park mass shooting, and nearly triple the number wounded there. But you won’t see CNN or the New York Times or Washington Post fulminating about those mass shootings. Because they’re primarily by blacks and of blacks. Yet the real hammer to the head here is that of 321 homicides so far this year in Chicago up to mid-day July 5th, just 12 had occurred in mass shootings.
Therefore, just four percent of all Chicago homicides to date this year have resulted from mass shootings. The data align with 2016 through 2021 locally, and 2020 nationally.
#2: Future gun control legislation is sharply limited by law, particularly by the latest in a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions favoring gun rights. Legal firearms are here to stay, and robustly so. Sharp rises in urban violent crime make the politics of a renewed “assault weapons ban” all but impossible. In truth, gun control advocates can only nibble around the edges.
Under the the Supreme Court’s June ruling on gun rights, the requirement that gun owners may have to get a state-issued permit to carry a concealed gun in public was upheld. But a discriminatory permissions scheme was struck down. The ruling held that a state cannot require you to give a reason for applying for a conceal-carry permit. The state had tried to maintain that general self-defense wasn’t a good enough reason. The High Court disagreed.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, other states with overly restrictive standards for conceal-carry will be easing their rules. One is Maryland.
Reeling from the Supreme Court’s ruling, New York state lawmakers approved – and their governor signed – legislation to ban conceal-carry in so-called “special places.” These were defined as transit, schools, street fairs, and Times Square. But criminals will still bring guns to these places, and the new law will be difficult to enforce in most special locations.
However as a practical political matter, New York politicians were going to take whatever was still on the table, as surely will some other states. The laws are not so much to actually deter, but to represent a certain sensibility of progressive good intentions. The tendency will not soon recede.
A similarly cosmetic reaction ensued from Congress to the Supreme Court ruling. Recent federal gun legislation now approved by President Biden closes something called The Boyfriend Loophole. Now you don’t have to be married to have your right to own a gun taken away after a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. It now applies to intimate partners who are unmarried, too. Okay, that’s something then.
The new national law also moves the needle somewhat closer to requiring unlicensed gun sellers to do background checks on private buyers. But the language changes fall short of an actual requirement. Now under the new law, any unlicensed seller who is selling guns mainly to turn a profit must do a buyer background check. That’s still vague and difficult to enforce. Its real effect may be negligible and is at least very uncertain.
Additionally, individuals under 21 years old who have juvenile felonies or misdemeanor domestic violence convictions may now be disqualified from a legal gun purchase through a background check process. But the new law merely gives local authorities 10 days instead of the old 3 days to complete the enhanced check on under-21 buyers. If it’s not done after 10 days, the sale can proceed. And all this assumes young buyers, including those planning crimes, are playing by the rules to begin with, rather than ignoring them. That’s a very poor assumption to make.
Vice-President Kamala Harris was in Illinois Tuesday and urged a renewed push by Congress for a national assault weapons ban. But although a national ban took effect in 1994 it exempted more than 2,000 types of firearms and required renewal in 2004, which didn’t occur. The New York Times reported in June of this year that, “the appetite for a bipartisan deal to revive the ban, always slight, is now non-existent.” That’s in some large part due to dramatic increases in cities including Chicago in 2020 and 2021 of armed crimes including murder, shootings, and carjacking. Rural and ex-urban Democrats already have guns. Now urban Democrats are at target practice, too. They just don’t talk about it at yoga.
#3: The relentless focus on “gun violence” obscures a core truth. It is usually disturbed young men at the trigger. People are killing people and often gun laws are not remotely obeyed. The way that parents raise young men at risk needs more attention. The solutions are more human and family-based than technocratic.
The gun used by the 21-year-old alleged Highland Park shooter Robert “Bobby” Crimo III was legally purchased in Illinois. He had also purchased other guns. He has not yet been proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty of committing the killings. However it seems fair to say if your son is producing rap videos which depict a fantasy version of a classroom shooting, and an insistent narration that this is his destiny, then he badly needs help. CNN summarizes here several of his disturbing videos.
Other warning signs from the Highland Park suspect were apparently missed or badly underplayed, particularly by his parents. In April 2019, Highland Park Police spoke to the suspect and his parents after they were notified of a suicide attempt. Then in September, 2019, police took 16 knives plus a sword and dagger from Crimo at his home after his family reported he’d said he was “going to kill everyone.” His father explained it away, and later that year served as sponsor for his son’s Firearms Owners Identification Card (FOID), which is required for all legal gun owners in Illinois. Crimo was under 21 so a family member with their own FOID under state law had to sign as his guardian and sponsor.
It gets deeper. Illinois has a so-called “red flag law” which permits the state to revoke an existing firearms owners identification card for six months if a firearms restraining order has been issued to a gun-owning individual upon petition by a family member, roommate or law enforcement officer. Under the law the petitioner could seek to renew the order indefinitely every six months. In any case, no member of Crimo’s family so petitioned the state.
Nonetheless, the broader issue remains that warning signs were greatly evident, and yet his parents and the authorities somehow managed to let a deeply disturbed individual slip through the cracks to become a legal gun owner and then an alleged mass killer. This does not bode well for the hope that more regulation is the primary means to quell violence involving firearms.
In effect, we have two main types of mass killings now in the United States. There are showy mass killings often perpetrated by disturbed young white men. As evidence suggests, they may very well be racist, as in Buffalo; or angry loners, as in Uvalde, Texas; or delusional and self-aggrandizing, as in Highland Park, Illinois.
Then there are the sadly “everyday” urban mass shootings perpetrated in primarily black neighborhoods in cities of various sizes by young men all too ready to settle day-to-day disputes with violent force. The per-incident body count is often lower and the national press attention far more scant because black-on-black crime is a virtually untouchable subject to big media. But far more are killed and wounded overall in these types of mass shootings than in the ones drawing broad national coverage.
However, and as we’ve noted above, mass shootings are still a small fraction of overall firearms-related deaths. Nonetheless, mis-use of guns is a serious criminal, social, and quality of life issue. As any Chicagoan can attest. Armed robberies, organized armed retail theft, armed carjackings, and both non-fatal and fatal shootings are all wretched and deeply hurtful crimes. And all have become disturbingly commonplace in Chicago.
Because sweeping new government rules to restrict gun access are so sharply limited now, parents and families need to look inward and do more to keep their sons on track. The odds of that are greatly enhanced when children are born into married, two-parent households. Particularly in high-risk environments like low-income Chicago communities.
#4: The best way for the government to regulate what it calls “gun violence” is for local prosecutors and judges to deal more strictly with repeat gun law offenders and other convicted violent criminals. Barring that, get ready for a continuing surge in private gun ownership.
The most effective way for the government to deter what progressives like to call “gun violence” – which of course is committed by people, not guns – would be to detain before trial, without cash bond, the gun-law convicts who’ve been busted again on gun charges. And also to give stiff sentences to criminals convicted of violent crimes and so-called “nonviolent” breaking of gun laws. Rather than light sentences or probation. Violent crimes – to which gun law violators often graduate – would be prevented and lives would be saved.
But as shown by the actions of local prosecutors and judges in cities including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, that too often does not happen. The revolving door is real, and the consequences can be dire. Thus the matrix resolves with one last and all-too-real deterrence option – law-abiding citizens will continue to arm themselves, for self-defense.
Highland Park was tragic and awful, as was Uvalde, and Buffalo, and all other mass shootings which attract national attention. But it is blatant hypocrisy to continue to downplay or ignore black-on-black mass shootings and deadly black-on-black violence outside of mass shootings, which mount daily in our nation’s biggest cities, and many second-tier cities. It is no coincidence these pathologies are most prevalent in the major cities of the Midwest and Northeast, where at the very same time good governance, public sector fiscal prudence, and private wealth have fled or are fleeing.
Preventive medicine against violence in cities like Chicago has to include better risk management through promotion of responsible parenting. It must also include empowering police to make more arrests and advance more murders to prosecution, and to respond more quickly, more often, to high-priority 911 calls. Lastly though perhaps sadly, preventive medicine against big-city violent crime increasingly requires competence with legal firearms.