Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson inherited the Windy City’s ongoing Schützenfest three years ago. It’s traditional for Chicago mayors to bemoan the city’s bloodshed and then take some measure that does nothing to ameliorate or even address it.
In keeping with this time-honored practice, Mayor Johnson signed an executive order tightening procurement standards for the city’s purchases of firearms, ammunition, and associated products.
“Chicago’s commitment to community safety is reflected in the standards we set for how taxpayer dollars are spent,” Johnson said in a press release.
“This executive order builds on that commitment by strengthening our procurement standards to ensure the City’s purchasing power advances responsible business practices and community safety. Every family deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood, and through this commitment to the families who have lost loved ones to gun violence, we are encouraging greater accountability across the firearms industry while supporting vendors that share our commitment to preventing illegal gun trafficking and protecting Chicagoans.”
I would have expected a bit more: Mayor Johnson and his family live in Austin, one of the city’s highest casualty count neighborhoods.
Johnson was inspired by the Brady Bunch’s Gun Store Transparency Project, an unusually lame attempt to discredit federally licensed dealers by playing fast and loose with definitions, implying trivial paperwork errors are the same as funneling guns to drug cartels or knowingly selling guns to straw purchasers.
“The gun industry has a responsibility to keep Americans safe from gun violence. Yet there is no transparency into which gun stores are violating our public safety laws and whether law enforcement is doing anything about it.
“That’s why Brady, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, is exposing never-before-released records that identify gun stores cited for breaking the law.
“Now, with the award-winning Gun Store Transparency Project, the American public will no longer be kept in the dark about businesses that contribute to gun violence in their communities — and whether federal authorities are failing to hold them accountable.”
Brady has accumulated thousands of ATF inspection reports and uploaded scans of them. Fair warning: They quickly become boring. Whole lot of clerical errors; a bit light on the gun trafficking.
It should be noted that there are no FFLs operating inside Chicago’s city limits. As Lori Lightfoot, Johnson’s more-than-slightly-deranged predecessor, said, all the guns come from outside the city.
Chicago’s violence has become legendary. Famed for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that was directly connected to the National Firearms Act of 1934; lampooned in Jim Croce’s 1973 hit “Bad, Bad, LeRoy Brown;” and saddled with the nickname “Chi-raq,” the city has become a joke.
The Council on Criminal Justice compiles monthly homicide data on 36 cities ranging in size from Rochester, New York to New York City. For the first six months of 2026, 29 cities had reported data for all six months. I added Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, to make an even 30 cities. Houston’s numbers were sourced from the Houston Police Department’s offense report for the first six months of 2026.
Chicago had more homicides (210) than New York City (107) and Los Angeles (95) combined.
The 30 cities reported a total of 1,325 homicides. Chicago accounted for nearly 16% of them.
Illinois has required a Firearm Owners Identification Card to possess a handgun since 1968. From 1982 to 2010, Chicago had a handgun ban. In McDonald v. City of Chicago, The Supreme Court ruled the Second Amendment had become incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and was binding on the states. The city’s ban was unconstitutional.
For decades, Chicago and Illinois politicians have tried to use politically expedient gun control laws to stem the bleeding in Chicago’s streets. Obviously, it hasn’t worked.
Cook County’s revolving-door justice system has been largely useless. Police, prosecutors, and courts have a circular firing squad, devoted to passing the blame.
In February 2018, Chicago Police Commander Paul Bauer was killed by a four-time felon who had been paroled from prison one more time.
Chicago’s core problem is in 15 of the city’s 77 neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are clumped together in the west side and the south side: [Based on the number of homicides and injuries, The South Side of Chicago is still the baddest part of town.]
So far in 2016, these neighborhoods have accounted for 64% of all the homicides and 48% of the injuries in the entire city.
Then there are the victim demographics. 85% of homicide victims are male. 70% are Black; 24% are Hispanic. 63% are between the ages of 13 to 35. All the markings of gangs, which are well-established in the Windy City.
This level of violence isn’t new. In 1974, when the city’s population was 17% larger than it is today, Chicago had 974 homicides and a homicide rate of 30.23 per 100,000 residents.
That’s 51 years ago and just six years after Illinois began requiring permits to possess a handgun. During that time, the number of Chicago killings soared 51%, from 645 in 1968 to 974 in 1974. Good job!
Speaking in a 2021 interview on WBBM radio, Bill Cameron, a retired broadcast reporter who was covering City Hall for WMAQ-AM in 1974, said:
“It is the one huge problem in all my years at City Hall that they’ve never been able to solve. They keep trying, with new bureaucracies and more people on the street doing social work and putting more resources into the high-crime areas,” he said. “It’s a complex problem that takes a generation, if not generations, to solve.”
Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem. Chicago has a deeply-seated culture problem it continues to deny.
The city isn’t alone; every city has its “baddest part of town.” Other, smaller cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and New Orleans have substantially higher murder rates. But when it comes to body counts, Chi-raq lives up to its name.
Unfortunately, the impact of Chicago’s violence doesn’t end at the city limits or even at the Cook County line.
Kamela Harris carried Illinois in the 2024 General Election but she won in just 14 of the state’s 102 counties. The rest of the counties were solid red.
Chicago and Cook County are the 800-pound gorillas in the Illinois General Assembly. 41% of the state’s population lives in Cook County alone; they rule the roost.
It’s a classic example of the tyranny of the majority James Madison wrote about in Federalist #51:
“It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”
Essentially, Chicago has used its legislative clout to impose its failed gun control measures on the entire state.
A number of those red counties have an agenda: Make Chicago a separate state. Based on 2025 data from the Illinois State Police and Chicago Police Department, Illinois could see its state homicide rate drop about 69% by kicking Chicago out, a process that’s constitutionally possible, but is anything but easy.
Chicago is the poster child for the failures of gun control. It should also be a clarion call for all who treasure their liberty to get out the vote. It’s a lot easier to prevent another Chicago than it is to fix one.
This article used statistics and other data from the Brady Bunch, Chicago Police Department, Council on Criminal Justice, FBI, Houston Police Department, Illinois State Police, U.S. Census Bureau, and “Hey Jackass” a website that reports on Chicago violence.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
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