After bloody year, Chicago looks to tougher gun laws

CHICAGO: On a recent evening on Chicago’s southwest side, an all- too- familiar scene unfolds: within sight of the Windy City’s iconic downtown high- rises, dozens of police officers swarm. A 21-year- old man has been shot outside his home.

All of a sudden, a deafening scream pierces the silence: the man’s family has just learned he has been declared dead at the hospital.

Chicago — the Midwestern stomping grounds of Al Capone, the ruthless mobster who left a trail of blood in the Roaring 1920s — is grappling once again with a gun violence problem and a soaring murder rate.

There have been more than 670 murders in Chicago from January to mid-November, according to police — a 56 per cent jump in just one year. The city is on track to end 2016 with the most killings since 1998.

On Friday night, the grandson of Illinois congressman Danny Davis was fatally shot in the head — over a pair of shoes, police said.

The nation’s third largest city is struggling to figure out how to stem the free flow of bullets and blood, and is hoping new, tougher gun laws are the answer.

“I have seen too many lives torn apart.

“Too many parents lose a child,” Chicago’s police chief Eddie Johnson said at a recent public forum.

“As a Chicagoan, I’m ashamed, because we could do better.”

Johnson and his state lawmaker allies want to reduce the number of shootings by stiffening jail sentences for those repeatedly arrested for gun offenses.

The police department says that a hard core of 1,400 recidivist gun offenders — many of them gang members or drug dealers — are fueling much of the violence.

“We’re beyond frustrated,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a police department spokesman. “You could reduce the violence in the city by 40 percent just by keeping people in jail for crimes they have committed.”

The new draft bill is headed for the Illinois state legislature in the next few weeks, where there are indications of bipartisan support.

It would ask judges to sentence repeat gun offenders at the higher end of the three-year to 14-year guideline range.

Judges who hand down lighter sentences would need to offer a written explanation of their reasoning.

Despite a tough national climate for passing gun control measures, the bill’s authors are hopeful that Illinois will be different. — AFP