Editorial: Illegal guns killing our city, body and soul

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There was a day, not so long ago, when driving drunk was borderline socially acceptable. A cop was more likely to wag his finger — you naughty boy — than haul you off to jail.

No harm no foul, right?

But as the death toll mounted, society came to understand that every drunk on the road adds to the possibility — the probability — that innocent people will be hurt and killed. We finally came to see that drunken driving, even when the drunk made it home without denting a fender, is anything but a victimless crime.

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Now we face a far worse scourge, an epidemic of illegal guns. They are everywhere, and they are killing us.

In Chicago, people carrying guns illegally are destroying whole neighborhoods. Yet they feel no fear of the law, not really. They know that if they are caught carrying a gun illegally they might go to jail or they might not. They might go away for a year, or maybe for a week or just pull probation — who knows.

Our laws and criminal justice system too often treat the illegal possession of a gun the way society once treated drunken driving — no harm, no foul, until somebody dies.

How do we end this epidemic of gun violence? In the same way we finally got real about drunken driving: zero tolerance. Penalties must be harsh and consistent for the illegal possession of a gun, even if that gun is never loaded, pointed or fired.

Get the gun drunks off our streets before they crash. Make them pay. Let the word get around.

We are so tired of writing headlines like the one on the front page of Tuesday’s Sun-Times: “Shooting kills pregnant mother, grandma; baby hurt.”

And you, we know, are so tired of reading those headlines.

We are tired of tallying the weekend carnage. Last weekend in Chicago, four people were killed and 53 more were wounded.

Fifty-three. Enough bleeding people to fill a bus.

This is nuts.

Let’s be clear. Our outrage is not directed at people who own or carry a gun legally. We opposed the legalization two years ago of concealed carry in Illinois, but not for a minute do we believe concealed carry is the real problem. Those are not the people shooting up our city every night.

Our outrage is reserved for the tens of thousands of guns obtained and carried illegally. Each one is a crime waiting to happen, often on an impulse. A fight breaks out and somebody pulls a gun.

For years now, this editorial page has called for a long list of gun control reforms. We believe strongly, to begin with, that the state should license all gun dealers, imposing reporting requirements and restrictions that go well beyond federal rules. And we increasingly see the merit of raising the mandatory minimum sentence — to three years from one — for illegal gun possession, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Supt. Garry McCarthy have called for. The rub is in the details, our concern being that judges must have discretion to make some — if rare — exceptions.

But one way or another, Chicago and Illinois desperately need toughness and consistency in sentencing practices for gun possession offenses. Or all our half-hearted and half-baked efforts will deter nobody.

This is the first in a series of editorials in coming weeks and months that will look at solutions to Chicago’s gun crisis. We’re looking for answers. In future reporting-based editorials, we will examine specific proposals to raise the mandatory minimum sentence. We will look at an intriguing idea to create a specialized gun court in Cook County. We will look at Chicago Police practices.

We will hunt down the best solutions out there, check them out and bring them to you.

The roots of violent crime in America are tangled and deep, but Chicago struggles with a problem less common to other big cities — huge numbers of illegal guns on the street. Our city ranks among the highest in the nation for gun violence, but does not rank high for overall violence or homicides committed without guns. Police here confiscate seven times as many guns per capita than they do in New York.

And the people carrying those guns, like drunken drivers in the past, don’t have much cause to worry. In the first three months of this year, the number of people arrested for the illegal possession of a gun shot up by 60 percent, McCarthy tells us, but 75 percent of those people were back on the street by mid-April.

So much for swift and certain justice.

Illegal guns are killing our city, body and soul.

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