Anti-gun violence protesters march away from the scene where Hadyia Pendleton was killed after a rally Friday in Chicago. The mounting homicide toll in President Barack Obama’s hometown is giving ammunition to both sides in the nation’s debate about gun rights and safety. Chicago has some of the toughest gun restrictions in the nation, but the the relentless shootings have made it Newtown, Conn., in slow motion.CHICAGO – They are counting the dead from gunfire again in Chicago, a city awash in weapons despite having one of the strictest gun-control ordinances in the nation.
After a year in which Chicago’s death toll surpassed 500, the bloodshed has continued in 2013 at a rate of more than one killing a day. It was the city’s deadliest January in more than a decade.
Now with this week’s death of a 15-year-old drum majorette who had just returned from performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the mounting losses have put Obama’s hometown at the center of the intensifying national debate over guns.
The slayings are no longer dismissed as an only-in-Chicago story about violent street gangs. They are almost a Sandy Hook Elementary School attack unfolding in slow motion: an honor student gunned down at a high school basketball game, two men in their 40s killed outside a hamburger stand, a woman whose bullet-riddled body was found early Friday in a van on the world-famous Lake Shore Drive.
Both gun-rights and gun-control advocates are seizing on the city’s woes – one side to push for greater access to guns for self-defense, the other to seek greater restrictions on gun sales.