Recent days have brought an interesting development—newspapers commenting (futilely, no doubt) on futility. The Tribune, the Sun-Times, and even the New York Times all published editorials applauding Mayor Emanuel’s proposed ordinance to legalize the gun shops City Hall doesn’t want to legalize. Alas, the federal courts say Chicago has to. The editorials gave us no reason to believe the ordinance would accomplish anything beyond getting the judiciary off our backs; the Sun-Times, most explicit about this, said it “will have absolutely no impact on Chicago’s real gun problem: the unceasing flow of illegal weapons into the city.”
The Tribune said the opposite—but unpersuasively. Emanuel’s ordinance “would make a significant difference in how easy it is for criminals to get guns,” the editorial page claimed, making so little effort to support this prediction that it can be written off as wishful thinking. The Tribune cited a study showing that “Chicago police recover seven times more guns, per capita, than the New York police.” If this is true when guns cannot legally be purchased inside the city limits, how will adding Chicago gun shops to the present assortment of thriving suppliers reduce the number of guns?