There were 781 homicides in 2016.
In 2016, there were over 3,000 shooting incidents.
From January to June 2017, 2,100 people have been shot.
Chicago ranks 18th out of 20 cities for its per-capita homicide rate.
"This is the price of freedom."
During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Oct. 8, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said getting shot in June during GOP baseball practice “fortified” his belief in Second Amendment rights, calling the push for increased gun control misguided.
Scalise also made the claim that strict gun-control laws have little effect, holding up Chicago, a city with some of the toughest gun laws in the country, according to Scalise, but still plagued by gun violence.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also singled out Chicago in a news conference on Oct. 2, following the Vegas shooting, and President Trump made a similar claim during a presidential debate in 2016.
This talking point has been frequently parroted on the internet
Verifiably false
The city got its reputation for having the toughest laws in the country because of two laws that are no longer on the books. The city used to have a gun registry, but that ended in 2013 when the city council voted to adopt the state’s concealed-carry laws. And in 2010, a federal appeals court struck down Chicago’s decades-old handgun ban. The decision followed a 2008 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller that asserted the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violated the Second Amendment, setting a legal precedent for the country.
When the numbers are analyzed on a per-capita basis, Chicago does not top the list. In 2016, St. Louis had the highest rate of non-fatal shootings with 660 per 100,000 people. Chicago, in contrast, had just 89 per 100,000 people. New Orleans had the highest rate of homicides in 2016, with 47 per 100,000 people. Chicago, in contrast had 16 per 100,000.
Even if Chicago or Illinois had the toughest gun laws in the country, it borders two states, Wisconsin and Indiana, that have lax gun laws.
Researchers traced all new guns recovered from crimes between 2009 and 2013, and they found that 60 percent of the new guns used in gang-related crimes in the city, and nearly 32 percent of the new guns used in non-gang-related crimes, were purchased in other states.
 most gun deaths, nearly 60 percent, are suicides.
Most proposed laws wouldn’t have stopped shootings.
Kleck found that “gun control laws generally show no evidence of effects on crime rates, possibly because gun levels do not have a net positive effect on violence rates.” But there were a few exceptions. Requiring a license to possess a gun and bans on gun purchases by alcoholics appeared to reduce the homicide and robbery rate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/17/does-a-city-with-the-toughest-gun-laws-end-up-with-worst-gun-violence/?utm_term=.d77904df252e
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/17/do-tougher-gun-laws-lead-to-dramatically-lower-rates-of-gun-violence/?utm_term=.85121ca3f0e2
The US is unique in two key — and related — ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.
According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in 1999 found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
State and local actions are not enough
This isn’t exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: “the Iron Pipeline.”) And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17028930/gun-violence-us-statistics-charts

And it all comes down a big shift in views on a provision of the Bill of Rights that was once called the “lost amendment” because it got so little attention from scholars and the courts. The NRA managed to revive this amendment from its forgotten status to make it one of the most important pieces of law in modern political times.
In the House, he wrote, “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting, or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”
In fact, guns were well regulated at the time. Legal scholar Adam Winkler wrote for the New York Review of Books:
What the NRA doesn’t like to admit is that guns were regulated in early America. People deemed untrustworthy — such as British loyalists unwilling to swear an oath to the new nation — were disarmed. The sale of guns to Native Americans was outlawed. Boston made it illegal to store a loaded firearm in any home or warehouse. Some states conducted door-to-door registration surveys so the militia could “impress” those weapons if necessary. Men had to attend musters where their guns would be inspected by the government.
As for what constitutes a militia, the founders were purposely vague, leaving it to Congress to define. In the past, these were organizations of all or most able-bodied men that states and the federal government armed for security and law enforcement. In modern terms, the militia is, essentially, the National Guard.
This was the perspective of legal scholars and courts for most of US history. As Bogus noted in a 2000 law review article, “from the time law review articles first began to be indexed in 1887 until 1960, all law review articles dealing with the Second Amendment endorsed the collective right model.”
For example, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1939’s United States v. Miller that Congress can ban sawed-off shotguns because that weapon was of no use in a well-regulated militia, making it clear that the right to bear arms was inseparable from the role of a militia.
Justice James McReynolds wrote in the majority opinion, “The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/12/16418524/us-gun-policy-nra