Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for more federal gun control in response to the rising gun violence that has plagued her city this year.

“This is a national problem,” Lightfoot said in response to an incident in Chicago Tuesday that saw eight people shot, leaving four dead.

Lightfoot said that many of the shooting cases in the city are due to illegal guns, a problem she said is not unique to Chicago.

“What we will likely learn as the details become clearer is that illegal guns continue to plague us. Gun violence continues to have a deep and painful history in our city,” Lightfoot said. “Unfortunately, Chicago is not unique. We are part of a club of cities for which no one wants to belong, cities with mass shootings.”

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The mayor then argued that cities cannot do enough on their own to stop the violence before calling on the federal government for help.

“Cities individually cannot tackle this problem. We just cannot. In Chicago, we’ve done absolutely everything possible, and we need help from the federal government,” Lightfoot said. “When guns are so porous that they can come across our borders as we see every single day in Chicago, we know that we have to have a multi-jurisdictional, national solution to this horrible plague of gun violence.”

Tuesday’s violent shooting was just one of several violent events that plagued Chicago over a weekend that saw a total of 43 people shot. That number actually represented a decrease from the previous weekend, when 55 people were shot in the city.

Homicides were up 22% through May in Chicago over last year’s numbers, even though 2020 had already seen a 50% rise in murders compared to 2019.

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Lightfoot has continued to respond to the issue with calls for additional gun control, though the city already has an “assault weapons” ban and a strict process for prospective gun owners that includes a background check.

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Tags: News, Chicago, Gun Violence, Gun Control, murder

Original Author: Michael Lee

Original Location: Lightfoot calls for federal gun control in response to another bloody Chicago weekend