by The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms notes that while President Barack Obama wants more gun control, his administration is less likely to prosecute violations of existing law.
The CCRKBA was responding to this report released yesterday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Interestingly, the Southern District of Illinois was one of the top ten judicial districts for convictions on Federal firearms charges. I’m not sure how the Northern District of Illinois (Chicagoland) is doing as I don’t want to have pay for the data. Nonetheless, it isn’t in the top ten!
Obama Prosecutes Fewer Gun Cases While Penalizing Honest Citizens
BELLEVUE, WA – While Barack Obama has been pushing harder for more gun laws to disarm honest citizens, his Justice Department has been prosecuting fewer gun crimes despite announcing more than two years ago he would increase such prosecutions, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“Here we go again with Barack Obama talking tough on crime, but actually being less aggressive, while at the same time he’s been pushing for more gun control,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This raises a question that the president needs to answer. Does he want to put criminals behind bars, or just discourage legal gun ownership?”
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, gun crime prosecutions have been declining since 2013, the same year President Obama began ramping up the rhetoric about more and stronger gun laws as a response to the Sandy Hook tragedy.
“After the president spoke yesterday to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago,” Gottlieb observed, “he took some heat from the Chicago Tribune for not using three important words: Mandatory minimum sentencing. When your hometown newspaper calls you out for essentially being disingenuous about cracking down on armed criminals, your tough talk turns to hot air.
“According to the TRAC report,” he continued, “the federal government reported 6,002 new firearms convictions during Fiscal Year 2015. That’s down 5.8 percent from the 6,373 convictions reported in FY 2014, and an alarming 15.5 percent from five years ago, when there were 7,101 convictions. It represents a whopping decline of 34.8 percent from the 9,206 convictions reported in 2005, according to the TRAC data.
“Obama can talk all he wants about being tough on crime,” Gottlieb said, “but his agenda only seems to erode the Second Amendment and the privacy rights of gun owners. His answer to crime is to penalize the good guys while not punishing the bad ones.”