The red-state invasion that worsened Chicago gun violence
President Trump’s eager deployment of federal and federalized troops is ostensibly rooted in fighting crime. Maybe he actually believes that; he did apparently see some footage from 2020 on the TV and argue that it actually represents the current environment in Portland. But it’s almost certainly mostly a pretext. He’s wanted to have troops marching through the streets of D.C. for years and was reportedly just looking for a reason to send them out. There’s also not much evidence that the deployment in D.C. is having much effect on crime.
What’s happening in Chicago isn’t being driven by soldiers. It’s immigration officers — mostly Immigration and Customs Enforcement, augmented by other deployed federal officials — who are turning over apartment buildings and tackling residents. But the administration’s messaging has long dishonestly conflated “immigration” and “crime,” and its current rhetoric about Chicago often mirrors what the president is saying about threats everywhere else.
During an interview on CNN Tuesday morning, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) was asked about the argument that Chicago has an urgent need to address violent crime. He offered a useful counterpoint.
If the president’s concern about gun violence were sincere, Jackson argued, Trump “would be more interested in saying, ‘How do we effectively deal with gun violence? How do we deal with gun manufacturers?’ The city of Chicago does not have one gun shop, does not have one gun range.”
“How are these guns flooding our streets?” he continued.
It’s a very good question.
It is not the case that there are no gun dealers in Chicago. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) maintains a list of licensed firearm dealers in the U.S. Cross-referencing that list with Chicago-area ZIP codes shows only six licensed dealers in the city — a city of 2.7 million people.
Mapping dealers by ZIP code, you can see how few dealers there are in Chicago. Zoom in on the city below.
You might also notice that there are a lot of ZIP codes with a number of gun dealers not that far from Chicago. In fact, there are 14 licensed dealers in the 46350 ZIP code, an hour east in La Porte, Ind., home to about 22,000 people.
The ATF also tracks where firearms recovered from crime scenes were originally purchased. Just over half of the firearms recovered in Illinois in 2023 were purchased in Illinois. Another 16 percent came over the border from Indiana.
If that balance sounds about right — most from in-state, some from a neighbor — consider the numbers for Indiana itself. More than 80 percent of firearms recovered in Indiana in 2023 came from Indiana, while less than 2 percent came from Illinois.
This is Jackson’s point. It is much easier to buy a gun in Indiana than in Illinois, so a large percentage of guns used in Illinois come from Indiana. In fact, the number of firearms seized in Illinois that originated in that state is remarkably low compared to other states.
You may notice that many of the states with the most seized firearms that originated in-state are red states and that most of those with the fewest are blue. Those two things do correlate: the more a state voted for Trump in 2024, the higher the percentage of seized guns that originated in that state.
In the vast majority of states, most of the seized firearms that originated out-of-state came from red states — states where gun laws are often looser.
None of this excuses gun violence or is meant to suggest that such violence is entirely a function of lax gun laws in red states. But it is the case that a lot of the gun violence that occurs in Illinois and in Chicago uses weapons purchased outside of the city.
It is easier — and more palatable to Trump’s base — to send squads of enforcers into the heavily blue city to crack skulls. Combatting gun violence, though, might also benefit from efforts to reduce access to guns, reconciling Illinois’ efforts to limit gun ownership with its neighbor’s interest in putting firearms in shopping bags.
Photo: Biplanes over Chicago in 1931. (National Archives)