A Chicago Suburb Is Confiscating 'Assault Weapons,' 'High-Capacity Magazines'

Nick Kangadis | April 4, 2018
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The assault on the Second Amendment continues, this time at the local level.

The suburban Chicago village of Deerfield has voted unanimously to ban “certain semi-automatic weapons.”

According to WGN:

The amendment to the village’s gun ordinance restricts firearms that village leaders define as assault weapons along with high-capacity magazines. That includes the AR-15, which has been used in mass shootings.

The new law goes into effect June 13. Residents who don’t remove banned weapons by then face a fine of $1,000 a day.

The village of Deerfield is essentially taking away people’s weapons by force. Isn’t this unconstitutional?

“There were a lot of emotional arguments and not a lot based on fact,” said Deerfield board meeting attendee Daniel Easterday, according to CBS 2 - Chicago. “Deerfield is a very crime free community, and I don’t see how this is going to make it any more crime free.”

Deerfield is an affluent village in the North suburbs of Chicago, Ill. According to crime statistics website neighborhoodscout.com, Deerfield is one of the safer towns in the entire United States. It is safer than than 82 percent of U.S. cities. However, crime in Deerfield is predominantly comprised of burglaries and theft. Deerfield experienced only five cases of “violent crime” in 2016, the latest data available. Zero of the violent crime in Deerfield in 2016 were murders. There were three assaults, one robbery and one rape.

Deerfield is well under the national average in all of those violent crime categories as well.

You have a .026 percent chance of being the victim of a violent crime in Deerfield. Of course, even that could be considered too high by some, but for a town that rarely — if ever — experiences “gun violence,” how can you say that banning weapons will help your community?

The move by the village of Deerfield is also a peculiar one — and it questions the board members knowledge of firearms — because the FBI reported that far more murders were committed in 2016 with handguns than firearms. It’s not even close, even if you combined the numbers of murders committed with rifles with the number of murders committed with shotguns.

I grew up a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Deerfield, and at no time was anyone ever worried about being the victim of a violent crime, at least from my experience. It’s a quiet town of about 19,000 people with big houses and fancy cars.

I guess this is what happens when you try to prove just how “progressive” you can be.

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