(NYT) — Mayor Richard M. Daley has long insisted that the city’s restrictive gun laws — including the handgun ban that was essentially nullified recently by the United States Supreme Court — have been a key crime-fighting tool.
But court records show that relatively few people were convicted of violating the laws, and even top city officials have questioned how useful they are in deterring crime.
Since 1982, when the city tightened its gun ordinances to include the handgun ban, there have been just 2,201 convictions under the laws, according to data obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative from the office of the Cook County Circuit Court clerk. That works out to an average of about 79 convictions a year.
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