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Last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, held up a print out of a study done by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data-gathering and research organization run by Syracuse University, that found that out of 90 federal jurisdictions, in 2012 Chicago ranked last for prosecuting bad guys with guns. LaPierre asked, “Do you know where Chicago ranks in terms of enforcement of the federal gun laws? Out of 90 jurisdictions in the country, they ranked 90th.
However, David Burnham, co-director of TRAC, says LaPierre “had it 100 percent right. On a per-capita basis Chicago ranks dead last for prosecuting gun crimes.” Burnham explained that according to case-by-case U.S. Justice Department information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by TRAC, there were 52 prosecutions in Illinois North (Chicago) in 2012, or 5.52 per million in population. By this measure, compared with the 90 federal judicial districts in the U.S., the prosecution rate in Chicago was the lowest.
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