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A murdered Chicago teen's mother attends the president's speech on gun control, not knowing federal gun-crime prosecutions have in fact dropped on his watch — with the Windy City bringing up the rear.
Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the mother of murdered 15-year-old Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, was one of 20 mothers who lost children to criminal violence who were at the White House last Thursday to hear President Obama speak once again on the need for gun control.
Obama met with her and some of the others in a small group before his formal remarks and told them "how serious this issue really is and something needs to be done about it," she said.
But President Obama did not tell this group that Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that the Northern Illinois district ranked 90th out of 90 in prosecutions of federal weapons crimes per capita.
David Burnham, co-director of TRAC, states their analysis says that according to case-by-case U.S. Justice Department information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, there were 52 federal gun 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 in the country.
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