Chicago’s latest plan to tame its homicide rate by expanding the very bureaucracy that has already failed for decades reads like a grim rerun of the same tired script. Instead of confronting the city’s revolving-door prosecution, fatherless homes, and gang-driven drug markets, Mayor Brandon Johnson is doubling down on gun-control offices, “violence interrupters,” and new layers of permitting that will mainly burden the law-abiding. The predictable result is that criminals—who already ignore every existing statute—will continue to source firearms through theft and the black market while compliant residents are priced out of self-defense.

For the 2A community the message is unmistakable: when progressive governance refuses to secure streets, it defaults to disarming the people who obey the law. Chicago’s experiment shows that each new gun bureaucracy becomes both a jobs program for activists and a political pressure valve that shields officials from having to reform policing or prosecute repeat offenders. Law-abiding gun owners nationwide should treat this as a cautionary tale; the same coalition pushing “equity-based” gun policy in Illinois is already exporting those ideas to Springfield and Washington.

The deeper implication is that crime policy and gun rights are now inseparable battlegrounds. Every restriction sold as “public safety” must be judged by whether it removes guns from criminals or simply from citizens. Chicago’s record—more than 600 homicides in several recent years despite some of the nation’s strictest local gun laws—demonstrates that the latter approach only enlarges the victim pool. Until mayors prioritize enforcement over euphemisms, the cycle of headlines about fresh anti-gun offices will continue, and the constitutional right to keep and bear arms will remain the only reliable backstop between citizens and the disorder their leaders refuse to confront.