CITY HALL — The City Council will take up a call for a national ban on assault weapons in the immediate wake of Thursday's sniper attack on Dallas police.
The Public Safety Committee has scheduled a meeting Monday to address a resolution calling for state and national bans on assault weapons submitted by Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th).
"The incident yesterday sparked more interest in the gun proliferation that's going on across the country, not just here in Chicago," said Ald. Ariel Reboyras (30th), chairman of the Public Safety Committee, at City Hall on Friday. "So I think it's about time that the U.S. Congress gets involved in this and maybe, just maybe, we'll get something passed and hopefully save some of these lives.
"We're going to have to address it on the local level as well," Reboyras added.
Yet that's where it gets thorny. Chicago already has a ban on assault weapons that has withstood court challenges, but its citywide ban on handguns was wiped off the books by a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, and the City Council has had its hands tied on local gun control ever since.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has led local law-enforcement officials for years in calling for stronger state and federal gun laws, but that movement has been consistently stymied in Congress and the General Assembly. Emanuel has boasted of helping President Bill Clinton pass a national ban on assault weapons in the '90s, but that has long since lapsed.
"We can still be the best advocate for the residents of our city, and our state officials can still make things stricter," Lopez said. "The federal government, we've seen their complete dysfunction on this issue and many others."
That's one reason for Monday's hearing, Lopez insisted. "We're hoping to have local witnesses and expert testimony as to what we can do legally as a state," he said, "then push forward and get some of our congressional delegation to take it back to [Capitol] Hill with them."
Yet Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th) worried that attitudes were growing polarized on both sides of the police and gun-control issues after police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota last week, followed by the Dallas sniper attack on police officers Thursday.
"It's clear that murder is an acceptable consequence of the Second Amendment right now," Pawar said Friday. "I don't know how you can change that.
"I think the pendulum will swing the other way one day," he added. "This kind of stuff is going to keep happening, and eventually the country will swing the other way."
Lopez's resolution was triggered by an attack with semiautomatic weapons he witnessed in Back of the Yards last month. It calls for hearings on "gun- and gang-related crime" and asks the Council to "stand in support of a state and federal ban on automatic and semiautomatic assault weapons and urge the passage of such legislation."
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