The new year is for making plans.
Say what you will about New Year’s resolutions, but they connect deeply to a practice shared by our faith communities: resolving that we, our communities and our world need to live up to our promises. This realignment of ourselves with our purpose is tied to the calendar: For Christians, this often occurs during Lent; for the Jewish community, the High Holy Days mark our season of reorientation.
For all of us, the first days of January bring with them the opportunity to sharpen our resolve as a city and a state, a chance on this opening moment of our new year to declare: We will no longer accept the gun violence that plagues our society.
The month of January, known nationally for diets and gym memberships, is time for Illinois’ lame-duck legislative session. This month promises, however, to have great potential to reduce gun violence in our state.
Illinois suffered 57 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Survivors of such horrific tragedies in East Garfield Park and Highland Park are helping lead support for House Bill 5855, commonly called the assault weapons ban. Introduced by Rep. Bob Morgan, a survivor of the Highland Park July Fourth massacre, this legislation would not only ban the manufacture, assembly or sale of assault-style weapons, but it also further aligns with goals of policy experts from Johns Hopkins University, including banning large-capacity magazines and strengthening the state’s red flag law.
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While it is paramount that we pass meaningful evidence-based gun legislation, we do have some concerns about this bill’s potential to target communities of color, from criminalizing existing owners to changes in the age eligibility for an firearm owner’s identification card. Yet it is to America’s moral shame that we allowed the national assault weapons ban to expire in 2004. We must pass new legislation that restores a measure of sanity through removing these weapons of mass destruction from our state.
Our violent year is leading advocates and activists to want even greater reform to our perverse culture of guns. Hoping that there is an appetite for more legislation to counter gun violence, Rep. Denyse Stoneback has introduced a trio of bills in response to the many voices crying out for greater change.
House Bill 5535 builds upon lessons learned from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and calls for mandatory fingerprinting and in-person background checks for gun purchasers. These efforts reduced gun homicides in Connecticut by 40% over 10 years.
House Bill 5859, the Prevent a Gun Tragedy Act, would strengthen policy and enforcement mechanisms around firearm restraining orders to help reduce mass shootings, suicides and hate crimes. Linked to Stoneback’s bill is House Bill 2541, which would strengthen and clarify existing law to protect victims of domestic violence from menacing gun owners and assist law enforcement in dealing with revoked FOID cards. Lastly, House Bill 5535 calls for the creation of a state commission to tackle the interstate and intrastate trafficking of guns.
Each of these important pieces of legislation is a key piece of the puzzle to solving gun violence. All of them have a chance to become law before the lame-duck session ends Jan. 10. Our state representatives and senators need to hear our loud voices of support for these key measures.
We have a role to play in encouraging our state leaders to enact these important laws.
And here in Chicago, our energies are needed to ensure gun violence remains a priority for our elected and appointed leaders. The beginning of 2023 is time for the Chicago Police Department and City Hall to create meaningful plans for the coming year and the coming summer.
It is troubling that few concrete plans have yet to be advanced by city leadership. One month ago, CPD sent its preliminary goals for this year to the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Even as we wait for the commission to respond, we are disappointed in the vague language: “to advance the citywide desired result around workforce diversity,” “to advance citywide desire result around public safety” and “to advance the citywide desired result around community engagement.”
Diversity in the workforce, a reduction in violence in Chicago and meaningful community engagement seem as if they should be the mission of CPD, not its annual goals. Furthermore, we have seen little from CPD leadership to believe that it has any concrete plans to advance these key efforts. What is CPD doing about strategy for hiring? When does CPD plan to sit down with affected communities to create a plan to mitigate another violent summer? Who is being engaged in the creation of meaningful plans for community engagement?
All Chicagoans deserve answers to these questions. And we should be asking them loudly, now so that we might get meaningful answers and ensure that this year is less violent than the past.
The start of a new year is a time for making plans. In 2023, may we convince our Police Department to meaningfully interact and plan with our community to reduce gun violence. In these first 10 days of 2023, may we raise our voices in support of important new legislation to take assault-style weapons off our streets, to strengthen our capacity to get guns out of the hands of bad people and to keep them from being illegally trafficked into our state.
May we resolve to play our role in reducing gun violence.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth M. Limmer and the Revs. Michael Pfleger, Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and Otis Moss III joined the Tribune’s opinion section this summer for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
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