BELLEVUE, WA – The grisly murder of Choni Dade and the brutal attacks on her two children Monday in Chicago underscore the institutionalized brutality of Windy City gun laws that Mayor Richard Daley would spread to the rest of Illinois, said the head of a leading national gun rights organization.
“This is what happens when citizens are forbidden to arm themselves for their personal defense and the defense of their loved ones,” said Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA). “This is what happens when callous politicians like Richard Daley pass laws that leave people to the mercy of vicious monsters who have no concept of what mercy means.”
Dade was shot four times and her neck slashed Monday, sometime between when she called Chicago police to frantically report that someone was trying to kill her, and the time that police arrived to find her dead and her children brutalized. That time period was no more than three to six minutes. It happened in mid-morning, at the home of Dade’s parents, on Chicago’s Southwest Side. There have been no arrests.
“For years, having a gun for self-defense in Chicago has been virtually illegal, thanks to the demagoguery of Daley and his predecessors,” Gottlieb stated. “They have left their citizens with no means of protection, other than a telephone and a prayer that police will arrive before some attacker leaves them robbed or raped, dying or dead.”
“And now Richard Daley is laboring hard to spread his Draconian gun control to every other corner of the state,” Gottlieb continued. “His cronies in Springfield are working overtime to stack the deck against gun owners and their rights. How many more Choni Dades will it take before the citizens of Illinois, and particularly the decent citizens of Chicago, tell Daley and his ilk to shut up, pack up and get out, and take their pro-criminal, anti-self defense philosophy with them?”
Gottlieb criticized Daley for pushing a lawsuit against the firearms industry, when the mayor should be devoting his efforts to prevent crimes like the Dade murder, and helping Chicagoans to defend themselves.
“Instead of Daley suing the gun industry to recover the costs of gun crime,” Gottlieb suggested, “maybe Chicago residents ought to sue the mayor, to recover their costs for medical treatment after being attacked by a thug, or to pay for funerals for loved ones murdered while Daley remains in office.
“Anti-gunners like Daley and his defenders will say that nobody can guarantee Choni Dade would still be alive if she had had a gun to defend herself and her children,” Gottlieb observed. “Unfortunately, that debate is moot. Chicago’s long-standing ban on handguns certainly deprived Dade and her parents of deciding whether to have a gun legally for self-defense, and now that philosophy may have deprived Dade of her life.”