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around gun control in our country, and yet our leaders do not want to talk about what's happening in my hometown of Chicago. I'm reading from Breitbart.com, quote a Chicago man has been accused of a shooting spree that wounded two, including a police officer, reportedly saying he was trying to lure police into an ambush. Tracy Thomas Jr. Was hit with five felony counts of attempted murder of a police officer after his arrest on Saturday. So I'm from the suburbs of Chicago. I know Chicago very well. You look at the statistics in Chicago, it's horrifying. If we were serious about talking about violent crime in our country, Chicago would be the top of our list. Year to date in Chicago, there's been 114 people shot and killed, 530 people shot and wounded, 644 people, total shot and 120 total homicides. So I am not disqualifying the pain, the suffering and the tragedy of what just happened in Colorado. However, this all comes in a context where violent crime is going up everywhere and it's not about the type of weapon. Most of the murders happening in Chicago are handguns. They are not AR15s. They are not long rifles. Now, I'm happy to explain weapons to people, but an AR15 is not an automatic weapon. It's not. Now you can illegally configure it to be an automatic weapon. However, an AR15 is a semi automatic weapon. Essentially, you have to pull the trigger every single time you discharge a bullet. That's a very important technical difference because we're about to have a bunch of people on cable television have no idea what they're talking about. And no, AR does not mean automatic rifle. It's Armalite rifle. We went through all of these different policy debates years ago after the tragedy in Broward, Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You all remember the tragedy that happened there. But Chicago is something that the left does not want to talk about. Democrats run all of Chicago top to bottom. There are no Republicans in elected office in Chicago, which, by the way, is not a clear representation or a picture of the people of Chicago. There are so many decent people in Chicago, and I have so many friends in Chicago. Lithuanian immigrants, Polish immigrants, Ukrainian immigrants that are not being represented in Chicago right now by Lori Lightfoot, who's an awful mayor. And when we look at where the majority of violent crime in our country with weapons is occurring, it is not in suburbia. It's not mass shootings. Instead, it is gang violence in the inner cities of our country. It's Chicago, it's Oakland, it's Houston, it's Minneapolis, it's Atlanta, and every single death is a tragedy. But when you try to craft public policy around a singular event, that's usually a really bad idea. Usually, public policy should come from the position of the protection of natural rights. Now, here's why I am worried today as we are speaking on this beautiful Tuesday. I'm worried because we have learned in the last year that people would rather be taken care of and they will go to safetyism much quicker than liberty. Liberty is hard. Liberty requires a sacrifice. Liberty comes at a price. You see, liberty is being willing to admit that things can go wrong, that people can abuse that liberty. But we embrace liberty for a reason. Because the benefits of liberty far outweigh the costs of having that freedom. And imagine not having that liberty. Imagine not being able to speak your mind, not being able to buy private property, not being able to have your right to privacy, not being able to protect yourself. So I'm afraid, I'm a little bit afraid right now, because what we have seen in the last year with the mask mandates, the lockdowns, is an American population that is more in the direction of being safetyism than liberty. And that is the framing of the debate that will be raging in our country for the next couple days and the next couple weeks when we dive into the statistics of this, you will be stunned when you learn that the Democrats and the gun grabbers, they're intentionally misrepresenting gun issues in our country. The gun grabbers are already dominating the news cycle. They have found an issue that fits their narrative. So Democrats will always ignore stories that make them look bad. And if you just look at the statistics, when it comes to what weapons are contributing to gun violence in our country, handguns are the number one firearm used when it comes to gun deaths in America, most of which are gang related. 7,105 gun deaths were handgun related, 374 were rifles, 262 shotguns and 186 other guns. Now you are going to hear it repeated time and time again that there are 30,000 gun deaths every single year in America. So you will hear the mantra repeated over and over again. 30,000 people a year die of gun violence in America. There's a phenomenal piece that was written in the Washington Post. That's right, you heard me a couple years ago. And the title was I used to think gun control is the answer. My research told me otherwise. So 33,000 sounds like a lot of people. But let's start with the top line number. Did you know that we're the only country in the world that counts death with a firearm as suicide? As a firearm death, that's 2/3 of the 33,000 figure. 2/3, the story says. I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn't prove much about what America's policy should be. So that's exactly right. It continues by saying, as my co workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun control restriction could make a big difference. Two thirds of gun deaths in the United States every single year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder with guns on hand to use them. I couldn't even answer my most desperate question if I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, is there anything I could do that would help? Leah labresco. Leah labresco is her name and she goes on to say here, which is very interesting when it comes to a statistical analysis of what is happening in America when it comes to gun violence. And she says this quote. However, the next largest set of gun deaths, one in five were young men ages 15 to 34 killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. She continues by saying, and the last notable group of similar deaths was 1700 women murdered per year, usually as a result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass shooting incidents. But few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them. So this is Leah labresco for the Washington Post, and it says, quote, I used to think gun control is the answer. My research told me otherwise. So the more you dive in actually into the data, you realize that this is a highly complicated issue and it's specialized to a couple cities and a couple demographics, mostly gang related violence. Now, what happened in Colorado was a tragedy. I'm not going to make light of it. I'm not going to say that we should minimize it. However, it comes in a context and it comes in a framework that we must remind ourselves and remind others that violent crime is going up in most cities across the country. The cities that it isn't going up in are cities that have open carry and they have legal ownership of firearms. Those cities are not seeing massive increases. New York City has a historic increase in violent crime right now. And New York City has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Mass shootings are actually quite rare. I know that comes as a surprise to some people because you remember them so vividly, but mass shootings actually represent a tiny share of all shooting deaths. This is actually from the liberal website Vox.com Vox.com, mass shootings represent a tiny share of all shooting deaths. Quote, There has been a rash of heavily publicized mass shootings in recent years. This is from a year and a half ago. But those incidents, while tragic, are actually a tiny sliver of America's gun homicide program. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, analyzing FBI data, found that fewer than 1% of homicide victims in 2010 were killed in incidents