Days after U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan ruled that a section of Chicago's gun ordinance unjustly denied residents with prior misdemeanors from possessing firearms, the city is poised to introduce a revised ordinance that would tighten restrictions on gun ownership once again.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel will introduce an updated version of the city's controversial firearms ordinance Wednesday that would prevent anyone convicted of a misdemeanor for a violent crime from being issued a gun permit for five years, the Associated Press reports.
Last Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan said the language in the city's ordinance was too vague, and shouldn't include individuals convicted of non-violent misdemeanors, like possession charges, in the group of offenders denied access to weapons permits.
That ruling was the second recent blow to Chicago's handgun possession policies after the previous citywide handgun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010.
Gun-related violence continues to plague the city, where shootings are a daily occurrence and the homicide rate has spiked in recent months, to the degree that more Chicago residents have been killed in 2012 than U.S. troops in Afghanistan over the same time period.
On Saturday, the city collected more than 5,500 weapons surrendered in exchange for gift cards during its annual gun trade-in event, which was hosted at 23 events across the city, down from 6,700 weapons recovered in 2007, the Associated Press reports.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the city urged Judge Der-Yeghiayan to protect the ordinance and argued that issuing permits to residents already convicted of misdemeanor weapons crimes could lead to more problems in a city already plagued by gun violence.
“There’s just way too many guns in this city," Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said at a press conference last week. "There’s way too many guns in the state of Illinois. And it’s one of those situations that if we don’t do something about it – and everything we do matters--if we don’t do something about it, it’s just going to continue at the rate that it is.”