In response to the shootings of over 30 people in a 48 hour period, Chicago’s Mayor Daley will arm the police with M4 Carbines. These machine guns’ rate of fire is upwards of 700 round per minute in 3 round bursts.
Note that Chicago has had a handgun ban for decades, yet the overwhelming number of shootings in Chicago are perpetrated by criminals using handguns. Rather than admitting that gun control doesn’t work and simply leads to criminals having a monopoly on guns while law abiding citizens are left unprotected, Chicago’s Mayor Daley will now give the police machine guns. Unlike the ordinary citizens of Chicago, however, Mayor Daley himself will not be unprotected. Instead, he will continue to be protected by his taxpayer-sponsored, gun toting bodyguards.
From a safey standpoint, this decision to give the police M4 Carbines also concerns me. The federal government virtually banned the ability of ordinary citizens to have machine guns, citing safety concerns among other things. With a fully automatic weapon, an accidental pull of the trigger means multiple stray bullets instead of one. These rifles also fire bullets that will penetrate much further than the average handgun, which will put innocent bystanders at greater risk. Now combine the already existing problem of police using excessive or entirely unnecessary force with automatic weapons, and Chicago may very well be made more dangerous with these new M4 Carbines than it was without them.