Nobody was ever killed by a gun.
It all depends on the operator.
I hear this all the time.
Gun control laws don’t work because criminals don’t follow the laws.
Do you feel like you would be safe
in your use of it.
Not at all.
to challenge them on a favorite talking point.
In Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States, they have more gun violence
than any other city.
The city of Chicago has some of the most stringent firearms laws in this country.
They have the strictest gun laws in the country.
The toughest gun laws in our country.
Yet they have one of the highest homicide rate and violent crime rates.
They have the highest number of gang-related killings.
Chicago does not have the nation’s strictest gun laws.
It does not have the highest gun violence, and the gun violence it does have might have
more to do with what’s happening right here in Indiana, the home state of Mike Pence,
Pete Buttigieg, and some of the loosest gun laws in the nation.
I’m here with Igor Volksy of Guns Down America.
Talk to me about this story that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work.
Folks argue, look, Chicago has some of the strongest gun laws on the books—
And it does have strong laws.
And it does have strong laws, though not the strongest.
We actually have a report from the Chicago Police Department that lists the top ten stores
that are responsible for selling a lot of the guns that end up in crimes in Chicago.
I bet that if we go to one of those stores and show just how easy it is to
we’ll be able to illustrate the problem.
All right, let’s do it.
Let’s go.
Ok, Nick, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
Our buyer did need to be an Indiana resident.
Fortunately, we met up with a local activist who was happy to help us out.
We’re going to a gun store in Hammond, IN.
It’s one of the top stores that sells guns in Indiana that end up at crime scenes in
Chicago.
And we have the help of Nick.
Nick, introduce yourself.
I am a current student at Indiana University.
I am very concerned about loopholes that we might have here in the state of Indiana and
the country as a whole.
My generation has been plagued by these high school shootings, and I really want to test
it out to see if me, personally, if I can go out and buy a gun today.
So, Nick is gonna buy a gun where he will be subjected to less of a background check
than he would have if he were in Chicago.
Well, yeah, that’s right.
In Chicago, in order to have a gun, you have to have a special identification card.
It basically functions kind of like a license.
But we should note that because Nick is 19, he can’t legally purchase a handgun.
The age for that is 21, so he is gonna purchase a long gun.
We actually spoke to a March For Our Lives leader who was gonna help us with this.
He was 21.
He could buy a handgun.
He was not old enough to rent a car, and so as a result, he actually wasn’t able to
do the experiment.
That’s right.
Unlike our gun laws, our car laws are actually— There’s a fair amount of regulation.
Cars here are a really apt analogy.
We as a society decided to increase the standard for driving, right?
We made cars safer.
We put these seatbelts in.
We increased the standard to get a driver’s license.
We made our roads safer, and as a result, we’ve really decreased deaths from auto
accidents.
And no one is saying, ‘Well, you know some people are gonna speed, therefore we should
have no speed limits.’
As we were driving to the gun store with a nineteen-year-old, news broke about another
nineteen-year-old with a gun.
So there appears to be a shooting in San Diego, CA.
Wait, there’s a shooting happening now?
Yeah, in a synagogue.
All we know is that a man has been detained following a shooting incident.
There are reports of injuries, but that’s all we know.
One person was killed and three wounded at the San Diego synagogue.
The nineteen-year-old alleged gunman was charged with a hate crime.
It was one of at least nine mass shootings in America that weekend.
So right now we are in Lake County, that’s the closest county in Indiana to Chicago,
and we’re heading down to the gun store that we’re gonna purchase our gun today.
Yeah, so according to the Chicago PD, this store is one of ten where a lot of crime guns
that are used in Chicago are purchased.
Ah, is this the place up ahead of us?
Yes, it is.
So I just started my timer on this.
Buying the gun ended up taking a little longer than we were expecting.
All right, so I went in there to use the bathroom ’cause we’d been waiting a while.
So, first of all, the reason we’re waiting a while is not because he’s doing an extended
background check.
There’s just a really long line.
Secondly, this place looks like it’s a sporting goods store.
They got the deer outside.
There were so many handguns in there!
There was just this wall of handguns, so many of them!
When you said that this was where guns from Chicago’s shootings come from, I thought,
‘How could that be?
Are they shooting deer in Chicago?’
Apparently it’s because they literally have all the guns.
They have all the guns in there.
It’s very much a gun store along with, I guess, other outdoor things.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, they did have some nice hats in there as well.
Oh.
How’d it go?
Oh, wow!
Look at this, Remington.
Ah!
We’re gonna do an unboxing.
I’m sorry you had to stand in line for so long.
Yeah, the actual process of background check and purchasing took less time than the process
of waiting in line.
The background check form, we did it all on an iPad, and it was basically, ‘Have you
been convicted of a felony?’
Yes, no.
No, no, no.
So that process was probably five minutes, and then him having to go in and look at everything
through the FBI— that database that you were talking about earlier?
I would say, five to ten minutes.
So the purchasing process from beginning to end, 25-30 minutes.
I actually thought it was kind of crazy how easy it was.
Can we get this into the front seat so that you can do the honors?
Let’s try.
It’s very long.
Oh, you might wanna— Go— Go the other way here.
Yep, there you go.
Go up.
All right.
There we go.
Careful, careful, careful.
Ok.
Oh!
Ok!
So this is the Model 783 Bolt-Action Rifle from Remington.
You said this is not the weapon that was used at Sandy Hook, but the weapon that was used
at Sandy Hook was a Remington.
That’s right, and that’s also why Remington is being sued by the families of Sandy Hook.
Wow.
Ok.
And there it is.
Do you feel like if you just loaded this up yourself right now that you would be safe
in your use of it?
Not at all, not at all, not one bit.
All right, we are going to head and go for the Illinois border.
To the border, where a different kind of crisis is happening.
In half a mile, turn left onto Indianapolis Blvd.
In a quarter mile, keep right to merge onto U.S. 41 N toward Chicago.
The biggest obstacle is the weather at this point.
If anything would stop us from bringing a gun into Chicago, it is the freezing rain
and hail.
Gun trafficking is best done on beautiful days.
All right, so, there it is.
Now, we are actually going to come just short of crossing the border.
We don’t actually want to bring this gun into Illinois, but there is nothing stopping
us from doing so.
There is no border wall.
There is no check.
And we could be in Illinois.
We’re technically in the Chicago metropolitan area.
From the moment Nick walked into the store to the time we reached the Illinois border
was just over two hours, and the drive from the store to the border itself was under four
minutes.
The NRA’s supporters say that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work, and there
is a kernel of truth in that.
and if neighboring areas have weaker laws,
So could it be that the NRA is making the strongest case possible for federal gun regulation?
Yeah, I mean that’s why you need a federal standard, a higher federal standard so that
we’re all safe.
Well, now we’re gonna take this particular gun out of circulation.
Yes.
Nick, you’ve offered to take this gun to your local police station, and it will be
destroyed.
Nick called the Indianapolis Police and made arrangements to drop off the gun.
Ok.
They were surprised that he wanted to hand over a brand-new rifle.
But they took it and gave him a receipt documenting that it would in fact be destroyed.
Now, you and I, through these videos— This is the second gun that we have taken off the
streets of America.
How many are left?
We have over 393 million guns in civilian hands.
We better get busy.
Let’s go.