Chicago's New Police Chief: "I think that we can protect the Second Amendment rights of people to bear firearms while preventing the illegal flow of firearms into our urban centers"

The Chicago Reader reports on a recent appearance by incoming Chicago Chief of Police Garry McCarthy before a group of aldermen, in McCarthy called Chicago gun-control advocates "abolitionists": 

Jody Weis wasn't the only ex-city official that new police chief Garry McCarthy attempted to distance himself from on Monday. He also signaled a distaste for the gun control policies of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

"My goal is to bring the gun debate back to the center," McCarthy told aldermen. "I think that we have abolitionists on one side and I think that we have NRA and those kind of folks on the other side, and frankly it's too polarizing a debate, and 95 percent of the country is somewhere in between."

That is not something that would have been uttered by a Chicago public official a month ago. Daley was a relentless advocate of tough gun control laws—one of the "abolitionists" McCarthy referred to—and he tolerated no open dissent in city government.

Nearly every year he was mayor, Daley responded to the annual warm-weather surge in violence by calling for tougher gun laws at the state level. When reporters questioned him about crime, he would go off on rants about guns, the NRA, access to guns, gun manufacturers, and Supreme Court justices who didn't see it his way. Daley and police officials, including Weis, boasted of how many guns they seized off the street—an average of nearly two dozen a day, at last count—but ducked and dodged (and sometimes did other strange things) when asked what that said about the effectiveness of local gun laws.

McCarthy also endorsed the hasty creation of a "gun offender registry," adding:

"I think that we can protect the Second Amendment rights of people to bear firearms while at the same time preventing the illegal flow of firearms into our urban centers and killing our children," he said. "That's a pretty wide gap, and there's someplace in between that we can come as a country."

This is a big shift, at least in tone, considering that Mayor Daley did not actually believe in the Second Amendment.

More Reason on the Chicago handgun ban.