New Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke is off to a great start in her effort to target deadly enhanced guns that bring criminal mayhem into our communities. But to get the job done, she needs support she’s not yet getting from Cook County judges.
Shortly after taking office, Burke announced a new policy of seeking pretrial detention, and jail time upon conviction, for any felony offender found in possession of a gun with a conversion switch that turns it into a machine gun firing rounds automatically or with a high-capacity magazine that fires more than 15 uninterrupted rounds. She has made eliminating these illegally enhanced weapons a major priority of her new administration.
These enhanced guns are now illegal in Illinois under laws passed over the last three years through the efforts of the Illinois Gun Violence Prevention Political Action Committee and other organizations across the state working to combat the unacceptable levels of gun violence in our communities.
The enhanced lethal capacity of these guns serves no lawful purpose. No one needs a gun with the rapid firing capacity of a machine gun or a magazine holding 20 or more rounds for purposes of self-defense. They are weapons of criminal violence designed and used for that purpose.
Anyone carrying one of these illegally enhanced guns has demonstrated that they are a danger to the people in our communities. Under Illinois law, these dangerous offenders should be held in pretrial detention after arrest, except possibly in unusual cases in which a judge finds there is some innocent explanation for carrying an enhanced weapon.
But the record of Burke’s first 100 days in office does not show all Cook County judges responding to those basic facts. In 202 cases in which Burke’s prosecutors have sought pretrial detention of defendants accused of carrying enhanced illegal weapons, Cook County judges have ordered detention in only 115 cases. That means 87 defendants accused of carrying illegal guns that have no purpose but criminal violence were allowed back on the streets.
Burke rightly says that is too low a percentage of detentions.
Burke is not an ideologue of “toughness” pursuing an across-the-board policy of trying to lock up every gun offender. In fact, she is supporting legislation to expand alternatives to jail in cases involving first-time offenders found in illegal possession of ordinary guns. She is targeting for detention offenders who carry guns no one needs for self-defense that have been illegally enhanced to maximize violence.
Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling strongly supports Burke’s effort to target the carrying of enhanced weapons. He has repeatedly cited the threat to community safety from increased proliferation of these enhanced guns. The threat extends to police officers themselves as three of the last five killings of Chicago police officers were done with guns with automatic conversion switches. Snelling has made it a priority of the Chicago police to use their patrol and investigative efforts to identify these dangerous offenders and bring them to the state’s attorney for prosecution.
The successful effort to pass laws against these lethally enhanced weapons, and the efforts now of our police and prosecutors to find and prosecute those who carry them on our streets, become meaningless if judges release the offenders back into the communities.
When people are found carrying weapons illegally enhanced for criminal violence, judges should keep them off our streets.
Steve Patton, a former Chicago corporation counsel, and John Schmidt, a former United States associate attorney general, are members of the executive board for the Illinois Gun Violence Prevention Political Action Committee (G-PAC).
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