Gun-controlled Chicago surpassed 600 homicides for each of the past two consecutive years.

The city first surpassed 600 homicides in 2016, when it witnessed nearly 800 dead and approximately 4,400 shooting victims.

American Military News reports that there were 609 homicides in Chicago “as of Monday,” November 20. That represents a slight improvement over this same time last year, when the city sat at 711 homicides, yet it is far deadlier than the 443 homicides the city had witnessed by this same time in 2015.

On November 7 Breitbart News reported:

Chicago has been a testing ground for gun control for decades. The city put a ban on handgun ownership in place in 1982 and the Tribune reported that the next 10 years witnessed a “41 percent” jump in murders, “compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.” And why shouldn’t such a ban lead to an increase in murder? After all, when bans are enacted, only the criminals remain armed. The ban was overturned in 2010 via the Supreme Court ruling in McDonald v Chicago, but city leaders have worked diligently to preserve the vestiges of the ban at every turn in the road. Municipal and county limits on the number of gun stores allowed in Chicago, together with rules on the locations of those stores and a ridiculous amount of regulation on acquiring and carrying guns for self-defense, have coalesced to guarantee that criminals maintain an advantage similar to what they enjoyed when the ban was in place.

What all this means in daily life is that guns are very difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire for self-defense. In order to get a gun a law-abiding citizen first has to acquire a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card. After that, a law-abiding citizen can search out one of the only handful of gun stores that are allowed to exist in Cook County. The FOID card holder can then purchase a gun but he must be able to afford the “violence tax” placed on each gun and each box of ammunition. Once the FOID card holder has a gun and ammunition, he can then begin the process for acquiring a concealed carry permit in order to keep the gun by his side for self-defense. (The FOID card does not allow carry, it only allows ownership.)

As the time-consuming process of permit acquisition is taking place, criminals are acquiring their guns without walking into gun stores or applying for FOID cards and concealed permits. Moreover, they certainly are not paying a “violence tax” for their guns and ammunition. All of these gun controls apply only to law-abiding citizens.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com