Two hundred and eleven. That's how many murders Chicago has logged so far in 2026, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association's year-to-date report released August 5th. Miami, Orlando, and Tampa — three major cities spread across a state with a combined population of more than 22 million people and also containing more guns per capita than most of the country — have a combined total of 29.
Twenty-nine. For an entire state. Against one city.
The breakdown is almost comical. Miami: 8 murders. Orlando: 10. Tampa: 11. Chicago, a single Democrat-run city operating under some of the most aggressive gun control laws in the United States, has managed to outpace all three of them put together by a factor of seven. And it's not just the body count. Chicago also posted 2,168 robberies year-to-date. Florida's major cities combined? Three hundred and eighty-five.
Illinois requires a Firearm Owners Identification card just to possess a gun. You need a separate concealed carry permit on top of that. There's a 72-hour waiting period on purchases. The state bans so-called "assault weapons," "high capacity" magazines, bump stocks, and "Glock switches." They've built a regulatory fortress around the Second Amendment and the bodies keep stacking up anyway.
Florida, meanwhile, went the other direction entirely. Governor Ron DeSantis signed constitutional carry into law on April 3, 2023, making Florida the 26th state to let law-abiding citizens carry a firearm without a government permission slip. DeSantis put it plainly: "Florida has a 50 year low crime rate. When you enact law and order policies" — the results follow.
The gun-control lobby has spent decades insisting that more legal restrictions on firearms equal fewer murders. Chicago has been their laboratory. Every policy they've ever dreamed up has been implemented there — the ID cards, the waiting periods, the magazine bans, the works. The experiment is running. We have the results.
Some will point out that Chicago's guns come from neighboring states with looser laws. Which is an interesting theory to test against the fact that Florida is surrounded by Georgia, Alabama, and other gun-friendly states — and none of their major cities are producing Chicago-level carnage. The "guns flow in from outside" excuse requires you to believe that guns have GPS units programmed exclusively for the South Side.
This isn't a story about one bad year. It's a story about what happens when Democrats treats law-abiding gun owners as the problem while violent criminals operate in a revolving-door justice system. The guns aren't the variable. The policies around them are.