Bloomberg's Outlet Is Using Chicago Evictions to Kill Your Gun Rights

The Trace — funded by Bloomberg's network, staffed by gun-control advocates — published a glowing writeup of a University of Chicago study linking eviction rates to shootings. The academic wrapper is deliberate. The policy pipeline is already running.

Here's what the study actually found: researchers analyzed 13,900 survey responses and concluded a 1% rise in eviction rates in a census tract correlated with 2.66 additional shootings nearby. Personally experiencing eviction was the single largest individual predictor of shootings — bigger than race, income, or education.

Notice who's missing from that equation: the criminal. The person pulling the trigger gets rebranded as a "social determinant of health." **The gun owner gets buried. The felon gets a therapy session.**

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — who has opposed nearly every pro-police and pro-self-defense measure to cross his desk — is already using this research to push a new renter-protection ordinance. The Trace is running air cover. The machine is moving.

Their star quote comes from Arne Duncan — Obama's education secretary, not a criminologist: *"Gun violence is the last manifestation of every other social ill."* That framing is the whole game. If criminal violence is just a symptom of poverty and housing instability, then guns aren't the problem, criminals aren't the problem — *policy* is the problem. Which means only government expansion, not enforcement or self-defense, qualifies as an acceptable solution.

This is exactly how the anti-gun left colonizes spaces where it has no business: housing boards, public health departments, city budget offices. They don't need to ban your rifle today. They just need to make your rights contingent on solving homelessness, unemployment, and segregation first. **Once that framework is accepted, the Second Amendment becomes a line item — endlessly deferred, pending the next social program.**

Step one: publish a study connecting any social condition to shootings. Step two: recruit politicians like Johnson to push legislation framed as "violence prevention." Step three: government power expands, spending balloons — and your rights get quietly interred under public-health jargon while everyone applauds the compassion.

Chicago already has some of the strictest gun laws in the Midwest. Those laws have not stopped the criminal violence The Trace wrings its hands about. Law-abiding gun owners in Chicago — who clear every legal hurdle — are not driving those shooting statistics. Criminals are. The study doesn't fix that. The ordinance won't fix that. Bloomberg's outlet knows it.

**What gun owners must do right now:** Watch your city council. When you see "violence prevention," "community investment," or "housing stability" attached to any ordinance, read the fine print — Bloomberg's money is probably upstream of it. Push back before it hardens into policy. Once criminal violence gets classified as a public-health crisis, the Second Amendment gets treated like a pre-existing condition — something to be managed, rationed, and eventually denied.

The pipeline is running. The question is whether anyone in your city hall is paying attention — or whether The Trace already answered that question for them.