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david shribman

A Chicago police officer picks through debris at the crime scene where a number of people were shot, including a three-year-old child, in a city park on the south side of the city on Sept. 19, 2013.PAUL BEATY/The Associated Press

For more than 120 years, gangs – often unfettered, often downright brazen – have operated in Chicago. In earlier days, a booze-and-bullets period celebrated in noir novels and in Hollywood thrillers, gangsters and pimps operated openly, sometimes proudly, in the city's streets. Racketeers ran wild – and ran houses of prostitution and gambling dens. They were known by monikers like Bloody, The Devil, and Shotgun Man. Or they went by their real names: Al Capone and John Dillinger.

So it may seem incongruous that Chicago, where gunmen have sometimes been elevated into folk heroes, last week adopted one of the strictest, and almost surely the most imaginative, gun ordinance anywhere in the United States, a country where the worship of the weapon is not exactly unknown.

But the city of Bugs Moran (jailed three times before he was 20) and Tony Accardo (a Capone hit man whose credits include the assassination of at least two mob leaders) instituted new regulations requiring video recordings of gun sales and restricting gun purchases to one a month.

Not that this was the first time Chicago, where some restaurants boast of being the venues for mid-course shootouts, has waded into the gun wars. A city ordinance banning gun sales in the city was overturned by the courts earlier this year, so city lawmakers – concerned that the bloody legacy of Chicago was hurting the city's image and endangering its citizens – responded with new strictures approved Friday. Gun-shop owners themselves will have to pass background checks.

Rahm Emanuel, who became the city's mayor after serving in Congress and then as chief of staff to Barack Obama in the White House, supported the ordinance, describing it as "tough, smart and enforceable."

It's a start, and Chicago surely has to start somewhere, so pervasive is the gun culture, so murderous are some of its neighbourhoods. Chicago had 500 murders in 2012. By comparison, there were 543 murders in the whole of Canada that year. There will almost certainly be more murders today in Chicago than there were in all of Prince Edward Island in 2012, when there were none. (There were only three murders in the entire province in the five year period between 2008 and 2012.)

Then there are the variations between neighbourhoods that underline the depth of the Chicago gun crisis. The North Lawndale neighbourhood has a homicide rate three times as great as the rest of the city. West Garfield Park's incarceration rate is 40 times greater than the rate in the Clearing neighbourhood, according to figures assembled this summer by The Atlantic magazine.

Indeed, more than perhaps any American city, Chicago is an urban contradiction. It is the home of masterpieces such as Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat and American Gothic by Grant Wood – and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that left seven gang leaders dead in 1929. It is the home of one of the world's greatest art-music ensembles, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – and probably 200,000 speakeasies during Prohibition, which was only observed in the breach in Chicago.

It is also the home of some of the seediest politicians on earth – four of the last seven governors of Illinois have gone to jail – and some of the sturdiest reform figures in the United States. It spawned Saul Alinsky, the celebrated father of community organizing who inspired Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama – and Dion O'Banion, a master of gunplay and bootlegging who operated, it is irresistible to note, out of a flower shop.

But it was the reform impulse that prompted Chicago's new anti-gun initiative. It was a long time coming, and perhaps it was a miracle that it came at all.

"Because Chicagoans still remember Al Capone, John Dillinger with his Lady in Red, and the Valentine Day Massacre, Chicagoans know that guns mean blood and death," said Newton M. Minow, 88, a long-time Chicago attorney whom John F. Kennedy appointed as his chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "That is why our mayors, including the two Richard Daleys, Harold Washington, Jane Byrne and Rahm Emanuel, all led Chicago's fights for tougher gun control. Chicago laws making it hard to get a gun have been repeatedly overturned by the courts – and gang gun fights now occur here every day."

Chicago is almost surely the most purely American city, situated as it is in the middle of the country, drawing its psychic and cultural identity from its ancient identity as a rail crossroads and stockyards town. William Cronon, author of a landmark book on the history of Chicago, described the city as "Nature's Metropolis" and painted it as the centre of American plains culture. It is not a coincidence that Frank Lloyd Wright, identified with the "prairie style" of architecture, had a home and studio in Chicago.

So the city's central location and its place in the centre of the gun debate is particularly appropriate. The fate Chicago wanted to avoid is to be come the city of big shoulder-launched multi-purpose attack weapons, or simply a supermarket of handguns.

That broader American gun debate is centuries old, with the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution setting out the right to bear arms – a right that gun-rights advocates argue assures their prerogatives and one that gun-control supporters say was intended to apply to militias, not to individuals.

That debate will continue for decades, but in the meantime Chicago, with a murder rate three times higher than that of New York City, has taken a stand.

"Chicago is trying to reduce the flow of guns into the hands of criminals," says Roseanna Ander, executive director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. "The federal standards are so minimal that the city wants to be sure to stop the process of legal guns moving into the illegal market. There's a lot of demand for guns here, and it's important to make sure these weapons don't get into the hands of gang members."

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