Gun-controlled Chicago has recorded more than seven times as many murders this year as Miami, Orlando, and Tampa put together, a gap that keeps widening despite Illinois's long list of firearm restrictions.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association released its midyear violent crime report on August 5, and the numbers tell a story that gun-control advocates would rather not discuss. Chicago logged 211 murders through the first months of 2026. Miami had 8. Orlando had 10. Tampa had 11. Add the three Florida cities together and you get 29, barely one-seventh of Chicago's body count.
Robberies paint the same picture. Chicago recorded 2,168 year-to-date. The three Florida cities combined for 385. A resident of Chicago is living under a violent-crime burden that dwarfs anything happening in Florida's largest metro areas, and the policy differences between the two states could hardly be sharper.
Illinois requires a Firearm Owners Identification card just to keep a gun at home. Residents who want to carry for self-defense need a separate concealed carry permit. The state imposes a 72-hour waiting period on purchases, enforces a red flag law, bans weapons legislators label "assault weapons," bans magazines they call "high capacity," regulates what Democrats refer to as "ghost guns," and outlaws both bump stocks and "Glock switches." On top of all that, the state has gun storage mandates.
Chicago and Cook County pile on additional local restrictions beyond the state-level rules. The specific ordinances vary, but the intent is the same: layer regulation on top of regulation in the hope that criminals will comply.
They haven't.
Two hundred eleven families in Chicago are mourning a murdered loved one this year. The city's political leadership, which has pursued a progressive agenda on everything from policing to immigration, has yet to produce results that match the rhetoric.
Florida moved in the opposite direction. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed constitutional carry into law on April 3, 2023, making Florida the 26th state to allow residents to carry a firearm without a government-issued permit. Gun-control groups warned the law would turn the state into a shooting gallery.
The MCCA's own data suggests the opposite happened. DeSantis pointed to the report in a post on X:
"Florida has a 50 year low crime rate. When you enact law and order policies and support law enforcement, the bad guys pay the price."
DeSantis's "50-year low" claim was not independently verified within the MCCA report, but the midyear murder totals from Miami, Orlando, and Tampa speak for themselves. Three major cities in a state with 23 million people combined for fewer murders than a single weekend sometimes produces in parts of Chicago.
The contrast extends well beyond the raw numbers. Florida backed its police. Illinois spent years debating how to limit them. Florida stripped away permit requirements for law-abiding gun owners. Illinois added more paperwork, more waiting periods, and more bans. The results are sitting in a federal law-enforcement association's own spreadsheet.
Murder draws the headlines, but the robbery figures may be even more revealing about daily life on the ground. Chicago's 2,168 robberies dwarf the 385 recorded across Miami, Orlando, and Tampa combined. That is a ratio of roughly 5.6 to 1.
Robbery is a street-level crime that shapes how ordinary people experience their own neighborhoods, whether they feel safe walking to a store, riding public transit, or leaving a car parked overnight. When one city racks up more than five times the robberies of three cities put together, it says something about the environment that local policy has created.
President Trump has repeatedly challenged Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Chicago's violence, and the MCCA data only sharpens that argument. When a Democratic governor's flagship city leads the nation in violent crime while a Republican governor's major cities barely register on the same chart, the policy debate should be settled.
It never is, of course, because the gun-control movement measures success by the number of laws passed, not by the number of lives saved.
Fair-minded readers will note gaps in the comparison. The MCCA report does not detail whether all four cities use the same legal definition of murder when reporting to the association. Population differences matter too, Chicago is a larger city than any of the three Florida metros individually, and per-capita rates would add context the raw totals do not provide. The report also does not explain why Jacksonville and St. Petersburg, both sizable Florida cities, were apparently not included in the comparison.
None of those caveats erase the central finding. Even adjusting for population, a seven-to-one murder gap and a five-to-one robbery gap between a gun-controlled city and three cities in a constitutional carry state is not a rounding error. It is a policy indictment.
Democrats at every level continue to insist that more gun laws will make Americans safer. The broader political landscape keeps shifting beneath them, and data like the MCCA report is one reason why. Voters can read a chart.
Chicago has tried the progressive playbook on crime, restrict guns, restrain police, and hope for the best. Florida tried the opposite. The scoreboard is not close, and no amount of legislation will change the fact that criminals do not apply for permits.
