Firearms: Chicago's Uphill Battle

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There are few innocents in Chicago's violent public housing projects. Children who live in the 19 complexes scattered around the city regularly witness random shootings and brutal deaths. One of the first things they learn is to hit the deck when gunfire erupts. Playing in the courtyard of the Henry Horner Homes -- a 21-building project made infamous by Alex Kotlowitz's book There Are No Children Here -- Meeka Boyd, 11, described the shooting of a young man on a basketball court that she saw last year. Her friend Netisha Stroger, also 11, saw a girl shot in the leg on the playground. "When it's real hot out, it's real bad," says Netisha. "That's when people start shooting, and you can't go outside. It's scary."

The statistics are certainly frightening. Police say one innocent bystander is shot at every day in the projects, one is hit by gunfire every week, one is killed every month. Last year Chicago's public-housing complexes saw 72 murders, the vast majority involving firearms; in the first four months of this year, the toll was already 36.

To curb the violence, the Chicago Housing Authority has begun to enforce a 20-year-old rule forbidding tenants to keep guns on its premises. Since 1988, when Vincent Lane was named C.H.A. chairman, Operation Clean Sweep has sent teams of police and housing-authority guards to conduct surprise searches for weapons, drugs and illegal residents in project buildings. In 1989 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp praised Clean Sweep as a "model for the rest of the country." The operation has posted impressive results so far: the police confiscated 817 weapons last year and 214 in the first three months of 1991. But faced with a flourishing drug trade and an illegal-arms bazaar, the C.H.A. is fighting an uphill battle.

Now that struggle is being made even more difficult by the National Rifle Association. Last month the N.R.A.'s deputy general counsel, Robert Dowlut, charged that the C.H.A.'s gun ban infringes on residents' constitutional right to bear arms. The N.R.A. maintains that law-abiding residents need guns to protect themselves from criminals. Furthermore, it says, because most of Chicago's public-housing residents are black, a ban on guns would have a "disproportionate impact on persons of African heritage" -- a particularly offensive argument since virtually all the victims of project shootings are also black.

While the N.R.A. has yet to sue the housing authority, Richard Gardiner, director of the gun lobby's state government-relations division, says a future lawsuit is possible. Among other possibilities, he adds, is "using legislation to prohibit housing authorities from putting such ((antigun)) provisions in place."

The N.R.A.'s protest has infuriated Chicago's housing officials. C.H.A. chairman Lane calls the N.R.A.'s protest an "intrusion on public-housing residents. Clearly they are not the N.R.A.'s constituency. Eighty percent of the residents are single mothers, with children, on welfare. I can tell you they are not out hunting pheasant or taking target practice. The only use of weapons in the housing projects is for negative reasons." And Ira Harris, chief of the housing police, blisters the N.R.A. for attempting to focus the debate on the question of race. Says he: "They have never cared about black people before."

The illogic -- some would say hypocrisy -- of the N.R.A.'s position is underscored by the fact that there has been little visible support within the project for its initiative. On the contrary, members of the Mother's Guild, a tenants' advocacy group at the Henry Horner Homes, strongly favor the gun ban. Though guild member Hazel Holmes has been robbed several times, she says she does not want a gun for protection. "I was raised in Mississippi, and my father had hunting guns around the house," she explains. "But he always ((said)) that guns are not for killing humans."

Another irony in the N.R.A.'s stance is that while it claims to be upholding the constitutional rights of the C.H.A.'s 150,000 authorized tenants, most of the firepower seems to be in the hands of illegal occupants. Police estimate that 80% of the crime in the projects is caused by 50,000 to 70,000 unauthorized residents, often gang members who move in with their girlfriends or take over empty apartments.

The Chicago dispute is not the first time the N.R.A. has attacked such gun bans. A similar measure in Portland, Ore., was defeated in 1988 when both the state attorney general and the N.R.A. objected. When a federal judge upheld a Richmond ban on guns in public housing last December, N.R.A. lobbyists swung into action; in April the state legislature outlawed such restrictions.

The N.R.A.'s air of invincibility was badly shaken last month when the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Brady bill. The gun lobby had orchestrated a massive campaign against the bill, which will require a seven-day waiting period for all handgun purchases. Now cities from Los Angeles to New York are monitoring the debate over the Chicago gun ban. Says Marshall Kandell, a spokesman for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles: "If the enforcement of a gun ban in the Chicago housing projects is successful, you can bet that the Los Angeles Housing Authority and housing authorities across the country will take a close look." All the more reason to hope that Operation Clean Sweep will keep on sweeping.