By Dave Dahl

SPRINGFIELD – Illinois leaders maintain optimism that the state can continue pushing back against gun violence.

“We are all acutely aware of mass shootings, school shootings, they offend our sensibility,” said Illinois Senate President Don Harmon (D-Oak Park). “I remind people regularly that there is a mass shooting every weekend in the district that I represent; it’s just not on the same corner at the same time.

“And we should treat these with the same moral equivalency. These are the same lives being lost.”

Harmon spoke to a City Club of Chicago audience, where attorney general Kwame Raoul talked about trying to cut off the flow of guns at the source.

“Just a week after Highland Park, there was Washington Park,” said the attorney general. “It didn’t get much attention, but those guns, as opposed to what was used in Butler (Pa., where former President Donald Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet), are illegally sold and trafficked.

“Cracking down on the trafficking on the straw purchases can go a long way toward curtailing those.”

On the same panel, State Police director Brendan Kelly praised what he said was reliable funding which has come since JB Pritzker was elected governor.

Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].