A 25-year-old Chicago woman is alive but the man who tried to rob her at gunpoint Tuesday isn’t, and the national gun rights organization that spearhead the legal actions that first nullified the Windy City’s handgun ban and then forced the Illinois Legislature to adopt a concealed carry law is ripping gun control groups for their deafening silence.
The dead man was identified as 19-year-old Laavion Goings. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, he was on probation at the time he was fatally shot by the unidentified woman during the attempted armed robbery at a bus stop. He died two months after having been released from the Cook County Jail, where he had been since pleading guilty Nov. 1 to possession of methamphetamine.
The newspaper said six counts of aggravated battery to a peace officer had been dropped by prosecutors. This stemmed from an incident in June 2018 when he was arrested for felony possession of a controlled substance, the report said. He was sentenced to community service and two years of probation on the drug charge.
Goings, at the time he was fatally shot in the neck, could not have been legally carrying a firearm. But his intended victim was, and she had a permit to prove it.
While the incident is still under investigation, at this point it does not appear the woman will be charged.
“Not surprisingly,” said Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, “the gun control crowd invariably loses its voice when a bad guy is shot while committing a crime. Groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action scream loudly when they push restrictive gun laws to disarm honest citizens, but when an intended victim is able to win in a deadly confrontation, they quickly stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing happened.”
SAF brought the first legal action against the City of Chicago’s handgun ban after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 handed down its Heller ruling that nullified a similar ban in the District of Columbia. The case, known as McDonald v. City of Chicago, not only derailed the Chicago ban, it also incorporated the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment. That case was decided by the Supreme Court in June 2010.
“Our legal actions have always been about putting law-abiding citizens on an equal footing against violent criminals,” Gottlieb stated. “We eliminated Chicago’s handgun ban with our 2010 Supreme Court victory in the McDonald case, and then forced Illinois lawmakers to allow citizens to legally carry with our Moore v. Madigan lawsuit.”
Goings was wounded in the neck by his intended victim. He rushed away from the crime scene, but was found a short distance away and was transported to a hospital. He died a short time later.
“A legally-armed 25-year-old woman is alive today because she could fight back,” Gottlieb observed.
Meanwhile, however, he said the anti-gun crowd that typically has lots to say has been silent, and that silence is “not only deafening, it is deadly.”
“SAF’s motto for more than a decade has been ‘Winning Firearms Freedom, One Lawsuit at a Time’,” Gottlieb said in a statement. “That freedom includes the ability to defend one’s self in a life-threatening situation, and there’s no other way to define an attempted armed robbery on a Chicago street. Anyone who thinks a young woman should not be able to defend herself with a legally-carried handgun needs to readjust their moral compass.”
