Fox News seizes on Highland Park shooting to push the tired lie that gun reform doesn’t work

After a mass shooting during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, Fox News personalities quickly tried to claim the tragedy proved that the state’s existing gun laws don’t work.

During a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, a 21-year-old alleged gunman opened fire from the rooftop of a nearby building, killing 7 people and injuring at least 30 more. After firing more than 70 rounds into the crowd with what police are describing as a rifle “similar to an AR-15,” the gunman fled in his mother’s car and was apprehended by law enforcement after an eight-hour manhunt.

In the day following the shooting, Fox News predictably tried to imply that because Illinois has several strong gun laws on the books — including universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders, waiting periods, and minimum age purchasing laws — this shooting proves that no laws work to prevent gun violence.

During the July 5 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, network contributor Leo Terrell insisted the Highland Park shooting demonstrates that extreme risk protection orders, commonly referred to as “red flag laws,” “will never, ever work. Why? Because family members who are aware of the problem are not going to turn in their children, their sons, their daughters.”

During an America’s Newsroom segment about the mass shooting in Highland Park, Fox co-anchor Bill Hemmer said, “There’s another point to be made here,” given the number of people shot throughout the city of Chicago over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Fox News contributor Ted Williams called it “unbelievable but not shocking,” and urged the city to do something, namely to loosen supposed restrictions on police officers and let them “do their jobs.” Williams went on to say there were maybe more people shot in Chicago over the holiday weekend than in Ukraine. Co-anchor Dana Perino added that Illinois has an “A-” grade from gun violence prevention group the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and noted there is a push to make many of those laws federal, but said the gunman was still able to commit a “horrific crime.”