Correction: An earlier version of this story included a comment from an official in El Paso County, Colo. That county  – not the city of El Paso, Texas — has defied President Obama’s acts on gun control.

Chicago, Ill., a city surrounded by the rural midwest, has tight gun laws. El Paso, Texas, has lax gun laws and neighbors one of the most violent cities in the world. Yet, El Paso is the safest big city in the U.S., whereas President Obama cites the murder rate in his hometown as a reason to implement his gun control agenda.

Gun violence isn’t much of an issue in El Paso, Texas, which is the safest city of its size in the country.  “[T]his week, for the third year in a row, El Paso was ranked as the safest U.S. city with a population greater that 500,000 by CQ Press, which compiled FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports,” per Fox.El Paso has minimal gun control — “mostly due to gun-friendly state law,” Reason observes.  It also neighbors one of the most dangerous cities in the world. “This dusty desert city sits directly across the Mexican border from what has been widely labeled as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Ciudad Juarez,” Fox noted. “The bloody drug war has claimed an estimated 10,000 lives in Juarez in the last five years.” Compare that to Chicago, which has very tight gun laws and city defenders who blame the violence their on the fact that the city is surrounded by rural areas that have less gun control. “We live in Chicago and one of the reasons we have such a huge problem is all around us are areas with weak laws and with very lax background checks and a lot of illegal guns flow into this city,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC last week, adding that the gang problem in the city also drives crime.