As President Obama prepares to stump for gun-control legislation in Minneapolis today, David Axelrod offered him a helping hand on morning television.

In doing so, Axelrod attributed the murder rate in the city of Chicago, which is subject to some of the most stringent gun-control regulations in the nation, to the lack of such laws in surrounding areas. “We live in Chicago, and one of the reasons we have such a huge problem in this city is that all around us are areas with weak laws and with very lax background checks and a lot of illegal guns flow into this city,” Axelrod told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “Every law enforcement official will tell you that.”

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