CHICAGO – After a year in which Chicago’s death toll surpassed 500, the bloodshed has continued in 2013 at a rate of more than one killing a day. It was the city’s deadliest January in more than a decade.

With this week’s death of a 15-year-old drum majorette who had returned from performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the mounting losses have put Obama’s hometown at the center of the intensifying national debate over guns.

Both gun-rights and gun-control advocates are seizing on the city’s woes – one side to push for greater access to guns for self-defense, the other to seek greater restrictions on gun sales.