In what could be considered “good news” in the Chicago of Lori Lightfoot, the Windy City saw the least gun violence over the past weekend that it has seen since June 12-15 when 33 were shot, two fatally. Unfortunately, that still means that during the weekend of July 24-26, 59 people were victims of gunshots with three fatalities.
Those are numbers that might make even Al Capone, the city’s most notorious gangster, cringe in horror. This weekend’s violence comes after 70 were shot, 10 fatally the weekend before and 64 were shot with 13 killed the weekend prior to that.
The city followed up the most recent weekend of violence with a vicious start to the work week as 22 were shot, two of them fatally on Monday, July 27. Among those shot on Monday was a 10-month-old girl who was shot on the Bishop Ford Expressway. In the last five weeks, four children under 10 years old have been shot, and at least 14 children under 18 have been wounded in the city.
The five most recent killings bring Chicago’s homicide count for 2020 to 428. The city recorded 490 murders for all of 2019. Gun violence in Chicago is up by 47 percent over 2019.
After a vicious, drive-by mass shooting on July 22 where 15 people were injured outside a funeral for a man who was murdered — ironically, enough — in drive-by shooting, Lightfoot finally signaled that she would be amenable to some federal assistance in her city, albeit closely monitored federal assistance.
The mayor confirmed on July 21 that a surge in federal officers from the U.S. Marshals, FBI, DEA, and ATF would be coming to the city to assist local law enforcement with violent crimes. “All those agencies are here. They’ve been here for decades. They have ongoing cases that they’re investigating,” the mayor said.
The surge in federal policing in the city is a part of Operation Legend, a Trump initiative announced in early July and named after four-year-old LeGend Taliferro of Kansas City, who was shot and killed as he slept in the early morning hours of June 29. Under Operation Legend, cities will receive a surge in federal officers to assist selected localities with local violence. Operation Legend is currently in force in Kansas City, Missouri; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Chicago.
Lightfoot stressed that the federal surge would not include the type of law enforcement that’s been sent into Portland, Oregon, to protect the federal courthouse in that city. “I’m hopeful that they will not be foolish enough to bring that kind of nonsense to Chicago,” Lightfoot declared.
Lightfoot has accused President Trump of playing politics with the surge in violence around the country, and claimed that if he really wanted to help with the problem, he would work to infringe on the Second Amendment even more than it has been already. “If the president was really committed to helping us deal with our violence, he would do some easy things. What he would do is push for universal background checks, he would push for an assault weapons ban, he would push to make sure that people who are banned from getting on airplanes can’t get guns,” Lightfoot has said.
What Lightfoot fails to concede is that Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois already have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The measures already in place have not made citizens safer, only more vulnerable as law-abiding Chicago residents are not likely to jump through all the hoops the city and state have set up in order to obtain and carry a weapon for self-defense.
Pastor Corey Brooks of the New Beginnings Church in Chicago summed up the situation in Chicago in early July when he said, “People are afraid to leave the house…. Individuals are scared, very scared to walk the streets, scared to go to the store, scared to go to the playgrounds and it’s a very unfortunate thing.”
Unfortunate indeed. And made worse by an incompetent mayor who doesn’t even seem to understand the problem she is charged with dealing with.
Photo: tillsonburg / E+ / Getty images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects. He can be reached at [email protected].
