The Windy City set a new record this July 4 weekend. It not only topped the number of shootings for a single weekend in 2021 but also the number of fatalities.
The tally: 104 shot. 19 dead. 13 kids injured.
“By 5 p.m. Monday, Chicago had recorded 2,000 shootings this year,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
That’s about 320 shootings per month.
War Zone
In Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, no one is safe.
“A 15-year-old boy was critically hurt in a drive-by shooting Monday evening at 5:50 p.m. when a dark-colored vehicle drove by and someone from inside pulled out a gun and fired shots,” the Sun-Times reported:
About a half-hour earlier, a 48-year-old was arguing with a person in a home about 5:20 p.m. in the 8600 block of South Aberdeen Street when he was shot and killed, police said.
That followed an incident when two people were killed and four wounded, including a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy in Washington Park on the South Side.
That happened around the same time that a 6-year-old girl and a woman were shot in West Pullman and about four hours after an 11-year-old boy and a man were shot in Brainerd on the South Side. And late Sunday afternoon, a 5-year-old girl was shot in a leg, also in West Pullman.
Let’s get that straight: a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, an 11-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 5-year-old. Eight other kids brought the total shot this weekend to 13, the newspaper reported.
“They didn’t ask to be hurt,” one distraught woman said. “I just pray and hope that the kids are OK that got hurt.”
Not even the cops are safe, the Sun-Times reported. Two officers, a commander and sergeant, were hit, too, after they dispersed a crowd at about 1:30 a.m.
As of today, the Sun-Times homicide database reports 781 victims, 722 of which are shootings.
The tally of shootings — 2,000 since January 1 — means that 11 people are shot every day.
Lightfoot: It’s Not My Fault!
Lightfoot thinks “gun violence” is a “public health issue” and that other states are to blame, Fox News reported, citing an interview with the city’s PBS affiliate.
“I believe that violence is a manifestation of systemic problems, and it’s a public health crisis,” she told the local PBS station last week. “When you see, in way too many neighborhoods, a lack of jobs, a lack of investment — these are historic, decades-long problems.”
Then again, Lightfoot can’t be held responsible for the city’s problems because, in her view, other states are to blame. They have “very lax gun laws,” she said:
We know that federally licensed gun dealers are selling to criminals and straw purchasers…. We know that because of our proximity to states like Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan that … you can go across the border into these states, and if you’ve got the cash, you can buy literally military-grade weapons of any quantity and bring them back to Chicago.
Chicago Alderman Anthony Napolitano told Fox that Lightfoot’s remarks are “pure nonsense.”
“We have the strongest and the strictest gun laws in the state, if not the country,” he said, and towns near the state’s border have “nowhere near the amount of crime we do.”
As The New American reported in May, one of Lghtfoot’s key concerns is the racial make-up of reporters who cover city hall.
In a major initiative that skeptics don’t think will stop the shootings, Lightfoot said media requests from reporters of color will take precedence over those from whites.
“I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall,” she tweeted:
It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American. …
This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city.
