As the Black Lives Matter movement courageously defaced or tore down Confederate statues in big cities in the last few weeks, blacks have continued to die by the dozen in weekend shootings in Chicago.
Yet again this Father’s Day weekend, thugs and murderers ran wild. They left 14 dead and shot more than 100. Yet those numbers weren’t the worst of the year as weekend killings go. That was the weekend of May 30, when 25 people were killed.
This weekend’s tally brought total shootings in the Windy City to more than 1,500 through yesterday.
If shootings continue at that rate, the city will surpass more than 3,000 by year’s end.
Five Kids Killed
Five of this weekend’s 14 dead were kids, reported the Chicago Sun-Times, which detailed multiple non-fatal shootings and the murder of a toddler:
Two boys, 15 and 16, were walking in an alley at 12:18 a.m. in the 4700 block of West Superior Street when someone fired at them, possibly from a gray sedan, according to Chicago police….
Saturday night, a 13-year-old girl was killed and two other teens were wounded in Austin on the West Side.
The girl was inside a home … when the shots were fired, and she was struck in the neck, police said….
Two boys, 15 and 16, were sitting on a porch when one of them noticed a red laser pointing at him and heard gunfire, police said. The younger boy was struck in the back and the older boy was struck in the leg….
Two hours earlier, a 3-year-old boy was fatally wounded when someone opened fire at his father….
The toddler, identified as Mekhi James, was struck in the back about 6:25 p.m. when someone in a blue Honda pulled behind the black SUV the boy’s 27-year-old father was driving in the 600 block of North Central Avenue and fired several rounds, authorities said.
Chicago’s police chief offered the usual platitude, the Sun-Times reported: “Bullets don’t just tear apart the things they strike,” Brown said. “Bullets also tear apart families. Bullets destroy neighborhoods and they ruin any sense of safety in a community.”
The city’s black lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, offered this observation about the armed criminals who run Chicago’s streets, the Chicago Tribune reported: “Public safety in Chicago, like in most big cities, is a big ecosystem. There’s lots of different inputs and partners. And the challenge that we have faced is, while the Chicago Police Department has been out there, many other parts of that system have not been up to full complement.”
Hilariously, the newspaper reported, “Lightfoot said she would convene a meeting with representatives of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Cook County criminal court system this week ‘to talk about things each of us can do to step up to stem the violence that we saw this weekend.’”
The two newspapers offered a different count of weekend shootings. The Sun-Times’s figure is 104; the Tribune’s is “at least 106.”
To be fair, a precise reckoning might be impossible.
The Tribune reported 1,508 shootings in 2020 as of yesterday. That is more than 8.67 shootings for every one of the year’s 174 days, although most of them occur on weekends.
This year’s total already exceeds 2019’s 1,158 shootings by 350, and 2018’s 1,274 by 234.
If this year’s pace continues, shootings for the year on December 31 will total 3,100 or more.
The highest figure since 2012 was 1,846 in 2016.
Big Weekend
Despite the lead-slinging and 14 fatalities this weekend, it wasn’t the city’s most deadly.
That was the weekend of May 30, when riots erupted over the shooting of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
That weekend’s total, 85 shot and 24 dead, was a record for 2020; 18 of them were killed on May 31, the deadliest 24 hours in the city’s history.
Max Kapustin, research chief at the University of Chicago’s crime lab, told the Sun-Times that the number of shootings are unfathomable.
“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” he said. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”
Good thing is, Black Lives Matter and the major corporations that back it are focusing on the country’s real problems: “systemic racism” and the menacing statues of long-dead explorers, prime ministers, Confederates, and Catholic missionaries.
Image: King of Hearts/Wikimedia Commons
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
