The Black Lives Matter movement and its leftist media auxiliary logged yet another successful weekend of protecting black lives with 143 people shot and 25 dead in New York and Chicago during the July 4 holiday.
Among the shooting victims across the country were six children.
Meanwhile, the worthies of the White House press corps badgered the president’s press secretary about the real enemy facing black crime victims: the Confederate battle flag.
Chicago
Chicago’s tally, 79 shot and 15 dead, included a seven-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy.
The little girl, Natalia Wallace, “was playing on a sidewalk about 7 p.m.,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported, when “three men got out of a white car and shot more than 20 rounds in the direction of the people holding the party, a group which included many children.”
One of the men shot her in the forehead.
The 14-year-old, the newspaper reported, was shot in the back that night at about 11:35 when “four males walked up and started shooting” into a “large gathering.”
As well, “three other male victims were pronounced dead, two at the scene and one at the University of Chicago Medical Center,” and two boys, 11 and 15, also landed in the hospital with gunshot wounds.
Frighteningly, the city’s black lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who wears a mask with the advice to “stay home,” claimed the cops are in control in a series of tweets that would be laughable if she weren’t so serious.
“We cannot grow numb to this,” she wrote. “We are making progress in slowing shootings, but we have to do better, every single one of us.”
Chicagoans are likely wondering what “progress” the city is making, given that 65 people were shot the previous weekend, but anyway, Lightfoot continued beclowning herself:
We must stop the violence before it starts by investing in our children, our neighborhoods and our schools.
We must continue to invest in our street outreach work, in police-community relationships, and in healing those who have been harmed by violence so that we can stop the cycle of retaliation.
As a city, we must wrap our arms around our youth so they understand there’s a future for them that isn’t wrapped up in gun violence.
Chicago’s homicide total for 2020 has reached 350, the vast majority of them shootings. Well more than 1,600 have been shot.
Ten Dead in New York
Dozens more were shot this weekend in New York, another city under the control of a radical leftist, in this case Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The weekend there ended with 64 shot and 10 dead, including a young father shot as he walked his six-year-old daughter across a street in the Bronx.
The 64 shootings lifted the city’s total past 400 for the first time since 2016, the New York Times reported. June’s 205 shootings, the most since 1996, brought the total to 528.
Like Lightfoot, de Blasio unbosomed the usual bromides, the Times reported:
“This is something that we have to double down on,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference on Monday, adding that the rise in shootings was fueled by several factors, but mainly the “dislocation that has happened over these last four months with the coronavirus.”
“The fact that the court system is not working, the economy is not working, people have been penned up for months and months, so many issues underlying this challenge,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, cops disagree, and blame the shootings on the leftist “reforms” of the criminal-justice system, the Times reported:
Those changes, which include efforts by the mayor’s office to reduce the population of the Rikers Island jail complex, have put more violent criminals back on the street and erased deterrents and consequences for carrying guns and shooting them, the police have argued.
“When you take basically half the population of Rikers Island and put it onto the street and then wonder what’s going on, it’s dumbfounding to me,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said during a radio interview on 1010 WINS on Monday, alluding to the number of inmates released from the city’s jails during the pandemic.
Six Kids Dead, Press Frets About Flags
Among the victims of the July 4 crime wave were six kids, six to 14 years old.
Victims beside seven-year-old Natalia Wallace in Chicago included eight-year-old Secoriea Turner, who was in a car with her mom in Atlanta when she was shot.
In Hoover, Alabama, eight-year-old Royta De’Marco Giles was shot when a “group of men,” as CNN described them, began a gun fight at a mall.
Eleven-year-old Davon McNeal was killed in a hail of gunfire on the way to his grandmother’s house in Washington, D.C., to pick up a phone charger.
In San Francisco, a six-year-old boy was shot.
The press focused on a more important matter though, as White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany observed as she ended a press conference yesterday:
You know, I was asked probably 12 questions about the Confederate flag…. I’m a little dismayed that I didn’t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend. I didn’t receive one question about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week. And over the last seven days, shootings skyrocketed by 142 percent. Not one question. I didn’t receive one question about five children who were killed.
And I’ll leave you with this remark by a dad — it broke my heart — a dad of an eight-year-old lost in Atlanta this weekend: “They say black lives matter…. You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody,” was his quote.
Image: mbbirdy/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
