Chicago is a war zone.
After a Father’s Day weekend tally of 104 shot and 14 dead, another 41 people were shot and six more killed on Monday.
The real authorities in Chicago are the rampaging criminals, not the city’s leftist, lesbian mayor.
Yet as people died by the dozen in the City of Big Shoulders during the past few days, the mainstream media focused on the 15 federal agents who swept into Talladega, Alabama, to investigate the latest noose hoax.
The Latest
A domestic shooting left two women dead and a third wounded, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
“No arrests have been announced,” of course.
Other victims include a 24-year-old man shot in the chest, and a 41-year-old man who was “on the street at 4:26 a.m. … when someone shot him in the face,” the newspaper reported.
A 30-year-old man “was walking at 4:18 a.m. … when someone in the alley fired shots.” Hit in the neck, he died at the hospital.
A drive-by shooting in the wee hours sent a 16-year-old to the hospital with a bullet wound in the abdomen that left her in critical condition. Four others were also shot.
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And on and on until the tally reached a whopping 41 shot and six on a slab on the morgue.
Among the victims of the latest wave of shooting, NPR affiliate WBEZ reported, were five minors, including a three-year-old.
“Before this weekend,” the station reported, “Chicago’s 297 homicide victims this year included 22 children (7.4%) under age 18. That percentage has been falling since 1993, when 18.4% of the city’s homicide victims were minors.”
The three-year-old was struck in the back when someone fired at his father.
The Sun-Times reports 291 homicides thus far in 2020, or more than one every day. If that rate continues through December 31, the city will tally 609 on the year.
The Chicago Tribune, as The New American reported yesterday, has tallied 1,508 shootings thus far in 2020, a rate that will, if maintained, end the year with more than 3,000 hit by gunfire.
Lightfoot Clueless
The city’s mayor is baffled. After this weekend’s shootings, she observed that police work in Chicago is a “big ecosystem” with “lots of different inputs and partners.”
More boilerplate hooey included the observation that cops must work with “community partners” or face having a “mess on our hands that eclipses some of the worst years of violence that we’ve seen in recent memory,” as CBS2 reported her remarks.
Though the city already has a mess on its hands, “I’m not about to let that happen,” Lightfoot amusingly claimed. That was after 104 shootings and 14 homicides in one weekend.
Police chief David Brown, WBEZ reported, “rejected a notion popular with University of Chicago criminologists who work closely with the police department. He said the violence cannot be blamed on easy access to guns.”
Speaking at a press conference after the mega-violent weekend, Brown poo-pooed the idea that guns are the problem.
“I’m from Texas,” Brown said, where firearms are widespread. “Houston, San Antonio and Dallas have lower murder rates.”
“He said that shows it would be possible for Chicago to tamp down its infamous gun violence,” the station reported.
Misdirected Attention
As dozens were shot and killed in Chicago, including the three-year-old, the media directed its fire toward Talladega Superspeedway, where someone found a noose just before the Geico 500.
Bubba Wallace, the only black NASCAR driver, claimed someone hung it in his garage.
The FBI ordered 15 agents to waste their time and investigate what turned out to be a pull-down rope that had been hanging in the garage for months.
After the FBI uncovered the fakery, Wallace appeared on CNN talker Don Lemon’s program to claim that what he found was indeed a “noose” even if it was there for months and even if it wasn’t intended to intimidate him.
Wallace’s successful drive to rid NASCAR events of Confederate battle flags began on Lemon’s show a week after Chicago suffered its deadliest weekend: 85 shootings, 25 dead.
Now that Wallace, Black Lives Matter, and their sympathizers have vanquished the flag and the noose, perhaps they might address the problem of black toddlers dying in a hail of bullets in Chicago.
Image: Bim/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
