Barely four days after 145 people were shot in Chicago from June 19-22, another weekend began with 20 shot in 24 hours.
The weekend ended with more than five dozen shot and 18 dead.
That latest weekend shooting tally will bring the total for 2020 to nearly 1,600 shot, if not more, and well past 300 dead.
The victims this weekend included a one-year-old boy and three other kids.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot is clueless.
The Latest Killings
Perhaps more remarkable than the weekend tally — 65 shootings — was, again, the gunfire that left 20 wounded or dead in the 24 hours beginning Friday at 5:42 p.m.
Victim No. 1 was a 42-year-old man on a sidewalk. He was killed when “someone emerged from an alleyway and opened fire,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
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The one-year-old died in a drive-by shooting with his mom at the wheel of the car. The little boy and his mother were on the way home from the laundromat a little after 2 p.m.:
A gunman pulled up alongside them in another vehicle and opened fire near 60th and Halsted streets, according to police. The child was struck once in the chest, while his mother, 22, was grazed on the head. She drove them to St. Bernard Hospital, where the child died. The mother was later taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center for treatment and her condition was stabilized.
A 10-year-old little girl was in her apartment home when a stray bullet crashed through the window and into her head. Hours laters she was dead.
“Neighbors said they heard gunfire but believed it was fireworks,” the Sun-Times reported. “Police said the shots may have come from a group of males who began firing at another group in the block.”
In other words, no place in Chicago is safe. Not one’s home, or his car. Walking in the city is a particularly dangerous endeavor, the Sun-Times reported.
A 36-year-old man “was walking about 7 a.m. [on Sunday] … when someone walked up to him and shot him in the back of the head.”
Ninety minutes later, a 38-year-old man “was walking in an alley about 8:30 a.m. … when someone got out of an SUV, walked up to him and fired shots, striking him multiple times, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.”
That night, the Sun-Times reported, a 24-year-old man “was walking about 8:40 p.m. … when someone in a black vehicle shot him in the head, back and shoulder.”
Early Saturday morning, a 30-year-old was sitting in a Chevy Tahoe when he was shot to death.
The 10-year-old girl wasn’t the only victim of a stray bullet, although the second stray-bullet shooting wasn’t fatal.
An eight-year-old girl “was sitting on a couch at 11:18 p.m. … when the stray bullet came through the window and grazed her on her head.”
2020 Totals
The Sun-Times tally of homicides for 2020 is 319 as of the 181st day, or nearly two per day. At that rate, the year might well end with about 642 homicides,169-percent more than the 238 in 2019.
The Chicago Tribune has logged 1,508 shootings as of June 22. Adding the 65 shot this weekend brings that total to 1,573. If that rate continues, the year-end total will reach 3,000.
Unintentionally amusing was Lightfoot’s remark after last week’s 104 shootings that left 14 dead.
Claiming that the city’s police must be more “proactive,” whatever that means, Lightfoot said she won’t lose control of the city’s crime problem if the police do their job.
They must work in a “proactive way to use the tools that are available to them — including community partners — that we are going to have a mess on our hands that eclipses some of the worst years of violence that we’ve seen in recent memory.”
Who those “community partners” are Lightfoot didn’t say, but as far the “mess” goes, she vowed not “to let that happen,” and she hopes police “understood the challenge that’s before them I’m confident that they will rise to the occasion, because they have to.”
Whether Lightfoot rises to the occasion remains to be seen.
She is, at least, offering sage advice to the city’s imperiled residents with the mask she wears. It bears the message “stay at home.”
Then again, as the latest shootings show, maybe staying at home isn’t such a smart idea.
Image: fergregory/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
