Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
As leftists everywhere caterwauled about President Trump’s July 4 extravaganza because it included military hardware, the residents of Chicago were stabbing, shooting, and killing each other again.
As with most holiday weekends in the City of Big Shoulders, some Chicagoans celebrated the Fourth with a little more than sparklers and bottle rockets. Or even M80s and cherry bombs.
Cops put the number of people shot through the holiday at 68. Five are dead. Bad as that is, compared to other July 4 holidays, it was relatively safe.
1,500 Cops Couldn’t Stop the Mayhem
No matter how many cops are on duty, the lead flies and the bodies pile up, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in its dispatch on the “gun violence”:
More than 1,500 police officers were scheduled to work extra hours to stem the violence that seems to repeat every July Fourth in Chicago, but shootings on Independence Day left two dead and 14 wounded.
On Friday, three were killed and 17 were wounded; Saturday saw 15 people shot, none fatally; 17 people were wounded on Sunday and there were no reported shootings Monday before 5 a.m.
At the Navy Pier fireworks display, a major city holiday celebration ended in chaos as three people were stabbed and more than a dozen others were trampled in a subsequent stampede.
Other victims of the “gun violence” included a 40-year-old shot in the gut and a 65-year-old shot in the face, arm, and back of the head.
And “before dawn Friday, two people were killed in separate incidents within minutes of each other,” the newspaper reported:
About 2:55 a.m., a 22-year-old woman was on the street in the 4200 block of South Wells Street in Fuller Park when a male approached her and shot her in the head, police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.
Less than 10 minutes earlier, a man was killed and a woman hurt in a double shooting in Austin on the West Side.
They were involved in a fight about 2:47 a.m. Friday outside in the 900 block of North Lavergne Avenue when a male pulled out a gun and opened fire, police said.
The target in that shooting died, too.
In other words, it was just another routine holiday weekend. For some inexplicable reason, patriotic holidays seem to send the city’s otherwise law-abiding gun owners into a frenzy of madness akin to what’s depicted in the Purge films.
Such was the explosion this July 4 that by 9:23 a.m. July 5 when the Chicago Tribune posted what it knew so far as the gunfire continued, the five were already dead. But just 30 had been wounded.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s top legal eagle, Laurence Tribe, tweeted that the site of tanks in President Trump’s patriotic salute to America was “chilling.”
So is a slab in Chicago’s morgue.
Past Years
Yet this year’s Fourth wasn’t near as bloody as 2017’s, when 102 people were shot and 15 killed in a weekend of mayhem that began Friday, June 30, and ran through, Tuesday July 4.
In 2014, July 4 was a Friday; 82 went down in gunfire that killed 14.
Just before the latest weekend of mayhem and murder began, the Chicago Tribune published the tally for 2019: 1,221. That’s more than six people a day.
The number of shootings through June 30 in past years are:
2018 — 1,370
2017 — 1,788
2016 — 1,982
2015 — 1,282
2014 — 1,133
2013 — 1,035
2012 — 1,195
The Tribune noted that 149 fewer people have been shot compared to 2018.
Prior to this holiday weekend, the most deadly was the first weekend in June, which ended with 52 wounded and eight dead, the Tribune reported. USA Today reported that 10 were dead in a story that appeared later that day.
Other Holidays
July 4 isn’t the only weekend that some Chicagoans celebated with gunplay.
The Sun-Times reported that 41 were shot and seven killed over Memorial Day weekend. The Tribune put the figure at 43.
Over the Labor Day weekend last year, 27 were shot and four were killed.
Last summer, a police spokeman said the department would hire 300 more homicide detectives by the end of 2018.
