No, thank God it’s not another terror attack — but perhaps that depends on your definition of terror.
No, this time the carnage comes from just another weekend in our nation’s third largest city, Chicago. From noon Friday until 6:00 am Monday, Chicago racked up another 12 shootings - with one being fatal.
Here’s a selection of the details, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times:
The fatal shooting happened Saturday morning in the University Village neighborhood. Officers responded about 9:50 a.m. and found the 30-year-old slumped over inside a running vehicle in the 1300 block of West Hastings. He suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at the scene at 10:07 a.m., police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. His identity has not been released.
About 1:40 a.m. Sunday, officers responded to a call of a person shot and found a 21-year-old man lying in an alley in the 5600 block of North Western on the North Side, police said. The man was shot in the head and taken in critical condition to Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston.
Late Friday night, a man was wounded in another Lawndale neighborhood shooting. The 23-year-old said he was on the sidewalk about 11:10 p.m. in the 3900 block of West Grenshaw when someone pulled up in a vehicle and offered him cash to buy drugs, police said. They started arguing about the authenticity of the money, and the person produced a gun and shot the man in the knee. He took himself to Mount Sinai Hospital where his condition was stabilized.
The weekend’s first shooting happened Friday evening when someone shot a man in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. The 23-year-old showed up at Mercy Hospital about 5:45 p.m. with multiple gunshot wounds, police said. Investigators think he was wounded when carrying out a robbery about 15 minutes earlier in the 4800 block of South Wolcott. He was transferred to Stroger Hospital in critical condition.
This weekend was bitterly cold in Chicago, so that may account for the relatively small number of shootings. But to date, this first month of 2017 in Chicago, 10 people have been shot and killed with another 62 shot and wounded. And this is only day nine.
Where’s the outrage? Sadly, we ask this question every time we cite Chicago statistics.
Bu until we tackle the root cause of this behavior, young (nearly all black) men will continue to be gunned down by their brethren in senseless acts. It ain’t the gun’s fault.
[Note: This article was written by Michele Hickford]
