While the mainstream media has justifiably reported voluminously about the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend, they have glaringly omitted the usual kind of news in Chicago, where another bloody weekend saw seven people murdered and roughly 60 people wounded by gun violence.
ABC News reported, “Shootings across the city of Chicago this past weekend have left seven people dead and another 44 people wounded.”
According to the Chicago Tribune, “About two hours after seven people were shot in Douglas Park in the Lawndale neighborhood, eight more people were wounded, one fatally, in a nearby shooting, according to police … Since Friday evening, at least 48 people had been shot, including a 5-year-old boy. Five were killed.”
Anthony Guglielmi, chief communications officer for the Chicago police, tweeted, “Below is the sound that Chicago needs to change its ways on how we handle gun offenders. Audio from the tragic shooting at 18th and Kildare yesterday shows that criminals have no deterrent to carrying illegal guns in our city and this is what residents and police are up against.”
In the beginning of June, Chicago experienced a weekend in which 52 people were shot and 10 people were killed, according to NBC News. As The Daily Wire pointed out, “Chicago is not the country’s most violent city — by far. In fact, it doesn’t even crack the top ten most dangerous cities in America, according to USA Today and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Chicago ranks well behind cities like St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Baltimore, Maryland; and Memphis, Tennessee. In fact, the city is currently listed as the 21st most violent, based on per capita homicides and the violent crime rate.”
In August 2018, as The Daily Wire reported, Chicago suffered two weekends in which at least 60 people were shot; the first weekend of the month, more than 70 people were shot and a dozen killed. Later in the month, in less than three days, 60 people were shot in the city and eight people were killed.
In May 2018, The Daily Wire noted, “Eight people were killed and more than two dozen were wounded over Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, as cops struggled to maintain peace and order in some of the city’s tourist destinations. According to Fox News, the victims were mostly young adults, including one young mother who was shot on her front porch steps during her two-year-old’s birthday party.”
In December 2017, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the FBI’s annual 2016 publication, Crime in the United States, one-third of the increase in murders nationally came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago. The Daily Wire reported, “In Chicago last year, homicides jumped to 771, 58% higher than in 2015, and more than the number of murders in Los Angeles and New York combined. Half of that increase, the analysis showed, came from just five neighborhoods, and is largely attributable to gang warfare. In a ‘roughly four-mile radius of West Garfield Park,’ for example, there are at least 30 gangs.”