In Chicago, it’s Orlando every day
Last month, the nation grieved over the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history after 49 people were slaughtered at an Orlando nightclub.
Here, primarily in several predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides, there’s the equivalent of an Orlando massacre every month, only the killings are carried out one or two at a time by multiple killers.
In June alone, Chicago counted 72 homicides.
Police in this city of 2.7 million reported 315 homicides during the first six months of the year, more than the much larger New York and Los Angeles have tallied combined.
The homicide toll for Chicago is about 50% higher compared with the same period last year. More than 2,000 people in Chicago have been shot.
In Orlando’s case, it’s easy to drum up a national sense of outrage over the senseless killings.
Gun control proponents on the left clamored in the aftermath of Orlando about the availability of semiautomatic weapons that allowed the shooter to kill more than he may have been able to with a less efficient weapon.
Gun rights advocates questioned how a man who had twice been on the FBI’s radar on suspicion of terrorist activity wasn’t being more carefully watched.
In Chicago, where the death toll climbs on a near daily basis, it’s easy to slough off the slaughter as the symptom of a dysfunctional city, where more often than not, the victims of the violence are far less than perfect neighbors.
But there also are victims such as Pamela Johnson, 32, who was killed after she was accidentally struck by a motorist when she fled an armed gunman who threatened her and her boyfriend as they took a late-night stroll on the city’s lakefront over Memorial Day weekend.
A little more than a week before Johnson’s killing, Yvonne Nelson, 49, was fatally wounded as she walked out of a Starbucks, a block from the front entrance of police headquarters. Police said the target of the shooter was a young man they described as a documented gang member who was walking nearby. He was wounded several times.
Sometimes the senselessness of the violence — and the indifference to innocent bystanders by the shooters — is beyond comprehension.
Early Wednesday evening, I was driving to Englewood — one of the city’s most beleaguered neighborhoods — for an anti-violence rally when I stumbled on the scene of a shooting. Police said the victim, a 4-year-old boy, was struck in the back and seriously injured as his family members hung out on the front porch. The shooter fired several rounds from a car and sped off.
The little boy’s shooting distracted me, and I never made it to the rally, which was called in response to a shooting two days earlier that had wounded two cousins, 5 and 8, as they played with sparklers.
“We’re living in the wild, wild West right now,” Darryl Smith, an Englewood activist, told me as we stood near the crime scene while police collected bullet casings. “Something has to be done, and we keep saying something has to be done. But I see no results.”
For the sake of the kids in neighborhoods such as Englewood — and the the working stiff who just wants to grab a cup of coffee — I hope Chicago figures it out sooner rather than later.