Actually, this was an unusually homicidal weekend given that it lasted from Thursday (the Fourth of July holiday) through Sunday: four days of shooting opportunities. And the bad actors were out in force: as everyone reports, there were 109 people shot in that period, 19 of whom died. From ABC News:
One hundred and nine people were shot, 19 fatally, in gun violence across Chicago from midnight Wednesday to midnight Monday during the extended Fourth of July holiday weekend, police said.
CPD Supt. Larry Snelling and Mayor Brandon Johnson both called for accountability for those responsible for the shootings during a press conference on Monday.
“This is a choice. The choice to kill. The choice to kill women, the choice to kill children, the choice to kill the elderly. These are choices that the offenders made and they calculated,” Johnson said. “We are holding every single individual accountable for the pain and from the torment that they have caused in this city.”
Snelling said adjustments were made after the Fourth of July heading into the weekend, including canceling officers’ days off, but ultimately, he said, they need communities to come forward.
“We have to really stop and think about the mindset of someone who will shoot a child, a helpless child an unarmed mother and think that that’s OK. And go about their days,” he said. “Those people have to be taken off the street. They have to be put away if we’re not doing that. Then we’re failing other families.”
When pressed to address what adjustments need to be made to keep the community safe, Johnson’s response was simply that the city needs more support.
“I am urging all of you across the entire city to step up and say, ‘We’ve had enough,'” Johnson said. “And I’m hopeful that our ongoing discussions will ensure that our state partners, as well as our federal partners, will swiftly come into the support of the city of Chicago. The city cannot afford to wait any longer.”
Well, if you’re a determinist, it’s not really a choice: you could not have done otherwise but pull the trigger. But of course future shootings can be reduced by modifying incentives, behavior, and so on, so determinism doesn’t justify this level of shooting. Further, gun control is vital, but almost useless to fight for given America’s love of guns. (One bright spot: a week ago the Supreme Court decided to leave in place Illinois’s ban on assault-style weapons.)
Brandon Johnson talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, and weapons are one of the things he needs to deal with as Mayor (not to mention our many potholes that go unfilled). My prediction is that he will not be re-elected, as he’s perceived as a do-nothing mayor. Look at his response when asked what he will do to stop the killings!
One assault occurred only a few blocks from my office on Sunday morning. While driving to the grocery store at 7 a.m., I found my route blocked off by many police cars and “do not enter” tape. I took a roundabout way to the store, and the street was still blocked off when I came back. It turns out that right by the University, three people had been shot at 5:30 that morning. Thank Ceiling Cat that none were killed. And the shooting was only a block from our Emergency Room, so treatment must have been timely.
I suspect this was a gang-related shooting, but the aim was poor: two guys were shot in the leg and one in the nose. (How you can be shot in the nose and survive eludes me, but perhaps the guy was standing in profile.)
I’m so glad I don’t live in the US. I have some good friends here in Canada who have left California to live here full time – they say it’s just gotten too bad.
I agree. Glad I live in Canada.
Sad.
No, the perps couldn’t help themselves, but future potential perps can possibly have their synapses adjusted—by appropriate actions taken by the public and by authorities—such that they are less likely to kill. From what I am reading, the synapse-forming incentives to kill are still too-often stronger than the synapse-forming incentives for restraint.
What incentives would work? You cannot offer anything as exciting as the life of a gangster. The goal is to get the would-be killers into boring, low-skill and low-paying jobs, but how many want that?
“Not spending the rest of your life in prison” ought to be a pretty powerful incentive. Also, most people in most places at most times in history did not have many options for an exciting life and did end up in low-paying jobs they didn’t really want, yet they didn’t choose to commit drive-by shootings (or become highway robbers or whatever it was).
It’s weird to me that the Mayor specifically pointed out killing women, killing children, and killing the elderly as choices (and bad ones, presumably), but conspicuously didn’t mention the choice to kill non-elderly men. Is that meant to imply (as it seems to) that, well, killing MEN isn’t all THAT bad? Of course, non-elderly men are the ones most likely to be shooting and to be shot, but…why is it not just as outrageous if men get killed? (I mean, yes, you don’t need many men to sustain a population, given that one man can father children with numerous women, but I didn’t think that was taken into consideration in the moral stand against murder.)
I think the intended implication is, if a man kills another young man, it’s probably as a consequence of a rivalry where neither party is really innocent – whereas a killed child or woman or elderly is more likely an innocent victim or bystander caught in the crossfire. And there may be some truth to that.
The other implication – young men, especially the sort who get caught up in violence like this, are expendable – is also present (and acted upon by some of the people who commit the crimes).
Your recent post and accompanying photo of “AmericanRounds” was rather ominous albeit far removed from Chicago. As you rightly said, only in America! As an ex-American who left in part because of the gun idiocy there, it just seems to get worse. We have more guns per capita where we live but ZERO gun related violence. Guns here are used against birds and to fire off blanks at weddings. Gun control won’t work as the idiots will find a way to arm themselves. It’s a matter of a serious will for societal change. The Europeans can do it. Why can’t the Americans??
We have more guns per capita where we live but ZERO gun related violence.
Half of the “gun violence” victims are suicides. How do people kill themselves where you live?
As the parachutists say, BASE. Though outside parachutists, the “A” is uncommon.
The acronym stands for Buildings, Antennae, Spans [of bridges] and Earth, for the 4 main classes of non-aircraft mediated parachuting. Ultimately, the mechanism of death is acceleration – 1g downwards, followed by about 200g upwards. Given enough of a head start, it’s pretty effective. Anything much over 100m with a solid landing zone has a high probability of success.
If you’ve got the knowledge, chemistry can be effective. Or ineffective, if you have got incorrect knowledge. Or effective after several weeks of agonising organ failure, if the Fates are being cruel. The necessary materials are easy to get, and clearly if confusingly labelled (basically, ignore the “do not” parts of the labels).
Then there are cars, which are a different way of achieving damaging accelerations. Unfortunately these can easily result in injuries to others. I have yet to hear a joke of the form “Did you hear about the [person from traditionally stupid group, region or hair-colour] who tried to gas himself with his car? He woke up with a flat battery.”, but I expect they’re out in the wild.
Oh, I forgot the other part of Dot Parker’s guidelines. Nooses only give if you don’t actually know your knots. Which is, frankly, too many people.
They don’t. And we don’t have old folks homes either. They live with and die with their families. Often four or five generations within the village. We live in rural western Crete by the way.
I see. Generally, rural life on mediterranean islands is pretty close to paradise for humans, I have always thought. One doesn’t need much materially to have a full life (not counting beautiful views, sun and fresh fruit and vegetables as “material” here) .
It is my edgy belief that gun control should have happened before the Civil Rights Movement. There was a majority to ban handguns, and without race being such a hot potato it would have been easier to get rid of the guns. Now you could legislate gun control, but it cannot be enforced, as the best strategy for any mayor with a large black population seems to be benign neglect.
Sadly too true! Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes. As far as I know, there already is pretty strict gun control legally in Chicago. The easiest method to reduce those numbers quickly would be stop and frisk in the high crime neighborhoods until all illegal guns are confiscated. But somehow that is against equity.
https://www.aclu-il.org/en/cases/aclu-cpd-stop-and-frisk-agreement.
I really do not like this argument. It’s an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. The fact is that most of the idiots will not find a way to arm themselves. Here in the UK, firearms are strictly controlled. Hand guns are more or less completely banned. Do people still find a way to acquire them illegally? Yes, some of them do, but not nearly as many as if we had the free-for-all that pertains in the USA.
The same would apply in Crete and, in fact, as I understand it, there is some gun control in Crete. Furthermore, gun deaths are not zero there. I was able to find a paper that estimates firearm suicides at 1.3 per 100,000. The data is quite old, but I doubt if it’s now zero. I was also able to find individual stories about homicides by firearm*, although no statistics relating specifically to Crete. That said, Crete only has 600,000 people on it. You need to get into USA levels of gun crime before you get more than one or two murders with guns per year.
* the linked example was an accidental shooting, but the victim was just as dead as if it had been deliberate.
Thanks Jeremy! You have done a lot of research that I no doubt should have done! I don’t read the local papers too much … mostly politicians showing off, traffic accidents , or Greek Orthodox Church malarkey. I’m sure you are correct. Also having been out of the US for over 50 years I only see the bad news (such as Dr Coyne’s post). Whatever the reason for the difference between gun violence in the US and the UK, I never worry about getting shot while out shopping or parking my car here. No doubt your situation in the UK is similar.
So, I’m a loss for a solution to his craziness in America and very sad for the many innocent victims. I always remember the film “Bowling for Columbine” and could very well relate my childhood TV experiences to those depicted. Particularly Woody Woodpecker! Obviously there’s more to it than that. Cultural mindset? Power of the trigger finger? Don’t know but it’s insane. “Only in America” but WHY??? If they can invent iPhones and put men on the moon, why must they insist on school shootings and drive-by killings? The impetus for these things is generally absent in most (but not all) parts of the world and I guess more in America than in other “advanced” countries. I realize I’ve gone off the track here. Let’s just leave it that I’m both ashamed and sad for this side of America.
I do not dispute that Crete has modernised a lot in recent decades, but in living memory the vendetta was very much alive on that island. A place where family clans practiced blood revenge into the post-war period is no great example for a naturally peaceful population.
True, and thanks! But they did rid themselves of this nasty habit. How I do not know. Perhaps the US government should seek guidance from the Greek government? Surely the US gun culture can be defeated but it’s a mindset I guess. I have literally hated guns since I was a kid. Some of my friends were gifted pellet guns by their parents and would go out squirrel hunting. I was sickened then. Solutions I have no idea other than EVERY American simply says enough! Yeah, simplistic and stupid I know.
Americans are stubborn and that stubbornness applies to every aspect of their lives… An insistence that we are better, freer, that our very beginnings were superior… And we continue to pay the price for our arrogance, hubris, lack of humility (all redundancies), built on a foundation of absolute amnesia. What? We came from nowhere? We just popped up over here with some superior knowledge that enabled us to shun all past experience? This is the stuff that embarrasses me about being an American.
How true! Thanks for sharing!
What is Chicago’s rank among US cities for gun homicides per capita?
And about being shot in the nose: I was immediately reminded of Johnny ‘No Nose’ DiFronzo. But I think he had his nose sliced off.
Here is a ranking….Chicago is a very large city, so per capita homicides are not among the top cities.
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-murder-rates/
Yes, but Chicago is also a city with very disparate neighborhoods and unequally distributed crime. People who live in the South side probably have pretty similar conditions crime-wise as those in St Louis are Baltimore.
Most of these guns are presumably illegally possessed and therefore outside the Second Amendment. So why don’t the police just shake down the neighbourhoods and confiscate all the illegal guns and solve the problem? Semi-automatic military-style rifles aren’t the problem in urban gang warfare. It’s plain old unlicensed handguns, or guns held illegally by convicted felons. You don’t need new laws to ban all guns to fix that problem. You just need to seize the illegal ones and lock up the owners for twenty years or so as the gun-control advocates say they want to do with all guns. But you don’t do that. Why not?
I would demur that the “only wounded”* indicates poor aim. Maiming and disfiguring teaches an object lesson that mere sudden death may not. If you’re dead you don’t know it. (What nickname will the guy with his nose shot off get?) Think of it as the gift that keeps on giving. 109 woundings unless they’re just “flesh wounds” imposes a huge life burden on the friends and family, not to mention on the state and medical providers for uncompensated care, that even a gold-plated coffin does not.
————————
* This was the title of a 2015 book by Patrick Taylor about people not killed by IRA bombs.
The large number of wounded vs killed is a reflection on the quality of trauma centers in our cities these days.
The are never going to aggressively go after gangs because they represent a significant part of the voter base in those cities. If not the gang members themselves, then their family members and friends.
Not only that but many of the perps are felons for whom gun ownership is already illegal. The issue could be solved by enforcing existing laws, not adding new ones.
I enjoy target shooting with hand guns, and keep my guns safe in my house. If someone broke in to my home, I also have the ability to protect my family. Most gun owners in the US are like me. Why should we give up our guns because unlawful guns are used by unlawful people in an illegal manner?
Where do you think the unlawful guns come from? All the unlawful guns started life as lawful guns. Cut down the supply of lawful guns and you cut down the supply of unlawful guns. Make sure all lawful guns are registered and that the owners have to be able to account for their whereabouts and again you cut down the supply of unlawful guns.
I have no issue with your hobby of target shooting but your family protection argument is misguided. If you have a gun in the house, the person most likely to be killed with it is you or a family member either by suicide or accident. You think you are protecting your family by bringing a lethal weapon into their home? I think you are mistaken.
Homeowners don’t typically keep track of the body count of intruders they kill. That’s not their point. That is a mismeasure of proportionality. The vast majority of armed homeowners never shoot a single soul, so it is trivially true that more will be killed by their own guns in accidents and from having the gun taken from them by a criminal who senses irresoluteness in a standoff, or by a criminal who keeps his head on seeing the householder’s gun and fires first. One is greater than zero. The point instead is deterrence. No one can know how many armed robbers decided to give a house a pass, or burgled the house but avoided the bedrooms. Maybe that is close to zero, also.
The wisdom, or not, of keeping a gun in the home is based on whether the likelihood that it will ever be needed is high enough to justify the risk posed by the weapon, not on how many bad guys you expect to shoot in a decade.
A practical reason not to keep a gun in Canada is that if you shoot an armed intruder and he dies, the police will with certainty charge you with second-degree murder. The best that will happen is that you will lose your life savings winning an acquittal. And if the Crown appeals, you will lose them twice over.
Tycho?
“I would demur that the “only wounded” indicates poor aim.”
I suspect it’s “Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings” in action:
“Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings is that in incidents with four or more people killed or wounded by gunfire, if more are wounded than killed, the shooter (or often shooters) is probably black. But when more are killed than wounded, the shooter is likely nonblack.
One reason for this is that black mass shooters usually want to escape, so they don’t hang around to finish off the wounded, whereas nonblack mass shooters typically made up their mind ahead of time that they are never coming home. ”
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/a-corollary-to-sailers-law-of-mass
This is surely the most chilling thing I will read today.
But it’s not yet 09:30, so there is still time….
The demographics are rarely mentioned in news articles because the shooters are largely black males from the ages of about 17 to mid-30s from very specific parts of neighborhoods. The majority of black neighborhoods are safe.
This happens year after year.
In many cases the perpetrators are already known to the police, but there is such fear of being accused of racial profiling and differential policing. Dr. Roland Fryer was on Triggernometry and should be listened to.
Young black men shooting other young black men. This is how the majority of the deaths of people of color happen in the US. And it tends to be concentrated in a relatively small number of cities…and in fact is isolated to certain neighborhoods within those cities.
In other words, this is a much more precise problem than what the “anti-racist” narrative would have you believe…which claims that black people are in danger everywhere and mainly from white people, due to the diffuse and all-encompassing nature of “white-supremacism”.
The true nature of the problem of violence among black people leads to different solutions than the anti-racist narrative. Namely, it would suggest much greater investment in police presence in certain key neighborhoods, and would likely involve a hard examination of the causes of the violence, such as the illicit drug trade and the large numbers of children with little to no adult supervision at home. It may involve investment to provide after-school activities and job training as an alternative to running the streets. It may include ready access to contraception. In other words, concrete steps that involve something other than blaming cops and racism.
+1
+1
Absolutely. The data on this is very clear. And I remember it from my days as a defense atty seeing a lot – LOT – of that in the courts. (My clients weren’t murderers, I’m not that good of an attorney!).
D.A.
NYC
What the woke believe is that what Jeff Vader is describing is ‘Black Culture’…
Indiana is just down the road from Chicago, and has very lax gun laws. I can only guess how many Chicago murders are a consequence of this. We need FEDERAL anti-gun to reduce the number of innocents murdered.
+1
“Federal anti-gun LAWS,” oy sorry.
A resident of Illinois cannot legally purchase a handgun in Indiana. It is also a serious federal offense for an Indiana resident to buy a gun with the intention of reselling it in Chicago.
The murders in Chicago are a direct consequence of the large number of Chicago residents who are willing to kill other people over trivialities.
When 11 year old kids are committing armed robberies, the root cause is not the gun laws in nearby states.
So I guess murderous gun purchasers will conscientiously abide by local laws. Hmm…
If you go into a gun store in Indiana, pop your Illinois drivers license on the counter, and say “sell me a glock”, the store will not sell you one.
Assuming you are a “murderous gun purchaser” you are very likely already a prohibited person. In that case, it is a serious federal crime for anyone to give or sell you a gun.
I agree with your assertion that murderers are unlikely to be deterred by purchase laws. I disagree with your belief that the solution to that is another law.
If a gang member wants a gun, they are going to be able to get one. They are already connected to the people bringing tons of drugs into the country. It would be trivial for the cartels to just add a few Kalashnikovs to the next shipment.
The Chicago Sun times has the specifics listed for those killed and shot (bottom of article).
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/07/05/chicago-fourth-july-violence-12-dead-55-shot
The piece ends with the following:
“Besides the gunshot victims noted above, 60 other people were wounded by gunfire between11 p.m. Wednesday and 5 a.m. Monday, the span of time the Sun-Times is using to define the start of this year’s four-day holiday weekend.”
It’s the Wild West in the late evening / early morning. Young men shooting wildly into crowds over some beef of disrespect.
https://twitter.com/cnn_co_jp/status/1810528846417903714 💐
The “Chicago incident” was also reported in Japan. I became worried about the safety of Professor Jerry Coyne. I pray for the repose of the soul of the deceased. 🇺🇸💐