Sunday at 11:59 p.m. ended a banner weekend for gun-controlled Chicago.
As the nation mourned mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso Texas, the City of Big Shoulders posted numbers that broke its previous record for shootings.
More than four dozen people were shot; seven were killed. Seventeen were shot during just three of the crimes, 15 in two of them.
Nor was this weekend unusual. In Chicago, the gunfire never stops.
Chances are, on any given Monday morning, the Cook County Morgue will have a few more bodies on ice.
Record Weekend
The Chicago Tribune opened its story about the weekend of murder and mayhem with the story of a young man engaged to be married. He was at a block party when “shots rang out.” He was killed, and seven others wounded.
Just two hours earlier, blocks away near Douglas Park, three women and four men were wounded when someone fired from a passing black Camaro about 1:20 a.m. Sunday. Officers were still by a playground when they heard more gunfire — about a dozen or so pops — and found two women wounded on the other side of the park.
A total of 17 people were hit in the three shootings — about a third of those shot over the weekend. Most were hit in the arm or leg. The attacks occurred in the Ogden Police District, where the department later deployed 50 extra officers on Sunday. Ambulances flooded Mount Sinai and Stroger hospitals on the West Side.
And so by Monday, “55 people had been shot across the city, seven of them fatally. The victims ranged from 5 to 56 years old.”
The bloody tally, the Tribune reported, “is slightly higher than the first weekend in June, when 52 people were shot, eight of them fatally,” while the New York Times reported 32 “separate shooting incidents” for the weekend.
Total people shot this year? More than 1,500, with 300 homicides.
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Shootings Down as of July
During the July 4 weekend, which began on a Thursday, more than 60 people were shot, as The New American reported, despite the city dispatching 1,500 officers to work the weekend.
As of July 27, the Tribune reported, 1,517 people were shot, a total that was, happily, 129 less than in 2018.
The annual data through July for the last eight years are:
2012: 1,451
2013: 1,257
2014: 1,425
2015: 1,566
2016: 2,354
2017: 2,158
2018: 1,646
2019: 1,517
Holiday weekends seem to be a particularly busy time for the city’s shooting enthusiasts. For instance, during this year’s Memorial Day weekend, more than 40 people were shot.
That said, the ratio of homicides to those shot this year is low: about 18.75 percent.
Why Aren’t These Mass Shootings?
A separate report in the Tribune explained why the mass shootings in Chicago aren’t really mass shootings:
Different organizations use a variety of measures to determine whether an act of gun violence meets the criteria of a mass shooting. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit data collection group, employs a broad definition, characterizing every incident in which there are four people hurt or killed as a mass shooting, Executive Director Mark Bryant said. Yet other online databases that keep tabs on mass shootings use narrower criteria that differentiate injuries and deaths. The one maintained by the news organization Mother Jones defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which at least four people are killed in a public place.
How you define the term results in vastly different counts: The Gun Violence Archive has tallied 255 mass shootings in 2019 so far, while Mother Jones lists the number at seven.
Some databases also exclude gang-related or domestic shootings. Most counts also don’t include the shooters when they’re killed or injured.
All that might be true, even if describing Mother Jones as a “news organization” is a somewhat hopeful characterization of the leftist outfit.
But the real import of the latest report from Chicago is that mass shootings are quotidian routine there and in other gun-controlled cities, whose leftist elected officials are less concerned with controlling crime than in virtue-signalling about “gun violence,” and, in Chicago’s case, illegal aliens.
In July, the city’s black, lesbian mayor promised to thwart the Trump administration’s immigration raids.
Some wonder why she doesn’t put her efforts into thwarting the mass shootings that occur every weekend in the city she was elected to lead.
