What would a holiday weekend in Chicago be without a body count?
The Memorial Day weekend in the Windy City – depending upon the media report – shows at least seven killed and more than 20 wounded, and that happened even with an “extra” 1,000 cops deployed, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that 26 people were wounded over the weekend.
But then comes a report from WLS News, which puts the number of dead at eight, and 30 more wounded.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Can the statistics be so grim and the bodies so numerous that the media can’t get an accurate accounting?
One thing appears certain. It was a less violent weekend than the same holiday in 2017, when 52 were wounded and six were killed, according to the Sun-Times.
But according to Fox News, seven were killed over last year’s Memorial Day weekend and 45 more were wounded.
It has become almost like a grim tradition on Lake Michigan’s southwest shore. The unofficial kickoff of the “summer” season (Summer doesn’t actually begin for another four weeks) sends several people to the morgue and more to the emergency room for treatment of gunshot wounds.
The Tribune noted in its coverage of the violent weekend that is typically one of the busiest of the year for the Chicago Police Department.
The question of the day is this: How many of the killers in these deadly episodes were:
- Legally licensed to carry?
- Members of the National Rifle Association, Illinois State Rifle Association, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms or some other Second Amendment organization?
- Law-abiding citizens with no criminal records?
Don’t everybody answer at once. Perhaps the easier question would be, how many of these shooters were recidivist criminals with prior convictions that preclude them from legal firearm possession?
Recently, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb posed a question that nobody has yet to answer. When was the last time that the nation’s gun prohibition lobby – perhaps best exemplified by Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety – blamed the perpetrators of violent crime and demanded certainty of punishment?
When was the last time Everytown or any other anti-rights organization praised the actions of any law-abiding armed citizen, such as the two men who brought down a would-be killer in Oklahoma City last week? The only fatality in that incident was the gunman.
People committing monstrous acts of violence are not the ones who typically pay the penalty. Perhaps if more incidents in Chicago ended like the one in Oklahoma City, Memorial Day weekends in northern Illinois would be a lot more peaceful.
