21 Shot, 1 Dead -- in Separate Incidents in Chicago

Clearly, not enough criminals are Hawks fans as they were not sufficiently distracted.

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/05/2-wounded-in-separate-shootings.html

Not a single arrest so far.

 

Good God. Advocate Christ Medical Center must have looked like a real-life ER episode last night. A goddamn season finale.

 

If this was the plot of Grey's Anatomy, I'd say the shark has been jumped.

 

Mostly gang related it seems.

 

True. Most of the violence has been gang related and has occurred in poor neighborhoods on the city's south & west sides.

But it's getting out of hand. Those neighborhoods are extremely unsafe and deserve better.

There was also an off duty cop murdered in front of his father's house recently, a brutal attack in Bucktown (a nice neighborhood), and a slew of armed robberies last year in Lincoln Park (another upscale neighborhood).

And the city seems more interested in enforcing traffic & parking violations and defending its unconstitutional gun ban than doing anything about it.

 

Obviously, no one is enforcing the gun ban

 

What was the Bucktown incident? A family friend has lived there for a couple of decades. That neighborhood always seemed pretty docile. I don't know much about the South side, but the West side has been a mess for decades. My brother worked as a fireman there for most of his career, and we'd visit the firehouse for Christmas parties on occasion when I was younger. The area always scared me.

 

Well, that's the rub.

So many of these crimes are committed with guns, that many people are arguing for a relaxation of gun regulations so that people can use them for self defense.

An 80-year-old man recently shot & killed a home intruder.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2320350,home-invasion-suspect-shot-052610.article

Much of the coverage of the case has centered on whether or not he'd be charged with a crime.

In the case of the murdered off-duty cop, his father shot & killed one of the four muggers. He only avoided criminal prosecution because as a vet, he legally owned his gun.

It's the damn wild west in some of these neighborhoods and only the bad guys are armed (in most cases).

There's been a lot of talk about bringing in the National Guard to supplement the cops.

I'm not sure what they should do, but with summer starting, they need to do something -- and quickly.

 

Guy decides to find someone to mug. Decides to go find some drunk, easy marks in Bucktown.

Girl (friend?) drives. He gets out, hits to girls in the head from behind with baseball bats.

One is critical.

They got caught because they were dumb enough to use the credit cards & cell phone.

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/bucktown.beating.arrest.2.1658853.html

 

And YF buries the lede about why the thread was started.

 

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

There's a big gang/crime problem in Chicago. There's been a lot of incidents lately, but when 22 people get shot in 24 hours, I think that's pretty significant -- even newsworthy.

I don't own a gun, don't want one, and am not some pro-gun nut. But I do recognize that most of the crimes here are gun related, so the gun ban is obviously not working.

Read the story I posted about the 80-year-old who defended his home. He, his wife, and great-grandson might all be dead if he wasn't armed.

And, whatever your views are about gun control, it's widely (almost universally) thought that the law will soon be struck down by the Supreme Court (because of the similar D.C. case).

That's why I referred to it as unconstitutional.

And Daley and his crew are already studying ways they can suppress gun ownership once it's overruled rather than simply complying with the expected ruling.