The city of Chicago saw a lot of fireworks over the Independence Day weekend. Unfortunately, they weren’t the kind you want to see.
At least 19 people were murdered over the weekend and another 85 were wounded in shootings across the Chicagoland area. Those numbers are way up over the already high numbers seen in the previous weekend, which saw at least five killed and another 72 wounded.
As the Chicago Sun-Times noted, “both the number of fatal shootings and the number of shootings overall are highs for 2021.”
If that wasn’t enough, “at least 13 children and two Chicago police supervisors” were wounded in weekend shootings.
Typically I list the names and ages of the people shot and killed over the weekend. But, since there were so many over the Independence Day weekend, the Sun-Times didn’t provide links to all of the individual shootings, which they usually do.
As for the year-to-date totals for Chicago weekend shootings, 148 people have been murdered and another 851 have been wounded in Chicago in 2021. The Chicago Tribune, which keeps a tracker of all shooting victims in Chicago, hasn’t updated their numbers since reporting that — as of June 14 — 1,587 people have been shot this year. That number is 195 more than at the same point in 2020, which saw the second most shooting victims in the last 10 years of tracking data.
Meanwhile, Mayor Lori Lightfoot seems to be more concerned with brining race and sex into why she receives the amount of criticism she does.
One can only hope that someone besides the handcuffed officer of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) steps up and addresses what can only be described as a crisis following the shootings numbers from this past weekend.