I was reading my local Chicago newspaper and a pretty good editorial about the Highland Park shooting:
We hold this truth to be self-evident: More numerous and more powerful guns in America are an assault on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
...
Yet the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and too many members of Congress think it is gun violence that has unalienable rights, not the rest of us. They don’t care that people were imprisoned in their homes and in businesses — called “sheltering in place” — on a day that was supposed to be a celebration of independence. Parades, fireworks and festivities were canceled throughout the area. Beaches and parks were closed.
We have to ask ourselves: What truly is freedom? Access to an unlimited number of firearms with too few rules governing who can carry them? Or the freedom to go to a parade, to church, to school, to a theater, to a concert, to a grocery or just walk down the street without fear?
I lived in Skokie for awhile and have friends in that area. I know the locations that are being reported and walked and drove there. I’m horrified.
Then I was reading my local Chicago newspaper this evening and caught another headline saying:
9 killed by gunfire in …
thinking it was an update from the Highland Park incident. But no, it was “just” the Monday report we see weekly about violence (mostly gun related) in Chicago itself.
...Chicago over Fourth of July weekend, at least 52 others are wounded
It will not make major news.
It will not be noted except by vicious rightwingers that want to trivialize suffering of the diverse populations of Chicago.
It will be demeaned by rightwinger white supremacists because Chicago’s native son President Barack Obama, his wisdom, compassion, competence, and his extraordinary family all remind them of something they will never see in a Republican leader.
But they will try to make Chicago an object of ridicule.
They will try to mark the city as a symbol of violence. The numbers are horrific but per capita Chicago does not even break into the top twenty. The top five are in the Republican dominated South.
The white supremacists and christian nationalists will find everything and everyone to blame except the NRA, weaponry designed for wartime use, guns sold in red states streaming across Illinois borders, the bloodthirsty cruelty of Republican congressmen.
But among this “other” mass shooting were actually two events considered to be mass shootings, one in West Garfield Park and the other in Parkway Gardens.
This will not count because the holes that have been ripped through Black and Brown bodies, families and communities “don’t matter as much”.
They won’t count as much because we still have no resolution to the root evils and so except for the grieving families there is nothing more to see here. “Move along, move along…”
There also won’t be much coverage on liberal social media.
The country will never address the psychological toll this takes on human beings even though these events scream “dysfunctional country here!”, and we will not hear about the 10 year old boy that was shot one evening while in his bedroom at home, where he should be able to feel safe.
Please no comments, no more political points. We all know I hope where we are as a nation with violence in the US and as America inflicts it on people of other countries. Please just remember that the mass shootings that get the big response in media are actually a small part of the nation’s gun related deaths. Please read about victims, their families, and know that they are your sisters and brothers. Please remember there are innocent people every day suffering from American violence. If you haven’t already today, please take a moment to grieve.