“Where we need help is holding these repeat gun offenders accountable for their actions”, Johnson said. The website HeyJackass.com tabulates these and other figures related to crime in Chicago, and it reports that on average someone is shot every two hours and murdered every twelve.
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“I’m not suggesting that the media shouldn’t pay attention to those issues, but what gets much less attention are the kind of day-to-day outbursts of gun violence that we see primarily in America’s inner cities, including in a place like Chicago”, Earnest said. Police said they made 18 percent more murder arrests this past month compared to August 2015.
Chicago recorded its deadliest month in two decades in August, part of a sharp rise in gun violence in the nation’s third-largest city this year. He said this year to date, 85 percent of the non-fatal and fatal shooting victims are on the department’s “strategic subject list”.
Aldridge was killed pushing a stroller on Chicago’s South Side. Just this weekend, 67 people were shot and 11 of them died. What is happening in cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere must be addressed.
Ms. Aldridge was shot as she took her baby for a walk in her South Side neighborhood, an African-American-majority neighborhood that, together with the West Side, has borne the brunt of the violence, driven mainly by disputes between gangs. Criminals don’t care about the law when it pertains to guns or anything else, which is why they’re criminals.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), firearms are the cause of death for more than 33,000 people in the United States every year, a number that includes accidental discharge, murder, and suicides.
“We also recover more guns than NY and L.A. combined, but that just shows you the proliferation of guns out here in the streets of Chicago”, Johnson said.
The Harrison District on the West Side, for example, has had nearly 400 people shot this year after logging 350 all of last year.
(Boykin) “We call on our federal government, our state government, our local governments to prioritizes these communities for resources, these are resources that have been abandoned”.
It’s Hillary Clinton who supports evidence-based policies like comprehensive background checks, while Donald Trump spouts the NRA leadership’s vision of a country with guns everywhere, for anyone – no questions asked.
Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner said earlier this week that he has weighed deploying National Guard troops to violence plagued Chicago neighborhoods. “The news conference was held the scene of Elijah Sims” murder. Hundreds of people packed a park in suburban Oak Park to remember Sims, on what would have been his 17th birthday. “I guarantee you won’t get shot”.
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His mother, Sharita Galloway, spoke her grief and outrage. “We have a state of emergency. But today, we come together to say that we’re going to do something about it as community leaders”, Boykin said. They will ask Chicagoans to clean up trash in streets and alleys, have picnics on their blocks and talk to young people about the importance of school. He also lowered the American flag outside his church, and raised it again upside down, which is officially recognized as a distress signal.
