Despite the national grief over the killing of 19 children and 2 teachers at Uvalde Elementary School, Texas, there were multiple mass shootings in other areas over Memorial Day weekend, both in urban and rural areas. Gun fatalities were still high in single-death cases.
Gunfire broke out at a Taft festival on Sunday morning. It sent hundreds of revelers fleeing, and Boots Cafe customers running for cover. Eight people aged 9 to 56 were killed and one was injured.
Sixteen- to fifteen-year-old children were injured Saturday night in Chattanooga’s tourist district. Two groups of people got into an altercation and two of them pulled guns, starting shooting.
In Charleston, South Carolina, a shooting at a Memorial Day street party left 10 people injured and three police officers hurt.
A 19-year old man was killed in gunfire at a Benton Harbor club and liquor store, in southwestern Michigan. Six other people were also wounded. Multiple shell casings were found by police of different calibers.
These and other people met a common definition for a mass shooting in which at least four people are killed. These events are so common that news about them will fade quickly.
Between Friday night and Monday, Chicago saw at least two mass shootings. One was near an elementary school on West Side. The victims included a 16 year old girl.
Families and communities were also affected by single-fatality shootings.
Arkansas 7-year old girl was killed in a pedestrian area near Little Rock Zoo on Saturday. Police described the incident as an isolated one involving several acquaintances.
On Chicago’s South Side, a body of a young boy who was shot at an outdoor party laid on the sidewalk, covered in a white sheet. His mother was nearby, weeping.
Chicago saw 32 incidents of gunfire over the weekend, in which 47 people were killed and nine more were injured.
Texas Governor. Greg Abbott and other Republican opponents to tougher gun laws pointed quickly at Chicago as an example of why such measures don’t work. They said that “more people are killed every weekend (there) then there are in Texas schools.”
The high rates of gun violence in Chicago make a number of Democratic governments, including the current Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s, susceptible to criticism from within their own party.
Abbott and others make misleading statements and simplify the situation in Chicago, the nation’s third largest city. Many of the guns used in the murders of Chicagoans were originally purchased in states that have stricter gun laws like Indiana or Mississippi. Officials in Chicago also noted that Chicago has fewer murders per capita compared to other smaller cities in the United States.
