Thirty people shot, six killed in Chicago between Friday evening and Sunday morning

The Chicago Tribune runs its weekly account of race-less weekend mayhem (here is last week’s). Some of the victims may be white, but the great majority of the shootings appear to be deliberate assassination-type attacks, i.e., reprisals for previous acts of violence, or acts of disrespect, or perhaps a wrong look out of someone’s eye. To paraphrase King Lear,

Chicago blacks must perforce prey on themselves,
Like monsters of the deep.

I also wonder, is it not at least a question to be asked, why, during the administration of America’s first black president, black violence, both against blacks and against whites, seems to have greatly increased?

Here beginneth the Tribune’s latest catalogue of Negro violence. Note how no names are provided. It’s as though the black-on-black shootings are so numerous, and so meaningless, that the Tribune feels there is no point in identifying the victims as individual human beings. As far as the Tribune is concerned, the ceaseless mutual killings of Chicago’s blacks have no more human significance than those of fish gobbling each other in the ocean.

An 18-year-old was killed and a 14-year-old was shot in separate shootings Saturday night, two of 13 people hurt in overnight gun violence across the city.

Those shot Saturday night and Sunday morning are among at least 30 people shot since 6:20 p.m. Friday evening, 6 of them fatally.

The 18-year-old was found about 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the 100 block of North Pine Avenue in the South Austin neighborhood on the West Side and was pronounced dead at 8:24 p.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital, officials said. He was found in a doorway with a gunshot wound to the head. Police recovered a revolver near his body. Two 18-year-olds were shot on the same block about 11:35 p.m. Friday.

The 14-year-old boy was shot about 9:30 p.m. in the 3900 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. He’s in stable condition at Comer Children’s Hospital. Police overnight were unable to provide more details about that shooting.

A man whose age wasn’t available was shot about 6 a.m. today in the 5200 block of South Wood Street in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side, Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Robert Perez said. He’s in stable condition at Mount Sinai Hospital. Additional details about that shooting weren’t immediately available.

A man was shot about 3:30 a.m. in the 3000 block of South Pulaski Road in the Little Village neighborhood on the West Side and was driven about a mile north to a gas station just east of Pulaski on Ogden Avenue. He was a passenger in a car when the people inside heard gunfire and realized their friend was shot in the head. Someone in the car called 911 from the gas station parking lot, where blood was visible next to the car. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and was in surgery as of about 5:30 a.m.

A man walking in the 3200 block of West Walnut Street was shot about 2:10 a.m. in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side, police said. The 29-year-old was shot in the groin and taken to Sacred Heart Hospital, a couple blocks north, before being transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital. He told police he heard shots and felt pain.

A 20-year-old man was shot about 1:30 a.m. in the 4600 block of South Winchester Avenue in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Police said the man was in stable condition but didn’t have any other details available.

Just before 1 a.m., a 22-year-old man was shot in the back and is in stable condition at Swedish Covenant Hospital, police said. He was shot near the intersection of Albany and Lawrence Avenues in the Albany Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side but additional details weren’t available.

A 33-year-old man suffered a graze wound in the hip about 12:30 a.m. in the 8900 block of South Vincennes Avenue in the Brainerd neighborhood on the South Side. He was walking when someone stepped out of a light-colored sedan and started shooting. The shooter fled southbound in the car, police said. The 33-year-old was treated at the scene.

About 11:30 p.m., a 20-year-old man shot in the chest was taken to Saint Bernard Hospital and Healthcare Center by a friend. He was shot in the 5600 block of South Princeton Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood, police said. He was sitting on a porch when someone approached on a bicycle, dismounted, and started shooting. The victim is in critical condition at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County.

Three people, all in their 20s, were shot in the 3800 block of South Princeton Avenue about two blocks south of U.S. Cellular Field in the Wentworth Gardens neighborhood on the South Side. A man in his 20s was shot eight times in his “lower extremities,” police said, and a 29-year-old woman suffered a through-and-through wound to her buttocks. A 26-year-old man “self transported” to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the stomach but police said he will likely be transferred to Stroger hospital, where the other two were taken.

Other details about that shooting, which happened about 10:30 p.m., weren’t immediately available. Police said witnesses at the scene weren’t cooperating with police, who initially had a hard time finding the crime scene and figuring out how many people were shot.

About 5 minutes after the Princeton Avenue shooting, a 37-year-old man was shot in the 11800 block of South Sangamon Street in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side and taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center with gunshot wounds to both legs. He was standing in the street when someone approached from a gangway and opened fire, police said.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

In the introduction to this entry, I wrote:

It’s as though the black-on-black shootings are so numerous, and so meaningless, that the Tribune feels there is no point in identifying the victims as individual human beings. As far as the Tribune is concerned, the ceaseless mutual killings of Chicago’s blacks have no more human significance than those of fish gobbling each other in the ocean.

Note how it is not I who am downplaying the human identity of the killers/killed, but the liberal Tribune.

Which reminds me of the comment by Patrick H. which started the huge debate a few weeks ago about whether human beings could lose the image of God:

One of the things white liberals and mainstream conservatives share is their view of blacks as subhuman, as possessing insufficient intelligence and conscience to be considered morally responsible beings.

Compare the Tribune’s account of the deaths in Chicago to the Iliad, in which, despite the hundreds or even thousands of battlefield deaths that Homer recounts, every man who is killed has a name, and often a history. Every man’s death matters, and is a tragedy.

Which further reminds me of one of the few seriously praiseworthy things the New York Times has done in recent decades: its mini-biographies of all the victims of the September 11th attacks. The Times managed, with just a paragraph or two on each person who had died, to bring out something individual and memorable about him. It was a magnificent thing.

Wayne Lutton writes:

Our classical FM station breaks for NPR “news” at midnight. They regularly mention that “Twelve people were killed in Kabul…. so many were killed in a suicide bombing in Beirut…. people were killed in a town outside of *** in such-and-such country which has been wracked by sectarian violence.” The nameless killings in Chicago are reported in the Tribune in much the same way. But I can’t recall when NPR reported the nightly/weekend killings in Chicago at all, with even the detachment with which they relate the growing casualties in the Middle East.

Patrick H. writes:

I agree completely with your comment, and share your rueful emotion.

One of the many ironies of the “image of God” discussion was that you and VFR were tarred as beyond the pale for considering the possibility that some people might have become, in some sense, less than human because of their savage behaviour and their remorseless exultation and sheer pleasure in the exercise of such. And yet here is an entire community being rendered as less than human, whatever their behaviour, whatever their status as victim or victimizer, because a recognition of the human cost of this violence would indirectly require a discussion of black pathologies. So the taboo against discussion of black pathologies has had the poisonous consequence of forbidding any discussion of those pathologies, including of their victims. Such is the inexorable logic of liberal taboo.

There is a Goya painting, The sleep of reason produces monsters.

The sleepwalkers of modern liberalism have become monsters of indifference to black people. To all black people. They have to be indifferent.

LA replies:

You wrote:

And yet here is an entire community being rendered as less than human, whatever their behaviour, whatever their status as victim or victimizer, because a recognition of the human cost of this violence would indirectly require a discussion of black pathologies. So the taboo against discussion of black pathologies has had the poisonous consequence of forbidding any discussion of those pathologies, including of their victims. Such is the inexorable logic of liberal taboo.

That’s very insightful. And let me also underscore the importance of your first sentence in the “image of God” thread which I quoted above. YOU were not denying the humanity of blacks. You said that it was liberals and mainstream conservatives who deny blacks’ moral agency and thus their humanity, by refusing to recognize the realities of black violence and other evil and destructive black behaviors.

And here’s a pertinent point I hadn’t previously thought of making in the “image of God” discussion, but you’ve reminded me of it. How many times have I spoken of the three-character liberal “script,” for example here:

The liberal order articulates the world through a “script” in which there are three characters: the white liberal, who embodies the non-discriminatory virtue of the liberal regime; the white non-liberal, who discriminates against nonwhites and who must be crushed by the white liberal; and the nonwhite/non-Westerner, who either is discriminated against by the white non-liberal or is non-discriminatorily included by the white liberal. In the script, furthermore, only the white liberal and the white non-liberal are moral actors, with the first representing good and the second representing evil. The nonwhite/non-Westerner is not a moral actor, but is simply the passive recipient of the white liberal’s goodness or of the white non-liberal’s bigotry.

I have never denied nonwhites’ moral agency. To the contrary, I have repeatedly pointed out that it is liberals (and mainstream conservatives) who deny nonwhites’ moral agency, by ignoring the evil acts they commit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 20, 2012 10:59 AM | Send