Another Grim Weekend of Gun Violence in Chicago

[Content Note: Guns, injury, death.]

Six people were killed and at least 23 people were wounded by gunfire in Chicago over the weekend. Each of these people had lives and loved ones and individual stories of their complex humanity. They are not just statistics. But as the pervasiveness of gun violence in Chicago invisibilizes individual victims as numbers get reported where names should be:

Six men [Maurice Gibson, 26; Donald Lewis, 25; Marcus Holden, 28; Eugene Clark, 25; William Brown, 34; and Carlos Barron, 19] were killed and at least 23 people — including a 6-year-old girl — were wounded in shootings across the city since Friday night.

Asked Sunday about Chicago's reputation in the wake of another violent weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he's primarily "concerned about the safety and security of our neighborhoods, and our residents."

Oh is he now? That's news to Chicago.

Naturally, his concern about the safety and security of Chicagoans does not mean a fundamentally new strategy for the city which disproportionately allocates resources to already-privileged areas while ever more deeply entrenching institutional neglect in areas compromised by poverty, discontinued public transport, defunded social services, no jobs, fewer grocery stores, and no tourist income. Naturally, his concern means sending more people to jail.

He again pushed for a three-year sentencing minimum for gun crimes — calling it the "weak link" in the city's crime-fighting strategy. And he said it's time to replace the "code of silence" with a "moral code."

Ha ha. A moral code. So says the mayor who is, in many of the same neighborhoods, "overseeing the closing of fifty-four schools and six community mental health clinics under the justification of a 'budgetary crisis' [after announcing] that the city will be handing over more than $100 million to DePaul University for a new basketball arena."

DePaul is a private Catholic university whose basketball team has a five-year record of 47-111.

The school closures are taking place entirely in communities of color while the city's elite feed with [wild] abandon at an increasingly sapped trough. As Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union chief who led a victorious strike last September fueled by rage at Mayor Rahm, said, "When the mayor claims he is facing unprecedented budget problems, he has a choice to make. He is choosing between putting our communities first or continuing the practice of handing out millions of public dollars to private operators, even in the toughest of times."

And this mayor has the temerity to lecture the men with guns on the need for a "moral code." Get your own shit in order, Mayor. Invest in those men's communities, instead of conveying to them at every turn that their lives have no value, and then wondering why they don't value life.

And don't even get me started on the victim-blaming shit of castigating victims and witnesses about a "code of silence" when your police force is doing half the killing.

This is the future of your Democratic Party. Mayor Rahm Emanuel. A corporate crony who doesn't give a fuck about anything but money and power, but gets elected saying he's on the opposite side of social issues that Republicans say they are, with precisely as little actual investment in those positions as his opponents. Woo.