CHICAGO (AP) — Even as the nation was reeling from the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, multiple mass shootings occurred elsewhere over Memorial Day weekend in areas both rural as urban. Single-kill incidents still accounted for the majority of firearm deaths.
Gunfire erupted in the pre-dawn hours Sunday at a festival in Taft City, Oklahoma, prompting hundreds of revelers to scatter and patrons inside the nearby Boots Café to seek cover. Eight people between the ages of 9 and 56 were shot and one of them died.
Six boys ages 13 to 15 were injured Saturday night in a tourist neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two groups had an altercation, and two people in one of them drew weapons and started shooting.
And at a club and liquor store in Benton Harbor in southwestern Michigan, a 19-year-old man was killed and six others were injured after gunshots were heard through a crowd around 2:30 a.m. Monday. The police found several shell casings of various calibers.
Those and others met a common definition of a mass shooting, in which four or more people are shot. These occurrences have become so regular that news about them is likely to fade quickly.
There were at least two incidents in Chicago between Friday night and Monday that qualified as mass shootings, including one near a closed West Side elementary school in which a 16-year-old girl was injured.
Single fatality shootings also shook families and communities.
In Arkansas, a 7-year-old girl was killed Saturday in a busy area near the Little Rock Zoo, in what police described as “an isolated event involving acquaintances.”
And on Chicago’s South Side, the body of a young man killed at an outdoor birthday party lay on the sidewalk early Sunday, covered by a white sheet. His mother was nearby, crying.
Overall, Chicago recorded 32 shooting incidents over the weekend in which 47 people were shot and nine were killed.
In the wake of the shooting of Uvalde, by an 18-year-old who legally purchased an AR-style rifle, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republican opponents of tougher gun laws were quick to point to Chicago as an example of how such measures don’t t work, saying, “more people are shot every weekend (there) than in Texas schools.”
High rates of gun violence in Chicago have made a number of Democratic administrations there, including that of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, vulnerable to criticism, sometimes from within her own party.
But the claims by Abbott and others are misleading and oversimplify the situation in the nation’s third-largest city. Many guns used in the murder of Chicagoans were initially purchased from other states with less strict gun laws, such as Indiana and Mississippi. Chicago officials also point out that the city has fewer murders per capita than many smaller US cities.
Police chiefs there and in other cities canceled days off to increase the number of officers during the holiday, hoping it would act as a deterrent. Independent conflict mediators are also taking to the streets, using social media to identify smoldering conflicts with the potential to explode into real-world violence.
In Detroit, Police Chief James White vowed to strictly enforce a curfew targeting youth and teens after three people were injured during a shooting earlier this month in Greektown, a popular downtown dining and entertainment district.
Such strategies may have worked in individual cases, but statistics from several cities did not indicate that violence remained at or below the levels of previous years. The death toll from Chicago’s Memorial Day weekend was three times higher than last year.
It has long been a general rule in northern cities that hot weather means more violence. Temperatures in Detroit and Chicago were in the unusually warm 80s over the three-day weekend, drawing more people and increasing the chance of clashes, often between rival gangs. Alcohol at Christmas parties can fuel personal disputes, some of which first fester online.
“The seasons may not have much of an impact on shootings in Los Angeles, where the weather is always good,” said Rodney Phillips, a violence prevention worker and former gang member in Chicago. But in his town, Memorial Day weekend usually marks “the start of killing season,” he said.
Residents like Detroit’s Yvonne Fields say they are especially cautious when Memorial Day rolls around. She, her children and her grandchildren spent some time closer to home this weekend.
“The holidays are not like they used to be,” Fields said. “The gangs have taken over. They do drive-by shootings. Everyone lives in fear.”
Police in big cities often say that most of the killings have some link to gangs, though others point to poverty and accompanying desperation as underlying causes.
An organizational shift in the last three decades, from top-down gangs led by identifiable leaders who could exert control to more fragmented and loosely structured groups, has also contributed to the violence.
“These gang factions are getting younger, bolder and more impulsive,” Phillips said. “It is alarming. It’s often children who shoot children these days.
Malik Shabazz, who helps lead crime and safety patrols in Detroit neighborhoods, said the New Detroit Black Panther Nation/New Marcus Garvey Movement he founded looks for spikes in crime during the holidays, when people gather in groups and have more free time away from home. to work.
“What I see is that both the perpetrators and the victims of (shootings and violent crimes) are getting younger, and the crime is getting more heinous,” said Shabazz, 59. “And people bring their guns and people have problems.” now I can shoot you and I can stab you as a matter of respect, not to talk about it or ignore it and walk away’”.
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Williams reported from Detroit, and Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed.
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