Yummy Sandifer not well served by Trib editorial

The Trib's Aug. 23 editorial 'Yummy Sandifer and Chicago: The grisly cost of losing one child' was touching, relevant and cried out for a solution to Chicago's gun violence. The Trib even touched on the two main drivers of catastrophic carnage on Chicago's South and West Sides: availability of guns and extreme hopelessness. But it skirted lightly on both issues, minimizing the urgency of meaningfully addressing them with the bland statement "Then as now, the gunplay most savaged poor and minority families consigned to neighborhoods short of good schools, good jobs, good services for those living on the margins". As poor as that description of the problem is, the Trib's cure offers even less value. "One homage we can pay to these thousands of young people is to keep looking for some way out of metropolitan Chicago’s chronic violence. The more children all of us can mentor, the more kids we can welcome into reliable foster care, the more resources we can donate to those who work with youngsters on the edge. ... The more of all that, the better."

That's it...just mentor those kids at risk, expand foster care and donate resources to the social workers helping them. Without massive local, state and federal investment to bring these areas into America's expanding economy; and without meaningful reduction in the weapons of civilian slaughter, nothing will reduce the fifty shot every week, ten of which die. On those two issues the Trib is still AWOL That doesn't serve the memory of Yummy Sandifer and the 60,000 Chicagoans shot since his death 25 years ago.