It’s not Chicago’s shame…it’s America’s.

The latest in a long litany of Trib editorials decrying Chicago gun violence calls it Chicago’s shame (Editorial, June 22). Yes, the 106 shot, 14 of whom died Father’s Day weekend is a shame all right. But it’s not Chicago’s shame, it’s America’s. Nobody, individually or collectively in Chicago can slow down, much less stop the weekly slaughter of 40 shot, 10 killed on average, week after week, month after month, year after year. Not the mayor, not the city council, not the police chief, not the 13,000 cops on the beat, not the millions of us in Chicagoland, far removed from the mean streets of poverty and hopelessness that breed gun violence.

But the Trib ponders that if, like in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, we could be so shocked by the killings of 3 year old Mekhi James and 13 year old Amaria Jones that it “jolts our collective consciousness into action…making Chicago a better and safer place”. That is utter nonsense. What I hear on Chicago’s ‘safe streets’ is that ‘it’s Black on Black crime that must be stamped out by Black leaders too busy protesting rogue cops instead of citizen gun violence’. That ensures there will never be a ‘collective consciousness’ to confront the daily shooting gallery.

The reality is that our racist, capitalist economy allows unlimited guns into the hands of millions left out of America’s overly revered economy. Chicago’s battleground streets, like those of every urban metropolis, were redlined out of that economy from the get-go. Before pandemic, when US unemployment was under 4%, the urban dispossessed never got below double digits. Pandemic has simply worsened the unlimited guns, scarcity of jobs mixture fueling endless gun violence.

The Trib’s feel-good happy talk about a mythical ‘collective consciousness’ should cease. It’s time the Trib dropped its love affair with cruel, unregulated, racist American capitalism and begin championing an end to gun availability and a beginning to a public rebuilding of America’s ghettos that capitalism couldn’t see with 20/20 vision.