Guns Gone Wild: Children Hit Hard By Recent Gun Violence

By Samantha Abernethy in News on Jul 16, 2011 8:30PM

Each Sunday we post the Chicagoist Weekend Blotter summing up criminal happenings across the city, and we've noticed a disturbing trend. While it's normal for violence to rise with the temperature, one thing is going down -- the age of the victims. In recent weeks, a number of children have been the victims of gunshots.

A sampling of recent events:

• A 9-year-old boy was shot in the head after walking out the back door of his Roseland home on July 6.
• An 8-year-old boy was shot in the stomach while playing in front of his grandparents' Englewood home on July 9.
• A 13-year-old boy was found on the morning of July 12 with a gunshot wound to the head in the Brainerd neighborhood.
• A 14-year-old boy was shot in the neck while walking in Washington Park on July 12.
• A 12-year-old girl was shot in the leg and buttock while walking through Garfield Park on July 9.
• A 7-year-old girl was shot while playing in the street in West Englewood on June 25.

Of course it's not likely a 7-year-old girl would be an intended target. The 17-year-old boy who shot her had just been told by a few people to stop displaying his gun in front of children. That pissed him off, he opened fire, missed the targets and shot the 7-year-old in the leg and a 44-year-old man in the back.

So this is a question of aim, right? As criminals get their hands on more powerful weapons, they're able to shoot further and faster, but they aren't able to aim, especially once that powerful gun throws their shoulder off kilter with a powerful kickback. Perhaps it's a good thing that the City Council approved the development of gun ranges in the city. Or maybe we should just keep all of the kids inside. Three aldermen from the South Side have proposed an 8:30 p.m. curfew for children under 12.

While everyone is busy being furious with the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, they're not noticing these things happening in their own backyard. Why is that? Well, have you ever noticed that there is one big trial each summer? That's not a coincidence. News outlets seem to pick one thing to talk about, be it a murder trial or an abduction, to fill slow summer news days. And ABC News seemed to fess up to its own chronic case of "Missing White Woman Syndrome" by hiring kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart as some sort of abduction correspondent. It's all a distraction. Because if we all really paid attention to crimes against children, our hearts would break a million times a day.