Chicago grapples with gun violence; death toll soars

CHICAGO — Flags flew at half-staff all across the winter-draped city last week to honor the dead in Newtown, Conn. The massacre was unspeakable, and yet Chicago counts far more homicide victims every month — many of them young people — than died in the carnage in Connecticut.

Their deaths usually go unmarked.

Graphic

Look at gun homicides and gun ownership by country

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Since Jan. 1, Chicago police have recorded 2,364 shooting incidents and 487 homicides, 87 percent of them gun-related. Shootings have increased 12 percent this year and homicides are up 19 percent.

Young people are often targets. In the school year that ended in June, 319 Chicago public school students were shot, 24 of them fatally. The total does not include school-age children who had dropped out or were enrolled elsewhere.

In the wake of the Newtown school shootings, as the nation talks anew of guns and the laws that regulate them, President Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago is struggling to retake its most violent neighborhoods from the gunmen who shoot with impunity.

A Chicago Tribune editorial Thursday said the national gun debate must carry beyond mass shootings “to focus on cities such as Chicago, which is nearing 500 homicides for the year. It has to focus on why the United States has the highest rate of gun ownership of any industrialized nation and the highest rate of violent crime.”

Obama, a former community organizer and Illinois state senator on the city’s South Side, noted the persistence of urban violence last week when he cited “a street corner in Chicago” when listing prominent shooting episodes that included Sandy Hook Elementary, a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

He also spoke about gun violence and its costs in 2007 at a South Side church. “Our playgrounds have become battlegrounds,” he said. “Our streets have become cemeteries. Our schools have become places to mourn the ones we’ve lost.”

Five years later, one of the most serious challenges faced by a city now run by Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), Obama’s former White House chief of staff, is how to stop the guns from blazing. Police and social workers alike are asking why, exactly, Chicago’s homicide rate has remained so high.

Homicide rates in Chicago and New York were similar in the 1990s. Even though killings in both cities dropped substantially, Chicago’s current rate is three times higher than New York’s, said Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. It is also higher than the rate in Los Angeles, a sprawling city long associated with gang violence.

“The gun violence problem in America gets a lot of attention when 20 white kids in Connecticut get shot all at once, but in general it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it really needs to,” Ludwig said. “It’s a huge problem and it’s very localized — and it’s localized among the most disadvantaged people in the city.”

One puzzle is that gun violence has remained high in Chicago while the incidence of other crimes has fallen.

“Our struggle is with violence and particularly gang violence and more specifically gun violence,” Chicago Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy told WBEZ radio this week. He cited free-flowing weaponry on Chicago’s streets as a major challenge for the 12,500 members of the city’s police force. Seizing guns, he said, offers limited benefit, with Chicago already claiming guns at a rate three times greater than Los Angeles and nine times higher than New York.