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45 People Were Shot In Chicago Over The Weekend

The Chicago skyline. The city's police chief says his officers can't keep up with the number of illegal weapons on the city's streets.
Carolyn Kaster
/
AP
The Chicago skyline. The city's police chief says his officers can't keep up with the number of illegal weapons on the city's streets.

There are more data to add to Chicago's .

Headlines such as this from the Chicago Sun-Times — "" — set us off in search of news reports after previous weekends.

There's a rather grim trend. Shootings are on the rise:

-- "At least 36 people have been shot, four of them killed ... in Chicago violence since Friday." ()

-- "27 People Shot In Chicago This Weekend, Including 16-Year-Old In Front Of His Church." ()

As our , Chicago's lawmakers have toughened the city's gun laws.

But that Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says that while his officers have seized 1,500 illegal guns so far this year, "it's like running on a hamster wheel. ... We're drinking from a fire hose, seizing these guns, and people are back out on the street."

Part of the explanation for the weekly increase in weekend shootings, authorities say, is that apparently brings out the worst in some people.

Many of the shootings are gang-related, police say. , among this past weekend's incidents was one in which:

"Five children, ranging in age from 11 to 15, were shot by someone who fired from a car shortly after 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the 6600 block of South Michigan Avenue in the Park Manor neighborhood on the South Side, police said.

"The children had been playing at a park near an elementary school and were walking home when a car pulled up and someone asked if they were in a particular gang, family members and police said.

"One relative said they had said they were not in the gang; another said shots rang out before they could answer. The gunman hit four girls and a boy."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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