Why All the Guns?

Prognosis for fourth of July Mass shootings not looking good

Jim:  Grim news greeted me when I returned from my three-week trip to Spain and Portugal: Twelve people killed in shootings and more than a hundred people wounded in communities across America, including five people shot near Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, where I used to live. The mass shootings occurred over the Juneteenth weekend and I’m bracing for even more carnage over the upcoming July fourth weekend, traditionally a gruesome one for gun violence in Chicago and other communities around the country.

photo by Christian Bowen

I found the violence particularly disturbing after returning from Spain and Portugal, where gun violence is rare. America’s lax gun laws puzzle the Spanish and Portuguese. One question from Europeans my wife and I encountered time and again on our trip was: Why does America need all these guns? That’s a fair question. Spain has at least seven guns for every one hundred citizens; Portugal has twenty-one. America has more than a hundred and twenty guns for every one hundred citizens. In other words, we have more guns than people. I can’t tell you how nice it is to walk the streets of Madrid or Barcelona in relative safety. You don’t have to worry about someone mowing you down with an AR-15 automatic rifle designed for combat or a teenaged gangbanger with a Glock automatic pistol that can fire twenty rounds per second. People who feel safe seem happier with life, their jobs, everything.

There are ample studies about America obsession with guns, but that’s a story for a later date. Now, I fear for the upcoming July 4th weekend. I did a piece on Chicago’s gun deaths a couple of years ago and the police I interviewed all worried about that weekend. Backyard barbecues can turn into a fire fight as quickly searing a bratwurst. If I still lived in Chicago, I would not let my kids venture out to any public celebrations. That’s a sad commentary on life in Chicago and America. My daughter still lives in a somewhat safe neighborhood in Chicago, and she fears going anywhere, particularly at night. Truthfully, per-capita gun deaths aren’t as bad in Chicago as place like Detroit or St. Louis, where a seventeen-year-old was killed, and eleven other teenagers were wounded at a social gathering in the downtown area over the Juneteenth weekend. But such statistics don’t ease my fears about what may happen in Chicago when we celebrate America’s independence. What about you, Charlie?

Charlie: Wow! My initial thought is: “Wait, you returned to all this violence?” I think I would have applied for asylum and set up a home in the safety of a life overseas. It is so strange to me that in my years in Moscow, Ireland, Europe in general, I never felt threatened by anyone or anything. That is the first thing. The second is that the situation looks the same from the distant fortress of Evanston, where the sour cherries are getting ripe, the apples are growing and everything seems immensely alive. I genuinely enjoy my life here. Then, in the Chicago Tribune this morning, “Three Wounded, One Killed in car shooting in Ashburn neighborhood.” I’m not going to go into the details. The headline tells the story. But it is clear to me (as it always has been) that Americans live in at least two different worlds. Each is defined by economics. We are comfortable, own a house, own a car, own all these good things. And so do our children. Others are not comfortable, own nothing to speak of, have little security and express the desperation of their lives in all kinds of violent outbursts. I certainly know that guns are a problem. But that is old news. I see them as a symptom, not as the illness itself. If we want to address these kinds of incidents, we need to know all about the people who kill as easily as we might go out to get coffee. I am not excusing their violence. But we can’t address what we don’t understand. Jim?

Jim: I agree that the economic disparities play a huge role in the violence. Economics aside, though, things have changed. When I did my reporting on gun deaths several years ago, Father Michael Pfleger warned me that the violence plaguing Chicago’s south side Auburn Gresham was on the move. Kids with guns know how to ride the el train, he said, or they can call an Uber. “Violence is on the move,” he warned. As usual, no one listened to him. Now the south side violence has moved north, scaring people who read about it as if it were a war in Afghanistan instead of something close to home. Let’s face it: Gun culture is deeply embedded in parts of Chicago, even among those who feel they need a gun for self-protection. One man told me he read all of the stories in the newspaper about how his neighborhood was so dangerous for the police. “Hell,” he said, “I’m the one in danger. I live here. I need my guns.” It’s simply too easy to get guns, even for teenagers who go to bed at night with a Glock under their bed. We have to get serious about stopping this madness.

Charlie:  Gun culture is part of every corner of America. It is also woven into the fiber of our politics so deeply that it’s impossible to pull even a single thread out without having a whole peanut gallery of Republican lawmakers shouting like banshees about the Second Amendment. I have friends who argue, quite seriously, that all firearms should be gathered up and destroyed. Imagine that, federal agents visiting people’s homes to collect their pistols! It could get bloody very quickly. When we first talked about writing this piece, I suggested we should focus on the theme: “Scared? You should be.” That has yielded to a more uncomfortable thought. This murdering will continue, and those of us who are in a safe place in our heads and our homes will sigh and utter, “Look at what ‘those people’ are doing now,” without recognizing that in our nation, there is no such thing as ‘those people.’ We are all ‘those people,’ and we should all turn to our government to beg for an intelligent solution before murder becomes so routine we just brush by the news as though these things never really happened.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.

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