The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, goes Wayne LaPierre’s axiom, is a good guy with a gun. What if the bad guy’s gun is fake? Another shopworn motto for gun-lovers applies: kill ‘em all, and let god sort ‘em out.
In February, the Guardian published a deep investigation into Homan Square, a shadowy facility where the Chicago Police Department takes suspects without booking them, entering them into any official database, or giving them access to a telephone or their lawyer. A new Guardian report claims that more than twice as many people have been “disappeared” into Homan as officials initially disclosed.
In Chicago on Saturday night, a 6-year-old boy fatally shot his 3-year-old brother after their father, who prosecutors said had acquired the gun for protection after testifying in a murder trial, showed the older boy where it was kept, above the refrigerator in their Humboldt Park home.
Yesterday, I wrote about a recent taping Steve Harvey held in Chicago for his daytime talk show. Harvey brought 2,000 men into a theatre for a special devoted to “What Men Really Think,” and things quickly, even predictably, turned sour. Men in the audience allegedly drowned out female speakers with catcalls and hurled slurs of all types at both women and men present.
When police departments face criticism, they tend to dig in their heels, deny any wrongdoing, and accuse those who dare to point out their flaws of being crime-humping gang-lovers. That’s all very charming, but it’s nice to see Chicago police experimenting with a different approach.
A 13-month-old baby on his way to the beach with his mom was killed Saturday when a car fleeing a drive-by shooting lost control and jumped a curb, police say.
The rules of beer pong vary from region to region—Is blowing allowed? When can you rerack the cups? What should we pee on and whose dad is getting us all jobs after graduation?—but it’s universally understood that defenders should create a distraction while their opponents are shooting. That distraction probably shouldn’t be a gun, though.
Yesterday, a Cook County, Illinois, judge ordered the release of a photo of two Chicago police officers holding hunting rifles while standing over a black suspect dressed in antlers. One of the officers, Timothy McDermott, was fired last year over the picture, which was taken sometime between 1999 and 2003; the other cop, Jerome Finnigan, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2011 for his role in a cop-lead gang responsible for a series of robberies.
Remember Aaron Schock? The Republican Congressman from Illinois’ 18th District resigned on March 31 in response to a cascade of scandals, such as his Downton Abbey-themed office, his use of government funds to pay for tickets to a Katy Perry concert, and his office’s extremely questionable travel reimbursements, all of which are now the subject of a federal investigation. So what’s he up to these days?
There will be no justice for Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed Chicago woman who was fatally shot by an off-duty cop in 2012.
At least 32 people were reported injured in shootings and five people died in violent attacks across a deadly weekend in Chicago.
