Over the weekend in Chicago, the Cubs clinched their first playoff berth since 2008 despite losing three straight games. The University of Chicago prepared to host a campaign event for Bernie Sanders, who attended the school in the 1960s. And for the second straight weekend, more than 50 people were shot in the city. The Chicago Tribune reports:
The toll included four men killed and at least 53 people wounded between Friday evening and early Monday morning, according to police. Last weekend, nine people were killed and at least 45 were wounded.
The violence, which has become bleakly commonplace, didn’t end Monday. The city has endured 2,300 shootings so far this year—an average of more than eight per day and 400 more shootings than at this point last year. And, America’s third-largest city continues to contend with a 21 percent increase in homicides. On Monday evening, an 11-month-old boy was wounded in a south-side shooting that also killed his pregnant mother and his grandmother.
“In a second, two generations of that child’s family were wiped out,” Eugene Roy, a Chicago deputy chief of detectives, told reporters. (A total of six people have been killed and eight others have been wounded since Monday morning.)
The violence is widely seen to stem from a deadly combination of gangs and illegal guns. Responding to Monday’s shootings, Mayor Rahm Emanuel squared his focus on gangs.
