The gap between Gakirah Barnes’s front teeth when she smiled, whether she was celebrating on the basketball court or messing around with friends, made her look even younger than the 17 years she spent in south Chicago before being shot to death last weekend.Gakirah Barnes was shot 9 times while she was chatting on the front stoop with a friend .. who was not injured and obviously not the target.
“At least I don’t have to constantly worry about what’s going to happen to her out on the street no more,” said her mother, Shontell Brown, who wept as she inspected the cemetery plot where Gakirah will be buried on Monday. Her father, who was gunned down on her first Easter Sunday, lies nearby. Her twin brother, who saw his best friend murdered in 2011, will be at the funeral.
Though mourned as a victim by her family and her girlfriend, Gakirah – one of five Chicagoans killed and 36 wounded over the city’s warmest and bloodiest weekend of the year so far – was, according to police and neighbourhood (sic) sources, also part of the problem: a hip-hop-fuelled gang war that is raging even as Mayor Rahm Emanuel boasts that crime is at a record low.
There are two issues here:
- WHY are children still being murdered in Chicago; and
- WHY does Rahm Emanuel insisting that crime is at a "Record Low"?
(Yes, I'm picking on Chicago again. As my Daddy told me: "Always take the easy ones first". And besides, The Brits have done nothing equally as egregious ... lately.)
(1) Gakirah Barnes was murdered, almost, casually, because of Drugs?
No.
She was murdered, if this article can be believed, because her favorite Rap Artist wasn't the same person favored by her murderer.
I can understand drug-related shootings. I can understand that when bullets fly over 'turf wars', innocents often suffer. And I can understand that even carefully targeted murders often include family members among the victims. I don't like it, but I do Grok it.
What I don't understand is a vicious, aggressive unilateral MURDER based on differences in artistic preferences!
This, to me, suggests a society which has become entirely estranged from civilization. If there were any value attached to human life in this society, it would surely include the need for a stronger imperative to murder than liking Lil Jay more than Chief Keef.
At this point, the actually motive for the murder is all speculation. But if The Guardian's reported motive is, in fact, that actual motive ... this would be the first justification for Abortion (assuming that we could look at an unborn child and predict his future behavior) that I have ever envisioned. I am appalled that 'people' in the 21st Century could take their vengence for such a small difference.
I'm not sure if it's quite as bad as hanging black people for being black, but it's at least as bad. I wonder if the murderer grasps the comparison?
Apparently, in Chicago, one needs no rational reason for shooting people. Even children:
(The link to this article is below, under "Chicago police face overwhelming gun crime as 45 people shot over the weekend" as well.)
A senior Chicago police officer said that parts of the city are being overwhelmed by gun violence, after a weekend in which nine people were shot dead and at least 36 – including six children – were wounded.
Ronald Holt, the commander of the Chicago police department’s special activities division, said that the city was witnessing “fratricide” among young men who had come to believe “that the only way to resolve a conflict is to get a gun and go shoot to kill”.
“To tackle gun violence where it is overwhelming communities with the extraordinary loss of lives at an alarming pace, we must deal with it as a social disease and health issue,” Holt, whose 17-year-old son Blair was shot dead on a bus in 2007, told the Guardian in an email.
His remarks came as Chicago suffered its bloodiest weekend of the year. Dozens of residents were shot in a series of separate incidents. On the city’s south side, five children aged between 11 and 15 were shot while walking home from a park on Sunday evening.
The four girls and one boy were asked if they were affiliated with a gang, and then shots were fired from a light-coloured sedan, a police spokesman said. An 11-year-old girl was in a critical condition in hospital after being shot in the neck. A 14-year-old girl was in a serious condition after suffering a shot to her abdomen. A 14-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl were stable after being shot in the left leg and right arm respectively. Another 14-year-old girl suffered a grazed buttock.
The shootings occurred less than a mile from the south-side porch where Gakirah Barnes, a 17-year-old girl, died after being shot nine times the previous weekend. “We are looking at whether this could have been a retaliation for previous shootings,” Andrew Holmes, a community organiser, said on Monday morning.
(2) Rahm Emanuel claims that crime is at a Record Low!
Here we're going back to the Original Article:
Stung by a 16% spike in killings in 2012 that led Moody’s, the ratings agency, to downgrade the city’s debt due to its "unrelenting public safety demands", Emanuel promised a tough response. Amid spending cuts, the former White House chief of staff to Barack Obama has ploughed tens of millions more taxpayer dollars into policing. Sure enough, in January he proudly announced that 2013 had seen the city’s fewest homicides since 1965 and lowest crime rate since 1972.
Yet a startling 7,000-word investigation earlier this month by Chicago Magazine cast serious doubt over the crime-busting miracle of Emanuel and his superintendent, Garry McCarthy. It identified at least 18 apparent murders in 2013 that had either been quietly redefined as “non-criminal deaths” or shunted off the city’s books by other statistical sleights of hand.(Go to the link above for details on "The Truth About Chicago's Crime Rates", or here. Same URL)
In mid-December, McCarthy and Emanuel called a news conference to highlight the release of a report from a professor at Yale University. It had found that Chicago was on track to have its lowest homicide rate since 1967 and its lowest violent crime rate for nearly as long. “This is not just 2013 against 2012,” Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “This is 2013 against the last 40 years. That is what is significant.”-------
Apparently, Mayor Emanuel has been hiding some murders by 'reclassifying' them as non-murders.
“The pressure from the top is unrelenting,” he said one had told him. “The defenders of the system always say ‘You can’t hide a dead body’,” said Silverman [unattributed]. “But you can reclassify one.” City authorities deny any impropriety. [emphasis added]So, has Mayor Emanuel been lying about crime statistics, in order to 'look good' to the nation?
You decide; we don't know.
Here's another article, for perspective:
Chicago police face overwhelming gun crime as 45 people shot over weekend
A senior Chicago police officer said that parts of the city are being overwhelmed by gun violence, after a weekend in which nine people were shot dead and at least 36 – including six children – were wounded.Does it sound to YOU as if crime is at a "Record Low"?
If this is a 'record low', that doesn't speak well for Chicago .. as a city, as a society, or as a community which is under the direct supervision and leadership if the President's ex-chief of staff.
And that leadership does not reflect well upon the judgement of the President.
2 comments:
Government created the problem, and it will not be the solution.
The Police Chief recently went on record as saying lax Cook, Co. gun laws and too many guns are causing the problem. What else could it be?
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