Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a message for fellow municipal leaders Friday on the scourge of mass shootings: Chicago has one nearly every week.
Lightfoot moderated a panel at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Washington on preparing for and dealing with mass shootings. She opened the discussion by citing the shooting last week of five people, including 11- and 12-year-old brothers, in a West Garfield Park barber shop as evidence of the fact the city knows what it means to cope with that kind of gun violence.
"My own town of Chicago, unfortunately, is no different," Lightfoot said. "Just last week, we had a gunman walk into a barber shop where some children were getting their hair cut, had a conversation or a confrontation with a barber, walk outside and then turn around and shoot through the window, even knowing that there were children inside."
Then nine mayors from places such as Parkland, Florida; El Paso, Texas; Annapolis, Maryland; and Pittsburgh spent the better part of an hour talking about shootings in their cities that received much more national attention than the Jan. 16 shooting at the Gotcha Faded barbershop.
While some of the other incidents featured many more victims than the five non-fatal injuries in the Chicago shooting, and some were designated hate crimes, Lightfoot later brought the discussion back to the drumbeat of gun violence that faces many big cities where multiple African American or Hispanic victims might not draw as much attention from the national media or the FBI.
"As we've been talking, I've been looking at my friend, (Mayor) Mike Duggan from Detroit, and he may be experiencing the same thing I am, which is that we have a mass shooting every week," Lightfoot said. "Mass shootings, defined by two or three people getting shot, it's happening every week and in some instances, sadly, multiple times a week in a city like Chicago."
"And I think we've gotten a lot of really good advice, but I want us to know that in big cities in particular, the level of violence that is happening is something that is vexing all of us," she added. "We're all working hard to make sure we're doing everything to think about the root causes of that violence. We're making sure we're supporting victims. But the level and frequency of what's happening is overwhelming at times."
Lightfoot pointed to neglect in some communities, but then said "the bottom line is, there are way too many guns out there."
