A Chicago Neighborhood Faces a New Fear: Assault-Style Rifles

[billh58]

CHICAGO — Over a five-day stretch this month, in a single police district on this city’s South Side, 13 people were shot with assault-style rifles. The victims included two police officers wounded while sitting in a van. And 10 others were shot on Sunday during an impromptu memorial service for a man who had been killed a few hours earlier near the same spot along a neighborhood street.

The use of high-powered weaponry is an unsettling subplot in Chicago’s long-running struggle with gun and gang violence. Most of the city’s shootings involve handguns, but the use of an AK-47 or AR-15 rifle can wound far more victims in far less time, leaving the police overwhelmed and residents ever more wary of venturing outdoors.

“People are walking around traumatized,” said Alderman Raymond Lopez, who lives a few blocks from the scene of Sunday’s shooting in the Brighton Park neighborhood. “It’s like they have that glazed look, like they’re not sure what to expect, not certain of what’s going to come out from behind the shadows at any given moment.”

Residents of Brighton Park, a working-class Latino neighborhood with well-kept homes and bustling restaurants, said occasional gunfire had long been part of life, but only in recent months did they recall such use of high-powered rifles. The latest shootings, which left three people dead, came at a time of escalating violence and turf disputes among Hispanic gangs in this part of Chicago, according to the police. An analysis this year by The Chicago Tribune found 33 instances in a nine-month period where semiautomatic rifles were used in Brighton Park and nearby Back of the Yards, far more than anywhere else in the city.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/us/guns-chicago-violence-rifles.html?

According to the gun nuts, ARs are so safe even a kid can use them. I guess it depends on which end of the rifle the kid's on.

[Hoyt]

1. I guess we could ask white wing gun nuts to give up their "assualt" rifles for humanity.

Fat chance deplorables would try to help.

[flamin lib]

2. Pistols are the machismo extension of choice, but

There's a reason the military prefers long guns. Not only are they more accurate but much more powerful as well. An AK47 firing the standard NATO 7.62 round can punch through BOTH car doors of a police cruiser. The AR15s lighter 5.56 only one door.

[jimmy the one]

3. spillover crime

but the use of an AK-47 or AR-15 rifle can wound far more victims in far less time, leaving the police overwhelmed and residents ever more wary of venturing outdoors.

Some smuggled into chicago from gary indiana which is maybe 20 miles east of chicago, or statewide indiana gunshops (imo), where assault rifles are not illegal. They are illegal in chicago, but legal in illinois.
Gary Indiana in the past was a prime depot for handguns getting into chicago illicitly during chicago's handgun ban. Gary also had in the past a higher murder rate than chicago, generally always. But the gun lobby always argued it was due spillover crime from chicago. Actually, hard to say.

[billh58]

4. True, and to take that

concept one step further I view it as spillover madness in allowing the sale anywhere of military style lethal weapons to any Tom, Dick, or Donald who wants one.