Homicides on the decline, but the ideologues will still rant about Chicago

It seems the number of murders in Chicago will be significantly less this year than last – which actually was a year of historic significance for Chicago when it comes to violence.

Almost ready to punch out on 2017

A year ago, it was being reported how the number of slayings took a significant rise compared to recent years. Some 760 slayings in Chicago – which may be less than the days of the late 1980s when the city could have nearly 1,000 killings in a year.

BUT CONSIDERING CHICAGO had experienced a significant drop in murder during the 1990s and 2000s, it had some of us concerned that the bad ol’ days were coming back.

And also gave ammunition to those ideologically-inclined to want to use Chicago as their example of a hellhole that they could use to blame for everything!

The Chicago Tribune reported Friday that 2017 is likely to see about 100 fewer slayings in the city compared to the year before. That’s about a 15 percent drop.

Although it should be noted we won’t know the final murder tally until some time next week most likely – on account that anybody who gets shot before Sunday night but doesn’t die until after Monday morning will still be counted as part of 2017 violence, rather than 2018.

ALSO, THE NEWSPAPER noted that arrests for gun crimes were up 28 percent this year, compared to last.

This kind of nonsense will still be spewed in 2018

Perhaps we’ve just been luckier in surviving the wounds inflicted upon ourselves in various incidents scattered around Chicago. Or maybe the Chicago police are correct when they imply that changing technology is making it possible for them to keep better tabs on what is happening on the streets – making it possible for them to fight violent crime more efficiently.

Not that I believe any of this will matter one bit to the ideologues of a conservative bent. We still have Donald J. Trump as our president, and I won’t be surprised if he manages to find some reason this weekend to issue one of his Tweets from a Twit-type messages to further lambast Chicago.

We’ve become a punching bag for a man whose literary style doesn’t extend beyond the 280-character limit of Twitter – which is perfect for espousing the incredibly trivial aspects of life.

Were still busy despite apparent homicide drop

PERHAPS THIS MEANS there’s legitimate reason to think in accordance with the results of a new Morning Consult poll – one that shows many of us are pessimistic about our government officials as we enter a new year.

The poll shows some 48 percent don’t think positively about government these days, with both Democrats (54 percent) and political independents (50 percent) having negative thoughts.

It seems only 37 percent of Republicans are pessimistic about government, but then again they’re the ones going about spewing the rhetorical nonsense about the majority of us.

Perhaps going on rants such as about how violent and decrepit Chicago has become is what makes them feel better about their lot in life.

PERSONALLY, I’D FIND such a line of thought to be depressing. But perhaps we’d all be better off ignoring the nitwits of our society as they try to drag us all down to their level.

ORR: Soon to perform 'first' for final time

Not that it means I think we ought to ignore the conditions that create violence in our urban area. Just that we shouldn’t exaggerate them for personal or political gain. That’s just sick!

So here’s hoping that when we get the final death tally for Chicago some time next week, it will be the beginning of a declining trend in the city’s body count. That would be a pleasant New Year's thought!

Then, we could move on to the other official stats for Chicago – the first baby born in the new year and the first couple to be issued a marriage license. Which Cook County Clerk David Orr says will be the last “first” license he issues, since he is not seeking re-election and plans retirement when his term ends next December.

  -30-

What should we think of homicide tally – on the rise, decline or nonsense?

The partisanship of politics is going to be played with the violence tallies for Chicago – regardless of how many people are killed and whether that’s less or more than in the past.

Homicide tallies on decline in Englewood neighborhood this year -- will it last?

We’re going to hear tons of rants from all sides over the fact that some 600 people have been killed in Chicago this year. That total was reached last week, and some are more than eager to say that means Chicago remains as violent a place as ever.

ALTHOUGH I COULDN’T help but notice the official Chicago Police Department spin that was placed on the tally. They pointed out the fact that in the Englewood neighborhood, the number of murders during 2017 was only 45.

Which is far less than the 79 murders that took place in that neighborhood’s police district during the same time period last year – a year in which Chicago had 780 slayings, more than in any year during the 21^st Century.

The point being that the neighborhood often thought of as the most violent in Chicago (unless you want to hang on to old memories of the West Side’s North Lawndale neighborhood being the “American Millstone”) is experiencing a decline in urban violence.

A fact, I’m sure, that the conservative ideologues amongst us who want to believe that Chicago is all that is wrong with our society will not want to believe. They’ll want to emphasize that 600-plus tally. Then again, they’ll only want to believe the worst.

JUST AS I’M sure they’ll want to continue thinking of the city to the east, Gary, Ind., as the “murder capital” of the country – even though a raw reading of the numbers don’t back that up (there are more violent places than the one-time “City of the Century”).

Then again, in this era where the “fake news” label is thrown about, they’ll believe what they want.

The reason I bring up Gary is the fact that their homicide tally thus far in 2017 is also 45. As in Gary being as violent in a technical sense as the Englewood neighborhood.

New downtown Gary mural doesn't erase "murder capital" image. Photo by Gregory Tejeda

Should this mean we should disregard claims that Englewood is getting better because it has the same tally as Gary, Ind.? Could bringing that Whole Foods supermarket into the neighborhood be having a slight impact on making the South Side neighborhood a more livable place for its residents?

OR COULD IT mean that numbers can be used to make just about any claim one wants to do? That without context, no homicide tally really means much of anything!

Keep in mind that I’m not trying to downplay the level of violence we’re experiencing in Chicago. Any one death is a tragedy; it certainly isn’t something to be celebrated.

Yet I can’t help but think that many of the people who get obsessed about keeping track of the death tallies for Chicago are more interested in perpetuating the image of Chicago as an excessively violent place that no self-respecting person would want to live in.

Which in my mind is an attitude that discredits itself, and not just because I often view Chicago as being the Greatest City on Planet Earth. I sense that the people most eager to spew such talk are the ones who have no interest in actually resolving the problem of our violence level.

THEY CERTAINLY WOULD be disappointed if our incidents of violence actually declined. They want to keep the image of a “hellhole” alive, and it won’t really matter what the actual numbers are for the homicide rate.

TRUMP: Should we care what his fans think?

My point being that I’m not going to get obsessed with that “600” total that we surpassed last week – other than to admit it is sad to have so many incidents that resulted in families out there losing loved ones.

Nor am I going to over-exaggerate the significance of that 57 percent drop in slayings within the Englewood neighborhood; unless we can see it turn into a trend that lasts for several years.

The real story will be what occurs in 2018 and 2019 and the coming years in Chicago – a long-range view that I’m sure the ideologues amongst us will find to be “boring!” but is more relevant than any of the nonsense they prefer to spew.

  -30-

Not a record, but still bloody gory. We ought to lower rate to spite Trump

I’m not going to go so far as to say that President-elect Donald J. Trump is a liar because of his latest Tweet from a twit that says 2016 was a “record-setting” year for Chicago’s murder rate.
 

Would Trump set foot outside his Chi tower?

Largely because the 762 homicides that the Chicago Police Department is acknowledging for the year isn’t even close to the 943 homicides of 1992 or the 931 of 1994.

BUT SOME 762 people who presumably ought to still be living amongst us, but are not, is still a tragedy worthy of our outrage.

Although let’s be honest. Trump could care less about the situation in Chicago. When he throws out his stupid little Tweets or other statements that take pot shots at our fair city, he’s doing so because he knows the reason he didn’t take Illinois in the Electoral College is because Chicago has far too much sense to fall for his bunk!

We’re going to be the target of many a cheap shot in coming years. Perhaps that is the way the cosmos balances everything out, for the way in which Chicago had extra super levels of clout and influence with the federal government during the soon-to-be finished presidency of Barack Obama.

To the degree that we’re going to be the setting of his “farewell” to the nation come next Tuesday at the McCormick Place convention center (the same place where he celebrated his 2012 re-election as president).

I SUSPECT THAT if Illinois had gone for Trump and Chicago weren’t so blatantly hostile to his nonsense, then Trump likely would find someone else to pick on.

Because I don’t think Trump cares the least bit about the individuals who are amongst the deceased. I suspect many of the kinds of people who actually voted for Trump probably have a sarcastic thought going through their head that the world is a better place without those specific individuals.

Who, after all, came largely from the parts of Chicago that were much less white than the average, and in some cases were the parts where Trump got maybe 2 percent or so of the overall vote.

Returning to re-election scene for his farewell to nation

So when Trump hints at a federal action to deal with the crime problem in Chicago, I know full well he’s not telling the truth. He’s not being serious. He could care less about our urban situation.

IF ANYTHING, THIS is a problem we are going to have to settle ourselves. And we certainly have it within ourselves to do so.

Because I can remember the days when I was a reporter-type person covering criminal activity in Chicago (the late 1980s) when it seemed like it averaged out 2 ½ killings per day. Which actually meant that murder wasn’t uncommon, and every now and again we’d get a particularly bloody weekend that pushed up the overall total.

We saw our homicide rate plummet into the 400s, which was close to the old days of the 1920s – when the statement was oft made that there were 365 killings a year in Chicago (one for every single day).

What accounts for the sudden surge in slayings? I’m sure the academic types who spend their lives weeding through numbers to try to analyze them can offer up their own theories.

BUT WE TRULY are better off resolving this ourselves – particularly if it means we can deny Trump the “stupid talk” of sending in troops to the Sout’ Side of Chicago to resolve order.

 

OBAMA: Soon to give 'farewell' to nation

He spews such images because he wants to create the image for those parts of the country that want to believe the worst. The partisan political nature of all the homicide rate trash talk is a large part of why I can’t take any of it seriously.

Such as every time Trump will claim that Chicago tops New York AND Los Angeles when it comes to crime – which I sense is a statement that partially pains Trump to make.

He’s probably like to claim that all three cities have crime rates on the rise – and that it is because of the lack of Trump that causes the natives to want to hurt each other. Then again, he’ll probably use his own interpretation of “the truth” to make such a statement anyway!

  -30-

EXTRA: St. Sabina marches on MI Av.

The protest. Photograph provided by Faith Community of St. Sabina

The Faithful of St. Sabina parish on the South Side came to the Magnificent Mile on Saturday to try to force all of Chicago to address the reality of the number of homicides, which the Chicago Sun-Times reported as totaling 778 but could increase in coming days if a last-minute incident results in fatalities.

How will Michigan Avenue crowd respond to so visual homicide protest?

I remember a time some three decades ago when I covered a protest march in the District of Columbia – one that passed through the upscale Georgetown neighborhood.

PFLEGER: Leading 100s on 'invasion' of Mich. Ave.

To be honest, I don’t even remember what the “cause” was. But what stuck in my mind was the reaction of people who thought they were out for a good time Saturday night, only to find the sight of all these great unwashed peoples ruining their time.

I REMEMBER BECAUSE I tried to interview several people who were spectators; none of whom wanted to talk, all of whom seemed confused about the point and probably felt like their night out was spoiled.

This comes to my mind because I won’t be surprised if there’s a similar reaction to a protest march being planned for Saturday night – also known as New Year’s Eve.

For Rev. Michael Pfleger of the St. Sabina Catholic parish in the Auburn/Gresham neighborhood plans to come downtown Saturday. Although he’s not headed here in anticipation of consuming too much alcohol and doing a countdown early Sunday to the beginning of 2017.

If anything, his count will be up – and one that I’m sure he feels is going up too high. Although I suspect many of us are going to try to downplay its significance.

HIS ‘CAUSE’ RELATES to the homicide rate for Chicago during 2016. We won’t know until early next week what the final tally will be, but it would seem we’re going to have a higher rate than any year since 1997. We’re likely to have something like 760 to 770 people killed during this year due to urban violence.

Now I know in the past that I have mocked the people who are getting worked up over the homicide rate increase, primarily because I remember back some three decades ago (the late 1980s, to be exact) when the homicide rate for Chicago would fall just short of 1,000 people per year.

Although I have to concede that getting into the 700s (and having some naysayers way too eager to point out how close to 800 we are) is a problem we ought to be concerned about.

One death attributable to violence by another human being is a tragedy for the family impacted. Having so many hundreds of families having to endure these circumstances is truly embarrassing for our city.

PFLEGER PLANS TO try to illustrate the number with his protest march, which is to have people bearing two-foot-high crosses with the names of each victim – marching in a parade along Michigan Avenue. It’s going to be a visual sight – one that I’m sure will make many of the New Year’s partygoers feel a bit squeamish.

And probably will cause some to try to dismiss Pfleger in the way they usually do – just another loudmouthed troublemaker, and when is Cardinal Blasé Cupich going to get around to giving him the boot!?!

As though Pfleger is the problem because he points out what we ought to regard as the problem – but which too many of us ignore because there are large swaths of the city where urban violence isn’t a problem.

It becomes way too easy for people to think of the violence as something that doesn’t impact them, and most likely is something that only affects “those people” who just can’t learn to live like civilized human beings.

YET BEFORE ONE gets the impression that this is a diatribe, consider that many of the people who are eager to highlight the city’s homicide rate have their own political agenda – in many cases to make “those people” look bad in their own minds. Which makes it easier for them mentally to commit all kinds of impersonal actions against them.

Particularly when it comes to political activity – the oncoming era of the Trump presidency is going to be particularly harsh and the people most eager to see it happen are those of a certain racial perspective.

There are so many statistics and mathematical formulas that can make many other places appear to be more violent than Chicago – even though some will want to cite the lower tallies for New York and Los Angeles this year as some sort of be-all and end-all on the issue.

Which means the sight of all those crosses Saturday night are going to be something of a reality check – even though many of those who see them will probably try to convince themselves that it really didn’t happen. They just had too much to drink!

  -30-

We really are a dual city, Chicago is

The weekend leading into Halloween 2016 is going to go into the memory banks of a segment of Chicagoans as a glorious moment, and perhaps even a historic occasion.

For it was the World Series being held in Chicago, and by the Cubs, no less!

THREE GAMES PLAYED at Wrigley Field in the Lakeview neighborhood to capacity crowds, plus many more crowded into the local taverns so they could say they were a part of the scene.

There were many thousands more who decided to claim to have been on hand for the event merely by gathering in the vicinity of Clark and Addison streets. Technically, they were loiterers. But because they did manage to behave themselves, nobody was looking to have them arrested.

Yet Chicago really is a city of neighborhoods and regions that often have little to anything to do with each other. This Halloween weekend, or World Series weekend, if you prefer, may be the ultimate evidence of that.

For while North Side Chicago, and those people who spiritually consider themselves a part of it, were obsessed with “the Cubs!,” there were other parts that were seeing the periodic outbursts of violence that occur in Chicago.

THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES reported Tuesday that 17 murders occurred during the weekend, although the Wall Street Journal says the figure is actually 18 – and that the total for 2016 thus far is 614.

Which could result in the year ending with a tally of somewhere about 700 homicides.

Not quite like the days of the late 1980s when the homicide total would typically average two or three a day and would invariably end with a total of just under 1,000 per year.

But considering how much some people freaked out (usually to reinforce their own partisan political ideological hang-ups about urban life) when the murder rate reached 500 a couple of years ago, you just know they’re going to react to 700 as though the hordes have run amok.

SOME HAVE TRIED hinting that all the extra police on hand around Wrigley Field to ensure that all the Cubs fans were “safe” might have left the rest of the city short-handed. Although any rational look at the situation would show that to be nonsense.

But yes, all of the homicides of the Halloween weekend took place in South or West side neighborhoods where it was likely that the Cubs, or baseball in general, wasn’t really the focus of the weekend routine.

Heck, it was probably just another weekend in the life of Chicago for the locals – except for the 17 (or 18) who died. For them, it was the finale of their life in this realm of existence.

If you want to be sarcastic in your world view, it could be said that the presence of the Chicago Cubs in the World Series was the end of world as they knew it (Yes, you can cue the R.E.M. song lyrics in your mind, if you must).

THERE IS A degree to which I think people take the homicide stats too seriously. They make too much of them, particularly since they get obsessed with just the numbers without giving any thought to the individuals who no longer exist.

For 17/18 isn’t just a number. Those are people whose families are now going to have to do their part to enrich the funeral industry. In the next few days will be the rituals that will allow their families to see them off and begin coping with the loss.

Something to keep in mind; that not all the “sadness” you may see in coming days will be from people upset that the Chicago Cubs fell short to the Cleveland Indians in the World Series.

And if by chance the Cubs do pull off that athletic comeback that enables them to win a World Series on Wednesday, not every person who doesn’t share in the joy of the moment is a disgruntled Chicago White Sox fan who can’t get with the program.

  -30-

Bloody, yet birthy during holiday weekend – Chicago now over 500 dead

Crystal Myers of the Back of the Yards neighborhood gave birth Monday to a son, and if he survives he’s going to have one heck of a birth story to share with people.

Because the Labor Day holiday weekend was one that saw 13 people killed and dozens more wounded – including his parents. It also was the tally that boosted Chicago to having in excess of 500 homicides for the 2016 calendar year thus far.

CONSIDER THERE ARE nearly four more full months to go this year. Who’s to say how high the death toll will get for Chicago – although I can only hope we won’t experience the days of the late 1980s when the city used to get close to 1,000 murders per year and where in some neighborhoods gunfire and death were just a common fact of daily life.

Myers’ son is going to be able to point to write-ups in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times of the circumstances under which he was born a few weeks early on Monday.

His parents, Myers and Albert Moore, were sitting on a porch in the South Side neighborhood where the stockyards once existed when someone snuck up the gangway, fired nine shots, then fled.

Doctors at Stroger Hospital managed to save the baby, while both Myers and Moore were recovering from their own gunshot wounds and it was uncertain Tuesday how they would turn out.

THE SUN-TIMES REPORTED a lack of a motive for the shooting, although police speculated to the newspaper the incident may somehow be tied in to a shooting that took place the day before.

Here’s hoping for the kid’s sake, at least, that both survive along with the boy. Who gets to begin his life as the human face of just how absurd urban violence has become.

And how divided we are as a society in determining what the real problem is and what needs to be done about it.

For the record, 13 people were killed across the city, with 65 people suffering gunshot wounds. Most of the violence came on the holiday itself – some 31 of the 65 were shot from Monday 6 a.m. to Tuesday 3 a.m., according to the Tribune.

THE USUAL TRIVIAL analysis says that urban violence picks up during the summer months – the intense heat that we in Chicago think of as routine for August somehow gets us all riled up and crazy and our tempers go flying off the handle!

Could this line of logic mean that cooler weather will bring cooler temperaments and that the rate of shootings ending in death will decline in coming months? Who’s to say? The fact is that people tend to want to view the statistics concerning urban violence in ways that back up their own personal hang-ups.

There are those who will want to put the focus on trying to keep firearms out of the hands of people who can’t keep control of themselves, while others will want to view it as the fault of certain types of people living down to their nature.

Which usually will result in those individuals wanting to scream and screech their bigotries aloud and claim their own need to keep a weapon on hand.

WHILE OTHERS WILL want to “tsk, tsk” the situation away and pay attention to their own isolated neighborhood where they’d like to pretend such things never happen because the local residents are “just too civilized” to do such things.

I’m of the belief that such acts can take place anywhere at any time – a holdover from my own police reporting days of three decades ago where I encountered so many nonsensical acts that I came to realize there is no making sense of any of it.

With that thought in mind, I’m willing to wish Crystal Myers’ son into this world and I’d like to tell him the circumstances behind his birth are the screwiest he’ll ever encounter in life – it’s all uphill from here!

I only wish I could make him such a promise, and have it come true.

  -30-

Holiday ‘blues’ leaves many for dead; but not in a way we’d honor and respect

It was Memorial Day on Monday, and we were supposed to be paying tribute to those people who served in the military and wound up making the “ultimate sacrifice,” as some people like to phrase it.

Yet I wonder if we’d have been better off paying some sort of tribute to those of us Chicagoans who wound up getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak, and being shot – if not outright killed.

FOR WHILE MANY people wanted to talk about long-ago casualties in places like Khe Sahn, Normandy Beach (we’re only a couple of weeks shy of the 71^st anniversary of D-Day) or Fallujah, certain of our own streets seem to be just as deadly.

For it seems that during the holiday weekend, there were nine people killed by gunfire and at least 34 others wounded. Unless you prefer to believe the Chicago Tribune, in which case, it was 41 people.

There’s always the chance that the figures could go higher by the time you actually read this, since one of those wounded may wind up becoming a fatality.

Now I’m not implying there’s something special about these holiday weekends that causes more people to become fatalities. I recall my own days of full-time police reporting back when I was with the now-defunct City News Bureau. It was back then that I learned to dread holiday weekends.

NOT BECAUSE I cared about the fact that one year, I worked every single major holiday that “real people” were given off as paid holidays.

But it was because of the tendency to pay extra close attention to every single incident of mayhem that occurs at such times. Not only running totals of every single auto accident, but of just about any incident that occurs in someone’s death.

Sometimes, I wonder if such attention somehow causes higher numbers of incidents. Or maybe we’re just made more aware of how deadly conditions can be in certain parts of Chicago.

Because it becomes way too easy to ignore for those of us who don’t live in certain parts of Chicago – which a Tribune story on Monday managed to define as being from the north end of the Bronzeville neighborhood south into the Englewood neighborhood.

THE PLACES WHERE the “Chiraq” label isn’t all that much of an exaggeration, and where our city officials wish they didn’t have to devote so much time and attention.

The image many of us want of Chicago

Better for them if they could think the seedy side of Chicago is the so-called “Bundy Fountain” that foreign tourists ask to see, and which the rest of us know as Buckingham Fountain.

It would be sad if it turned out that Memorial Day went into the mindset of a significant number of Chicagoans as a bloodbath. Since it seems several of the shootings and at least two of the fatalities were on Monday proper.

The day that some people are devoting to trying out a special sauce to go with their holiday barbecues will be the day that some families remember as the one where a loved one died.

ALTHOUGH I’M SURE it won’t be thought of that way. In fact, I’m sure some people will want to think of such a thought as being overly morbid. Perhaps even subversive.

They’d rather think of death on this holiday weekend in the abstract – as in something that occurred on a battlefield overseas and where noble words about “honor” and “duty” can be tossed about.

 

The great shame of the bloodshed that occurred in Chicago this past weekend is that many of these were young people – the fatalities were as young as 15 and the wounded included a 4-year-old girl.

The way some view holiday's death

People whose lives were cut off prior to reaching their prime; before they could even have a chance to serve their country and possibly make that “ultimate sacrifice” that would probably be the only way that would cause some in our society to recognize their worth as human beings.

  -30-

Police playing about with crime stats? We’re still likely to reach 500 homicides

It’s almost comical when you think about it.

Chicago on Thursday officially reached its 500^th homicide of the year (keep in mind that not all homicides are murder). A dubious statistic.

YET IT SEEMS that some people want to keep us under the 500 mark – and are determined to doctor the books.

Because a man was shot to death in the Austin neighborhood Thursday night. That would appear to make him Number 500 – the first time since 2008 that Chicago reached that mark (it had 513 homicides that year, with 2003 being the last time the homicide total exceeded 600).

Yet now, a previous homicide has been reclassified as an ongoing death investigation in which we don’t officially know the cause of death.

So it is premature to count it. So we were as of Friday morning back at 499.

I FIND IT laughable in part because I remember my own days as a police reporter-type person in the late 1980s.

Back then, Chicago routinely had over 900 homicides per year – averaging out to 2 ½ per day. Although in reality, it usually meant there were occasional weekends where 15 or 16 people would be killed in separate, and random, incidents.

Those would make up for the fact that we might go a few days in Chicago without anybody being killed.

So to think that some people are getting all worked up over the number 500 when the record-highs are 970 (in 1974, when the population of Chicago was still over 3 million people) and 943 (in 1992, when we had dipped to just under 3 million).

THERE ARE THOSE people who argue that the current levels are worse because the total Chicago population is about 2.7 million – which makes the murder rate per 100,000 people absolutely atrocious.

Still, I can’t help but think that obsessing over a total number misses the point.

The total number of people who are dying due to the deliberate actions of their fellow human beings (which is the very definition of homicide) is down considerably to what it used to be not all that long ago.

The fact that the homicide total in recent years has been on the decline (as low as 433 last year) is always a good thing. Yet there are no guarantees in life.

THE FACT THAT the number is on the rise this year so much is not an easy thing to explain.

Personally, I’d like to think this year is like 2008. The year before, the homicide total was 448. The year after, it was 459. Yet in the year that both the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs managed to make it to the baseball playoffs before doing their own dying act on the field, the homicide rate shot up over 500!

There probably wasn’t any hard-and-fast reason for it that year, just as there isn’t a simple explanation for this year’s sudden increase.

Which, when you come right down to it, could be considerably worse – even though in an ideal world, one homicide would be one too many.

SO IS SOMEBODY with the Police Department playing with the homicide statistics?

I would rather believe they’re not. Mainly because such an effort would be in vain.

We still have one more weekend to go through, then the prospect of the New Year’s Eve holiday.

There’s just too much potential for somebody to do something idiotic that provokes somebody else into committing the ultimate act of stupidity – the taking of another human life!

I’LL MOURN THE loss of the deceased. But I’m not going to think it’s any more tragic because we still managed to surpass the “500” figure in Chicago.

Viewing the issue from that perspective is trivial, and also downright morbid!

  -30-