Killing Our Kids

A conversation with friend and colleague Charles Madigan about gun violence and our children.

Jim:  Charlie, I felt terrible hearing the news out of Nashville about yet another tragic mass school shooting but not entirely for the reasons you might suspect. There’s no question I mourn for all victims of the senseless killing in Nashville: Six people gunned down by a heavily armed former student with well documented emotional problems at the Covenant Christian school in a relatively affluent suburb of the city. The tragedy leaves the victims’ families and police searching for a motive and many others seeking an answer to the question: Will this ever stop? But the three nine-year-old children killed in the shooting made me ask myself another question: How many kids must die before we do something about the uniquely American problem of violence with guns?

My benchmark for this depravity occurred in November 2015 when I was reporting a story about gun violence in Chicago. A little Black boy, Tyshawn Lee, had been executed, apparently in revenge for his father’s gang activities. When I say “executed” I mean it: He was lured into an alley and shot five times, including to his head and neck. Like the Nashville victims he was a mere nine years old, the same age as the two girls and boy in the school shooting. The Tennessee rampage shocked the city, but so did the shooting of Lee in Chicago. Both drew national attention. Both produced the predictable vows to stop the senseless killings. But Tyshawn’s tragic story soon drifted from the headlines. When I asked Father Michael Pfleger, a south side activist and Catholic priest who presided over Tyshawn Lee’s funeral, where the young boy was buried so I could visit the grave, he said in an exasperated tone:

“I do so many of these, I don’t remember.”

Since Tyshawn Lee’s murder in November 2015, at least 600 other children under the age of seventeen have been killed by guns in Chicago, according to various crime databases, including one maintained by the Chicago Tribune. The violence is relentless; it happens in Chicago almost every weekend. Nationwide, we average 1,839 kids killed by guns every year. I don’t want to be callous about all of this. I feel horrible for the victims and families in Nashville. But the tragedies around the country are starting to seem numbingly like one more weekend on the South and West sides of Chicago. Gun deaths have now surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States.

photo by Heather Mount

Charlie: We are united in our reaction to yet another gun tragedy. Two points emerge when I think about this. First, why are Republicans generally more worried about what children read from their school libraries than whether they are shot to death in their desks by mentally disturbed people with high powered rifles? That seems to be the buzz on the far right these days: “Thoughts and prayers” for the victims and their tortured families and friends come forth from politicians as though they have a “thoughts and prayers” app button on their iPhones (Not a bad idea for those of you who are market oriented. The problem clearly isn’t going away.) Then they just walk away from their obligations. An immense amount of attention is paid to a tragedy in Highland Park and very little attention is paid to the many young men and women killed on Chicago’s South and West sides in an unrelenting and long-running sequence of individual massacres. I think the Democrats may be just as weak in this business, with “more gun control” being their default reaction to these tragedies. The problem goes beyond weapons. How have we become such an accepting culture when it comes to homicidal behavior?

We are obliged, as truth tellers, to look at the statistics in these tragedies. School shootings are heartbreaks that defy all reason. But the day-to-day massacre on the streets and in the neighborhoods of Chicago, and in big cities everywhere, are behind the bigger gun violence numbers. So, balance the equation for me, which is worse, a mentally disturbed person with two automatic rifles and a handgun attacking a school, or an armed army of street kids (and adults) shooting each other in a location most people pay no attention to? Imagine it this way: Put all the young people who have died in Chicago the past few years in a stadium and blow them all the hell up, kill them dead right on the spot. Film it on your iPhone then share it like a dance on TikTok. Imagine the outrage. Not to mention the spectacular number of views. But if it happens one human at a time, it doesn’t seem to matter much.

Jim:  The challenge you pose isn’t easy. There’s no equation for balance. We obviously shouldn’t have mentally ill people with automatic weapons scaring everyone and killing innocent people. Equally unsettling is an army of armed street people. In reporting my story, I attended several community policing meetings attended by Black people, a majority in Englewood, where the meetings took place. They were good, hard-working citizens trying to make it and protect their property. They told terrifying stories: young kids in gangs wandering the streets with pistols that could double as machine guns, adults who arm themselves because they can’t get adequate police protection. One man who owned several apartment buildings told me he needed his guns (yes, plural) to defend himself. “I keep hearing on the news about all of the guns the police take off the streets,” he told me. “I don’t see that. They say how dangerous it is for the police to work down here. Man, I’ll tell who It’s dangerous for — me. I live here.” But Nashville shows this senseless violence can happen in any neighborhood, even an affluent one. Unfortunately, buying a gun in America is about as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes. Why do we tolerate a situation that is literally killing our kids?

Charlie: Republicans have made it too easy to get guns by gutting every attempt to control purchases by falling back on the Second Amendment. That’s quaint, using a several century old amendment to the Constitution to cover a problem that is as recent as tomorrow’s headline. We should be calling out these people and making them public examples. It wouldn’t be too much of stretch to call them murder conspirators because that’s what they are. As a final note, in my research on firearm violence, the most striking statistic I found said eighty percent of the victims of Chicago homicides were Black. Let that statistic sit in your head and think about it every time violence pushes its way into the news.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.