Is Juneteenth becoming black-on-black violence day?
Juneteenth, a holiday that most Americans had never even heard of until Congress made it a federal holiday in 2021 to celebrate the end of slavery, is starting to acquire some very unpleasant associations.
According to CNN:
At least 22 people were injured and one person was killed by gunfire overnight in Illinois, in a peaceful Juneteenth celebration turned deadly, police say.
An unknown number of suspects fired multiple rounds from multiple weapons into the large crowd of people gathered to celebrate Juneteenth, according to a statement from the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office.
Several other victims were injured in the chaos as people attempted to flee the area, and victims are being treated at hospitals in the area, the sheriff’s office said.
The shooting took place around 12:30 a.m. in a parking lot in Willowbrook, about 21 miles west of Chicago.
...and this, from WSPA in North Carolina:
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WSPA) – A juvenile was charged in connection to a shooting that injured two people at a Juneteenth festival on Saturday.
According to the Asheville Police Department, officers responded to reports of shots fired at a downtown festival in the area of Court Plaza around 8:15 p.m.
Upon arrival, officers found two juveniles suffering from gunshot wounds.
Both were taken to a nearby hospital for their injuries. One has been released, and the other remains in critical but stable condition.
...and this from San Diego, according to local NBC7:
One person is dead and another was injured after a shooting broke out at a Liberty Station park during a Juneteenth celebration Saturday evening, according to San Diego police. The shooter has not yet been found, police said.
The shooting was reported at 6:45 p.m. at NTC Park at Cushing Road and Womble Road, where personnel from San Diego Police Department and San Diego Fire Department were seen giving CPR to one victim.
..and this from St. Louis, according to ABC News, which doesn't mention Juneteenth but suggests it in quoted comments about family gatherings near the bottom of the story:
An overnight shooting at a party in a downtown St. Louis office building injured at least 10 people and killed one person, St. Louis police chief Robert Tracy said at a press conference Sunday afternoon.
Eight out of the 11 victims, including the deceased, were minors, according to St. Louis police. Five of the victims were male, while six were female.
The victims are between 15 and 19 years old, according to police.
The previous two years have seen the same sort of Juneteenth violence, with black gunmen shooting black people attending festivities, and mass lootings not uncommon. If you didn't know what Juneteenth was, you'd think it was a good day to board up the shops and avoid public gatherings. How did it morph into something better described as black-on-black violence day? Who told the shooters that today's a fine day to get out there and shoot other black people?
Obviously, there are some peaceful celebrations -- this one described by the Santa Fe New Mexican describes what appears to be a lovely summer celebration. I've always been a supporter of the idea of Juneteenth, because it involves all of us -- those who were freed after enslavement, but also, those among our ancestors (black and white) who died to free the enslaved people after our country's bloodiest war.
But there are too many of these nasty events to avert one's eyes and pretend nothing else is happening.
Part of the blame has to be a failure to understand the event as it evolved historically and then disappeared, only to be revived in wake of the George Floyd riots.
It began as spontaneously, as family celebrations by black people in Texas, who got news of the end of slavery on June 19, 1865, three months after the Civil War had ended.
According to the Santa Fe New Mexican:
Juneteenth, observed June 19, honors the day in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay in Texas and announced the freedom of more than 250,000 enslaved Black people — 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. While celebrations of the event had been held in Texas and in many other communities throughout the nation for more than 150 years, it wasn’t recognized as a federal holiday until 2021. That was the year the first celebration was held in Santa Fe.
It was happy, joyful and family-oriented. What could be more wonderful than celebrating freedom after bondage? What could be more natural and normal and spontaneous? And why couldn't everyone who isn't black celebrate this, too?
Today it sounds angry and downright dangerous, based on these violent manifestations.
Thomas Lifson yesterday wrote about some of the problems here.
To start, it's been distorted in meaning by radical intellectuals into a grievance group event, with some arguing that it shouldn't be joyful at all, it should be a time to nurse boiling rage and grievances at being "robbed" as one put it, rather than to savor the freedom from bondage.
This sort of ignorance keeps real knowledge of the holiday and its wholesome origins from reaching the ears of young people who might benefit from what it was and what it meant.
A look at the profiles of the shooters and those engaged in the violence on this holiday suggests that they are largely young black men without intact families.
That's sad. Since slavery's end, the black family has endured both slavery and the Jim Crow horrors with families intact. The damage to black families came in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs, which were cynically crafted at least in part with the aim of creating a permanent black voting base for the Democrats, except that Johnson used far more repulsive language. Those programs effectively replaced fathers with the state, doing great harm to the black family that had otherwise managed to survive oppression. Shelby Steele writes an important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal describing that terrible dynamic that serves as a petri dish for violence.
Another problem seems to be social media and the greedy entertainment complex -- checked out any lyrics lately from the most popular black rappers on YouTube? Play those over and over to impressionable young people without any other input and see what happens.
Now we see the results of this grievance-group obsession and the impulse towards violence to solve any personal or public problem out there, and it's ruining a great holiday that should be celebrated as enthusiastically as every other holiday.
We shouldn't be reading about mass shooting events every time Juneteenth rolls around. We should be looking at why these things are happening and whether it's really Juneteenth as its original creators had once celebrated, or now just another repeat of the George Floyd riots as a sort of baleful commemoration day anyone who doesn't like violence should want to stay away from.
This holiday shouldn't bring to mind mass violence every time the word comes up. Maybe some real leadership from the black community will finally end the grievance-group nursings, and restore the holiday's original celebratory origins.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
At Least 55 Shot During Father’s Day Weekend in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago
At least 55 people were shot, seven of them fatally, during the Father’s Day weekend across Mayor Brandon Johnson’s (D) Chicago.
Breitbart News reported 27 people were shot Friday into Sunday morning alone in Chicago, and three of those shooting victims succumbed to their wounds.
On Monday morning, ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times noted the total number of shooting victims for the weekend had reached 55, with four additional shooting fatalities.
One of the additional shooting fatalities was a 26-year-old man who was shot in the back Friday around 6:30 p.m. “in the 3900-block of West Gladys Avenue.”
WATCH:Hawkins: Chicago’s New Mayor Means “Same Song, Different Verse” on Gun Policy
ahawkinsHe was taken to hospital, where he died.
Another shooting fatality was that of a 48-year-old man who was found at 1:30 a.m. Sunday “in the 6600-block of South Evans Avenue.” He had a gunshot wound to the head.
Sunday evening, five people were shot during a shooting “in the Roseland neighborhood near West 99th Street and South Princeton Avenue.”
Two men–a 33-year-old and a 37-year-old–died as a result of their wounds.
Police investigate the scene where approximately 16 people were shot, one fatally, in a parking lot outside BCD Liquors in Willowbrook, Illinois in the early hours of June 18, 2023. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Breitbart News observed at least 21 people were shot, one of them fatally, during a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, early Sunday morning. Willowbrook is 21 miles from Chicago.
The Sun-Times pointed out that 262 people were killed in Chicago January 1, 2023, through June 18, 2023.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
At Least 21 Shot at Juneteenth Celebration in Gun-Controlled Illinois
At least 21 people were shot, one of them fatally, at a Juneteenth celebration in gun-controlled Illinois on Sunday morning around 12:30 a.m.
CNN reported the shooting occurred “in a parking lot in Willowbrook, about 21 miles west of Chicago.”
FOX 32 pointed out two of the wounded remain in critical condition.
FOX News noted DuPage County Sheriff’s Deputy Chief Eric Swanson indicated that deputies patrolling the area near the parking lot heard the gunshots and responded.
Swanson said, “The motive behind this incident is unclear and this is still an active investigation.”
Police tape blocks an area at the scene of an overnight mass shooting at a strip mall in Willowbrook, Ill., Sunday, June 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Matt Marton)
No information has been released on the number of shooters involved in the incident.
Illinois has a red flag law, an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, a 72-hour waiting period, and a gun owner licensing requirement via the Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card system, among other controls.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
Mass shootings and violence leave dead and injured across the US this weekend
CHICAGO (AP) — Mass shootings and violence killed and wounded people across the United States this weekend, including at least 60 shot in the Chicago area alone. Four people were found shot to death in a small Idaho town, a Pennsylvania state trooper was killed in an ambush, and bullets struck 11 teenagers, killing one, at a party in Missouri.
The shootings happened in cities and rural areas alike, following a surge in homicides and other violence over the past several years that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. Officers responded to mass shootings in Washington state, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southern California and Baltimore.
“There’s no question there’s been a spike in violence,” said Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some of these cases seem to be just disputes, often among adolescents, and those disputes are played out with firearms, not with fists.”
Researchers disagree over the cause. Theories include the possibility that violence is driven by the prevalence of guns in America, or by less aggressive police tactics or a decline in prosecutions for misdemeanor weapon offenses, Nagin said.
Only the Idaho killings fit the definition of a mass killing in which four or more people die, not including the shooter. However, the number of injured in most of the weekend cases matches the widely accepted definition for mass shootings.
Here's a look at the shootings this weekend:
CHICAGO
Five people were shot, two fatally on the city's South Side on Sunday evening when someone opened fire from a car that pulled up to a gathering, according to police.
Another four men were shot, one fatally, during an altercation in a garage in the West Side neighborhood of Austin around 3 a.m. Sunday, police said. Other shootings with fewer victims added to the tally — city data shows 29 gun violence victims Friday evening through Saturday.
Meanwhile in the suburbs, at least 23 people were shot, one fatally, early Sunday in a parking lot where hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate Juneteenth, authorities said.
The DuPage County sheriff’s office described a “peaceful gathering” that suddenly turned violent as multiple people fired shots into the crowd in Willowbrook, Illinois, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of Chicago.
A motive wasn’t immediately known. Sheriff’s spokesman Robert Carroll said authorities were interviewing “persons of interest,” the Daily Herald reported.
“We just started hearing shooting, so we dropped down until they stopped,” a witness, Markeshia Avery, told WLS-TV.
The White House issued a statement calling the violence a tragedy and saying the president was thinking of those killed and injured. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement that he was monitoring the investigation.
“Gathering for a holiday gathering should be a joyful occasion, not a time where gunfire erupts and families are forced to run for safety,” Pritzker said.
KELLOGG, IDAHO
Police in Idaho arrested a suspect in a shooting that killed four people on Sunday at a home behind a church.
Responding officers found four people, all dead from gunshot wounds, at a residence in Kellogg, according to the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office and news reports. Idaho State Police said a 31-year-old man was detained, KXLY-TV reported.
A neighbor at the scene told the TV station that there had been an ongoing dispute between neighbors at the location. It happened behind the Mountain View Congregational Church, the Shoshone News-Press reported.
ST. LOUIS
An early Sunday shooting in a downtown St. Louis office building killed a 17-year-old and wounded 11 other teenagers, the city’s police commissioner said.
St. Louis Metropolitan Police Commissioner Robert Tracy identified the victim who was killed as 17-year-old Makao Moore. A spokesman said a minor who had a handgun was in police custody as a person of interest.
Teenagers were having a party in an office space when the shooting broke out around 1 a.m. Sunday.
The victims ranged from 15 to 19 years old and had injuries including multiple gunshot wounds. A 17-year-old girl was trampled as she fled, seriously injuring her spine, Tracy said.
Shell casings from AR-style rifles and other firearms were scattered on the ground.
WASHINGTON STATE
Two people were killed and two others were injured when a shooter began firing “randomly” into a crowd at a Washington state campground where many people were staying to attend a nearby music festival on Saturday night, police said.
The suspect was shot in a confrontation with law enforcement officers and taken into custody, several hundred yards from the Beyond Wonderland electronic dance music festival.
A public alert advised people of an active shooter in the area and advised them to “run, hide or fight."
The festival carried on until early Sunday morning, Grant County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kyle Foreman said. Organizers then posted a tweet saying Sunday’s concert was canceled.
CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA
One state trooper was killed and a second critically wounded just hours apart in central Pennsylvania on Saturday after a gunman attacked a state police barracks.
The suspect drove his truck into the parking lot of the Lewistown barracks about 11 a.m. Saturday and opened fire with a large-caliber rifle on marked patrol cars before fleeing, authorities said Sunday.
Lt. James Wagner, 45, was critically wounded when he was shot after encountering the suspect several miles away in Mifflintown. Later, Trooper Jacques Rougeau Jr., 29, was ambushed and killed by a gunshot through the windshield of his patrol car as he drove down a road in nearby Walker Township, authorities said.
The suspect was shot and killed after a fierce gunbattle, said Lt. Col. George Bivens, who went up in a helicopter to coordinate the search for the 38-year-old suspect.
“What I witnessed ... was one of the most intense, unbelievable gunfights I have ever witnessed,” Bivens said, lauding troopers for launching an aggressive search despite facing a weapon that “would defeat any of the body armor that they had available to them.”
A motive was not immediately known.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
A shooting at a pool party at a Southern California home left eight people wounded, authorities said Saturday.
Authorities were dispatched shortly after midnight in Carson, California, south of Los Angeles, KABC-TV reported.
The victims range in age from 16 to 24, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. They were taken to hospitals and two were listed in critical condition, the statement said.
Authorities said they found another 16-year-old boy with a gunshot wound when they responded to a call about a vehicle that crashed into a wall nearby.
BALTIMORE
Six people were injured in a Friday night shooting in Baltimore. All were expected to survive.
Officers heard gunshots in the north of the city just before 9 p.m. and found three men with numerous gunshot wounds. Medics took them to area hospitals for treatment.
Police later learned of three additional victims who walked into area hospitals with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.
The wounded ranged in age from 17 to 26, Baltimore Police Department spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge said.
SAN FRANCISCO
Six people were injured after a “car-to-car” shooting in the streets of San Francisco on Sunday evening, police said.
Two victims sustained gunshot wounds, one with life-threatening injuries, in the moving shootout beginning shortly before 7 p.m., San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said at a news conference Sunday.
Suspects in two cars, a black SUV and a white sedan, “drove very recklessly and chased each other while engaged in gunfire” near the northern waterfront, Scott said. The area includes Fisherman’s Wharf, one of the city’s busiest tourist areas.
Three victims were injured by glass shards caused by “errant gunfire,” Scott said, with none of the injuries considered to be life-threatening.
Two girls, ages 10 and 16, were struck by one of the two vehicles while walking their bicycles across the street. The younger girl was injured and transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries while the older girl was not injured, Scott said.
“It appears that this was an isolated incident and these individuals were targeting each other. We don’t believe this was random at all," he said.
PHILADELPHIA
A 4-year-old boy was among five victims of a shooting in south Philadelphia Saturday night.
Police responded to the block shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday and found a 58-year-old woman with gunshot wounds to the legs, a 54-year-old woman with gunshot wounds to her wrist and leg, and the boy, who was brought to Presbyterian Hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen.
A 30-year-old man also arrived at the hospital with a gunshot wound to the wrist and a 40-year-old man was brought in with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The last victim was listed in critical condition; all others were said to be in stable condition.
Police said the shooter was an unidentified person wearing dark clothing.
—
Brown contributed from Billings, Mont. Savage is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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