Gunfire tore through a loaded school bus Friday morning in Chicago, narrowly missing the children on board.
Chicago police had this to say: “Police believe shots had been fired even before the bus came into the path of gunfire.”
What? Is gunfire in the morning the new normal in Chicago? How can that be?
Guns are difficult for the law-abiding to purchase and possess in Chicago, thanks to that city’s onerous gun laws, easily the strictest in the State of Illinois!
Yet gunfire in the morning is normal there? Reading the article and comments from those quoted sure seem to suggest even though the neighborhood in question doesn’t have a gang problem, they surely do have a problem with people shooting at one another.
But school buses pass through the path of gunfire? Is that the new normal?
Hold on a second.
I’m back. Had to stick my head out the door to count the gunshots. Oh, wait!
There were no gunshots this morning here in Champaign where law-abiding folks with FOID cards can freely purchase handguns, rifles and shotguns after a background check and waiting period and carry them out to their car for a trip to a range without fear of police harassment. There’s no city licensing requirement or lists of guns we can and cannot own. No regulations about how we must store them in our houses. There’s no expensive fees to register our guns here either.
And you know what? People aren’t getting shot left and right and school buses are not being raked with gunfire here.
Yet, rocket surgeons like Jesse Jackson (How’s Junior doing with his FOID card since getting his inpatient mental health treatment, by the way… that precludes having a FOID card for five years. Hope he’s moved that semi-auto Uzi he bought in Champaign when he was at the U of I and living on Tahoe Court out of his collection before the police show up!) and Father Pfleger agitate for more gun restrictions.
Perhaps Jackson and Pfleger are working to export Chicago-style crime to the rest of the state in addition to Chicago-style gun control idiocy.
Here’s the story from the Sun-Times. Photos all courtesy of Chicago Sun-Times.
The Villaruel brothers hopped on the yellow school bus Friday morning as usual.
It stopped right in front of their South Deering house at about 7:45 a.m., and rolled out once Adrian, 11, and Oscar, 8, made their way to the back.
Their mom, Rosana Villaruel, was watching from the front door when everyone heard something snap.
“Like running over a tree branch,” Adrian explained Friday after returning home from Our Lady of Guadalupe School…
Police said it appears that the bus had not been targeted but had been accidentally caught in crossfire in a possible shootout in the 10600 block of South Calhoun Avenue.
Inside the bus, Adrian said, two windows broke, and glass fell in. Children began to scream.
…
And while the area around 106th and Calhoun has a gang problem, it was not immediately clear if the shooting was gang-related.“Over here they shoot all the time,” Adrian and Oscar’s grandmother, Lucy Reyes, 53, said.
The sound of gunshots is common in the neighborhood, neighbors said. Bullet holes pockmark Reyes’ house around the door and second-story windows.