Sad: Community group in Chicago pleads with gangbangers: ‘9 AM – 9 PM no shooting’

Things have gotten so bad in Chicago that the most a well-meaning and sincere community group can aspire to is getting the gangbanger community to confine its shooting to the overnight 12 hours of 9 P.M. to 9 A.M.  A kind of daylight curfew for drive-by shootings.  The invaluable website CWBChicago reports:

A North Side community group is calling for people to refrain from shooting guns in Chicago between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. to reduce the risk to people “not involved in high risk activities.”

The proposal from Rogers Park-based Native Sons, known as “The People’s Ordinance,” was recently promoted in an email newsletter by Ald. Maria Hadden (49th).

The thinking behind the plea:

“We have to start somewhere,” Tatiana Atkins, co-founder of Native Sons, said. “Our goal is to approach our city’s gun violence problem strategically and not all at once. Things didn’t become this way overnight, and change won’t happen overnight.

“Under this ordinance, we ask that people stop associating with and glorifying’ shooters,’ stop glorifying ‘switches,’ and stop wearing those ski masks everywhere which perpetuates you as some ‘opp,'” Atkins told CWBChicago recently. “When those who live a certain lifestyle try to hang with ‘regular’ class citizens, they put everyone at risk.”

“Switches” are after-market devices that turn some semi-automatic handguns into automatic-firing weapons, similar to machine guns.

“If people know that after a certain hour, the likelihood of them being shot by an unknown and unprovoked assailant are at a higher risk, they will be less likely to be out and about, and they may become more proactive with the supervision of their children,” she continued.

Although Native Sons calls the movement an “ordinance,” no such legislation has been filed in the city council.  It accepts that shooters are not going to stop shooting one another and seems to ask them to murder responsibly, at a time when the civilians have been warned to huddle indoors.

The 9 A.M. time for beginning the pause in shooting is certainly a late riser’s version of the end of night.  Many employed people begin their commutes at 6 or 7 A.M., with 9 A.M. often seen as the time that rush hour traffic subsides.

Although laughter was my first response to this initiative, I do empathize with the desire to wash one’s hands of the mission of ending gangbanging and merely confine it to the hours the fewest non-gang people are out and about.  But it is an awful concession to make, a normalization of horrific violence, an acceptance of an unacceptable reality.

Hat tip: Peter von Buol.