The sad news from today’s Chicago Sun-Times:
Three young women were shot and wounded while sitting on a porch early Sunday on the South Side.
Officers responded to a person shot at 2:20 a.m. at the 2900 block of East 87th Street and found three females, 16, 18 and 20, who were shot on a porch, according to South Chicago District police.
Were you expecting to hear they died? I was too, when I first read the headlines. I was expecting more bad news.
The girls are listed in fair but “stable” condition.
This is bad news. We have a serious problem with guns in this country. I will not be naive and suggest that we ban guns. That discussion will go nowhere, and I don’t believe it will ever happen.
Rather, we must explore the reasons we shoot each other. We can talk about poverty. We can talk about drugs. We can talk about domestic violence, and gangs, and lack of family values.
And we should. We should seriously have numerous discussions about all of these things.
But the fact remains that we have a serious problem with violence in this country. This is the most violent country in the world outside a war zone, and even then there’s room for competition.
We have to ask ourselves why it is so easy for us to kill each other — or die trying.