Teenager Who Performed At Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony Is The Latest Victim Of Chicago Gun Violence
By Adam Peck on Jan 30, 2013 at 10:20 am
Less than two weeks ago, Hadiya Pendleton was leading her classmates in the King College Prep School Marching Band down Pennsylvania Avenue on the afternoon of President Obama’s second inauguration. It would be an opportunity of a lifetime for any 15 year old, but for Pendleton, it was her last. On Tuesday, she was gunned down in a park a few blocks from school on the South Side of Chicago, less than a mile from the first family’s home.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Pendleton and another classmate, a 16 year old boy, were both caught in the middle of a gang war. The boy was still in serious condition on Tuesday evening, but Pendleton did not survive:
Friends of the slain girl said King was dismissed early today because of exams, and students went to the park on Oakenwald–something they don’t usually do.
Friends said the girl was a majorette and a volleyball player, a friendly and sweet presence at King, one of the top 10 CPS selective enrollment schools. Pendleton performed with other King College students at President Barack Obama’s inaugural events.
In the last year, Chicago has endured a surge of gun-related murders, more than quadruple the number of homicides in New York City and 58 percent more than the number of U.S. soldiers shot and killed in Afghanistan. During the recent debate over gun control, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has sought to place his city at the front of the push for reform, instructing the city’s pension funds to divest from any gun manufacturer and supporting more gun buyback programs.
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By Adam Peck on Jan 30, 2013 at 10:20 am
Less than two weeks ago, Hadiya Pendleton was leading her classmates in the King College Prep School Marching Band down Pennsylvania Avenue on the afternoon of President Obama’s second inauguration. It would be an opportunity of a lifetime for any 15 year old, but for Pendleton, it was her last. On Tuesday, she was gunned down in a park a few blocks from school on the South Side of Chicago, less than a mile from the first family’s home.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Pendleton and another classmate, a 16 year old boy, were both caught in the middle of a gang war. The boy was still in serious condition on Tuesday evening, but Pendleton did not survive:
Friends of the slain girl said King was dismissed early today because of exams, and students went to the park on Oakenwald–something they don’t usually do.
Friends said the girl was a majorette and a volleyball player, a friendly and sweet presence at King, one of the top 10 CPS selective enrollment schools. Pendleton performed with other King College students at President Barack Obama’s inaugural events.
In the last year, Chicago has endured a surge of gun-related murders, more than quadruple the number of homicides in New York City and 58 percent more than the number of U.S. soldiers shot and killed in Afghanistan. During the recent debate over gun control, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has sought to place his city at the front of the push for reform, instructing the city’s pension funds to divest from any gun manufacturer and supporting more gun buyback programs.
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makes a lot of good points. The new gun control proposed does nothing to curb this type of violence.
Also, from that article:
"That's when the powerful pro-gun National Rifle Association effectively ended federal funding for gun violence research, citing its opposition to taxpayer-funded studies on gun violence."
Am I missing something, or does that basically say "The NRA effectively ended federal funding for gun violence research, because they wanted to"? "Citing its opposition to..." is a very wordy way of saying absolutely nothing, under the circumstances.
RIP, Hadiya.
So fed up with people who don't live here saying that the best solution to my city's gun violence problem is for all of us to carry guns, and I've spent half the day in a rage at the idea that this poor teenage girl died because she wasn't carrying a gun. This country is fucked.
I'm realizing that this has little to nothing to do with your comment, but I'm just also here and pissed. :[
People looooove to talk about the gun violence here but nobody wants to discuss the fact that assault weapons aren't the major problem; it's the precious handguns that terrified suburban white people cling to, even though they'll never know what it's like to actually live in a dangerous neighborhood and would actually do better with a dog as home protection.
I don't live in a particularly violent area, but it's also not crime-free. The thing that really gets me is that people who aren't from here really honestly believe that the whole city is this terribly dangerous place where people are being shot left and right, which really just shows complete goddamn ignorance of the fact that despite the fact that this happened in a wealthier neighborhood, in general crime rates are linked to poverty. Because fixing poverty is TOO HARD, so let's just cling to our guns, live in irrational fear, and toss more people to the prison-industrial complex.
I don't live in a particularly violent area, but it's also not crime-free. The thing that really gets me is that people who aren't from here really honestly believe that the whole city is this terribly dangerous place where people are being shot left and right, which really just shows complete goddamn ignorance of the fact that despite the fact that this happened in a wealthier neighborhood, in general crime rates are linked to poverty. Because fixing poverty is TOO HARD, so let's just cling to our guns, live in irrational fear, and toss more people to the prison-industrial complex.
Ffs, thank you. It's like people are either talking about how awful and ubiquitously crime ridden it is here (no), or passing around graphs that inexplicably trumpet how "safe" Chicago and Illinois are because of our gun laws (lawl wat). Nuance is just really fucking hard for a lot of people, evidently.
But yeah, I used to live in the neighborhood you're in, if I'm thinking of the right one; now I'm in the neighborhood just north of there. Shit was rough this summer. It was nothing like Englewood, but it was bad enough to make me derisively snort at people who think that assault weapons bans and shit in response to a very specific type of gun violence that primarily affects the affluent and white people would do anything at all to remedy the things going on in this city. ESPECIALLY when these very same people didn't give a shit about gun violence until after Newtown or the Aurora shootings.
tl;dr: I AGREE. >:[