Sep 17, 2016 4 min read

The odds are awfully good that the Chicago Cubs will be sweeping through baseball’s postseason well after the Pittsburgh Pirates have cleaned out their lockers and dispersed until spring training. Chicago is also a lively cultural center, with top-drawer institutions like the Field Museum and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a diverse population and no shortage of commerce thanks to 29 Fortune 500 companies being headquartered there.

Chicago is no hellhole, that’s for sure. But America’s third-largest city, about an eight-hour drive from Washington County, has been in the headlines recently for something the Chamber of Commerce is never going to feature prominently in its promotional materials – an eyebrow-raising rate of gun violence, which has led to a horrific toll of dead and wounded residents.

As of Thursday, 522 people had been shot to death this year in the Windy City, already overshadowing the 491 who were killed as a result of gunplay in all of 2015. Then there are the wounded who managed to survive their injuries – more than 3,000 in 2016. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the number of seats in the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh, and more than twice the number of students enrolled at Washington & Jefferson College in any given academic year.

Another grim statistic: August was the deadliest month in Chicago in two decades, with 93 people killed by gunfire.

Some observers have pointed out with a mix of resignation and anger that Chicago routinely sees as many people killed over the span of a few weeks as the number who perished in the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting in June, but the relentless drip-drip-drip of two deaths here or three deaths there never gets the same kind of sustained coverage.

Why has Chicago become such a killing ground while other cities of comparable size, like New York or Los Angeles, have seen their murder rates decline? As with most vexing problems, the reasons are many and complicated.

Chicago’s high rates of residential segregation – a study released by the University of Illinois at Chicago earlier this year anointed it the most segregated city in America – has led to high rates of poverty and unemployment in neighborhoods where blacks and Latinos are located. Gangs have taken root in the corners of Chicago where opportunities are few and hopelessness is abundant, and social media has been a platform for gang rivals to insult and provoke one another, often leading to blood being spilled.

The Chicago police have assembled a “strategic subject list,” where they attempt to identify possible victims and perpetrators of gun violence based on, among other things, their arrest records.

There are also a number of programs that have been instituted to try to improve job and educational opportunities for young men who might otherwise be tempted by gangs.

But all of these efforts are being carried out against a backdrop of lax gun laws. Felons can purchase guns from private dealers, who don’t have to conduct background checks as licensed dealers do. Guns have also poured into Chicago from Indiana.

The Chicago Tribune recently took note of a 2013 gun-trafficking case where one offender went to an Indiana gun show and loaded up a duffel bag with guns, paying cash for all of them, before making tracks back to Chicago.

A bid to prohibit handgun ownership in Chicago was struck down in federal court in 2010, as was a complete ban on gun sales four years later. Efforts to impose stricter sentences on felony gun offenders have hit the shoals in the Illinois legislature, with African-American lawmakers arguing that it would result in more members of their communities being shipped off to prison.

Chicago has problems that are distinctive to it, but the city also has woes that can be found in other American communities, both large and small. That’s why we all should look at what’s happening there with a sense of outrage and concern.