- Sep 4, 2005
- 24,719
- 14,599
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Single
- Politics
- US-Others
A large group of people gathered for the celebration from around 6 p.m. on Saturday, and police were at the site to monitor the event, the sheriff’s office said.
The officers were called away around 12:25 a.m. to respond to a 911 call reporting a fight nearby.
“As deputies responded, they heard gunshots and immediately returned to the scene of the gathering,” the sheriff’s office said.
Witnesses said the parking lot was still filled with people when the sound of gunshots rang out and the scene turned chaotic. Some people started running.
After the 2022 shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, less than 40 miles from Willowbrook, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law a ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines in the state.
“This shooting shows that even states with strong gun laws like Illinois are not immune from gun violence due to our incredibly weak federal laws and weak laws in neighboring states.” Kris Brown, president of Brady, the country’s oldest gun violence prevention organization, said in a statement.
While I would agree that with each passing shooting like this, it highlights more and more why we need to button up some gun control laws, clearly this sort of thing doesn't happen in other developed nations with the frequency that it happens here. But with regards to Illinois (and the Chicago area in particular), I think they're missing the mark a bit when they trot out the old trope of blaming Indiana's weak gun laws for all of their problems.
While they're partially right in that a neighboring locale where it's easy to get a gun can introduce some new guns into the hands of people who shouldn't have them in their own locale, there's still some underlying cultural aspects that they're deflecting from by trying to pin the blame there.
The situation of "we have strict gun laws, but a neighboring state that's an easy drive to doesn't" is by no means a situation that's unique to Illinois/Chicago, yet they seem to be the only ones who try to deflect from their own internal city management problems by citing it.
For instance, New Jersey has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, they still have some high violent crime rates in certain cities...I don't hear New Jersey officials regularly blaming their internal issues on the more lax gun laws that exist in Delaware and PA...nor do I hear California blaming the crime rates in the southeastern part of the state on the fact that it's a close drive to Yuma, AZ where it's much more permissive.
I think this problem needs to be approached from both sides. While I'd agree that Indiana's weaker gun laws certainly don't help matters in Chicago (and the surrounding areas), I don't think that Indiana implementing strict gun laws would solve most of their problems either.