This past May several students from Percy L. Julian High School sat on a CTA bus on their way home after classes when a gunman boarded the bus and opened fire. The end result was 4 injured, 1 dead.
The student killed in the shooting incident was Blair Holt, a sixteen-year-old junior at Julian. The shooter, Michael Pace, also sixteen years of age, was apprehended and is now facing murder and manslaughter charges.
Every Chicago media outlet covered the outcry that followed in the weeks after the incident. Families, friends and complete strangers expressed their anger and heart-felt sorrow. Community activists gathered and voiced the urgent need for something to be done.
It appeared that this reaction, brought on by a single act of violence on the city’s southwest side, had united the community under one common and clear cause and all voiced the same opinion: the senseless violence must stop.
The violence has not stopped.
A little over a month has passed since Blair Holts’ death and yet another CPS student has been killed due to gun violence. And once again the community is outraged.
Roberto Duran, a 14-year-old student who attended Social Justice High School, was shot while walking in Little Village. His body was found in a gangway.
Duran and Holt have become part of a grim CPS statistic; since the beginning of the school year, over thirty-two children have been killed due to acts of violence, twenty-four of them involving guns.
With every student that dies, predictable reactions follow. Activists protest and call on all levels of government to bring an end to the violence. Legislators, filled with the sense of duty towards their constituents, make their voices heard in their respective branches of government.
But what has happened since Holt’s death? Or better yet, what changes have been implemented since the very first CPS shooting death recorded back in 2006?
It is easy to see that almost nothing has changed. This school year is one shooting-death away from matching a record set in the 2001-2002 school year.
Each time the wave-like reaction reaches its roaring peak, it eventually breaks as time passes and the outrage yields to indifference.
The issue that urgently needs to be dealt with is that children are dying and more needs to be done to prevent such senseless deaths. And perhaps, the solution to the problem must begin within the communities affected by these crimes, but community outrage and protests are not enough. More has to be done on the federal level to prevent the guns from reaching the hands of youth.