A Chicago resident had quick reflexes when awoken by a barking dog barking at 1:20 in the morning on Sunday morning. It was then that he discovered an alleged intruder in the basement of his home and opened fire, shooting the potentially violent intruder.
According to ABC 7 Chicago, the man heard noises coming from his basement after being woken up by the barking dog. Having a sense of what might be going on, he grabbed his gun and proceeded down the stairs to investigate.
Once down the stairs, he found a young man in the basement. That 27-year-old alleged intruder lunged toward the resident, who opened fire with his firearm and struck the intruder. ABC 7 Chicago reported that the suspect was then “transported to Lutheran General Hospital in serious condition.” The resident was uninjured during the incident and the wounded suspect has been kept in police custody.
The incident comes as part of a continuing crime disaster in Chicago, called “Chiraq” by many on the right. As Chicago Business reported:
Four in five (77%) Chicago-area residents see public safety as a public health concern afflicting Chicago. When asked to judge the safety in their neighborhood, the average score was 5.02 (out of 10) for city residents—an unacceptably low number for a world-class city. This low rating is hardly surprising. Even Chicago’s historically low-crime North Side neighborhoods have experienced a spree of shootings, armed robberies, theft and muggings in recent months.
Chicago-area residents are clearly calling for city leaders to address their public safety concerns. Only 3% think public safety is better in Chicago than in other U.S. cities, with the vast majority (73%) agreeing that public safety is worse. Looking five years ahead, 76% of residents think public safety will either remain at current levels or worsen. Only 16% think public safety will improve.
Residents’ pessimism is understandable when you consider Chicago’s 2021 crime statistics. In 2021, Chicago saw more than 800 homicides. This is the city’s highest number of murders in a quarter century—and a 60% increase from 2019. More than 90% of these deaths were the result of gun violence. The increase in violent crime is even more staggering when we compare the number of gunshot victims in 2021 (4,300) to those from 2018 (2,800).
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Similarly, RT noted in a 2021 op-ed that Chicago’s decline mirrors America’s and that the crime problem has been around for years, but the politicians refuse to deal with it, saying:
With not much more than a week left to go before the new year, Chicago has had 812 murders in 2021, up from the 803 mark for 2020, versus 552 homicides in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The number of people shot has surged from 2,221 in 2019 between January and October to 3,766 in 2021, during the same period, a 70% increase.
But besides futile gestures like declaring gun violence a “public health crisis” and rhetorically demanding the violence “must stop,” little has been done by local politicos to stop the violence, while much has been done to allow it to flourish.
The Chicago Sun Times says that the current mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and her allies in the city council cut $1.8 billion from the policing budget last year, eliminating 600 vacant cop jobs after 1,000 police retired in the wake of the budget reductions.
Now the violence on the South and West sides of the city is creeping into the business districts, encouraged by fewer police and the violent anti-police political protests staged downtown that were fueled by the George Floyd killing in 2020.