The schedule for the festivities on Monday, July 4, 2022, remains on the website for Highland Park in Chicago. Parade in the morning, music festival and fireworks in the afternoon.
When the first bangs came from the roof of the house, some of the spectators thought that they were rockets that had been fired in advance.
Six people died and 31 were injured. It’s hard to ignore the symbolism of the shooting drama on the United States’ birthday.
National Day is celebrated in memory of July 4, 1776 when 13 British colonies in North America declared independence from Britain.
Fifteen years later, the founding fathers, led by James Madison, wanted to strengthen citizens’ right to protect themselves and their property from new tyrants. Then the second amendment to the constitution was made:
“A well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state, therefore the people’s right to possess and bear arms should not be curtailed” – so reads the United States’ famous second amendment.
For a few weeks then the US Congress adopted a reform package against the mass shootings. It included investments in the fight against mental illness, strengthened security in schools and more detailed background checks on young arms buyers. But there was not – and will not be – a total ban on so-called attack weapons in the United States. Opposition from Republicans is strong.
The tragedy for the residents of Highland Park – a prosperous Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population – is that their leaders actively sought to prevent the mass shootings. In June 2013, Democratic Mayor Nancy Rotering signed a local ban on assault weapons. It was immediately appealed to by a local doctor and the gun lobby in the state of Illinois.
The legal battle lasted for several years and continued all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which refused to try the case. Thus, a judgment was upheld in a lower instance which ruled that the ban might not prevent shootings, but reduce the risk of bloodshed if a shooting took place.
HD’s statement came 2015, another era in US law and politics. Conservative HD judges Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia made it clear that they wanted to test whether the ban was in conflict with other guiding rulings on the right to bear arms.
Scalia is no longer alive, but Thomas is now part of a solid Conservative majority in the Supreme Court. It was he who held the pen when HD a few weeks ago tore up a century-old law that said that special reasons were required for a gun license in the state.
Now, gun supporters are pointing to Highland Park to try to strengthen the thesis that strict laws do not prevent mass shootings. Republican Congressman Lauren Boebert tweeted earlier this weekend about the shooting drama at the Field’s shopping center in Copenhagen on that topic.
Those who fight for stricter rules may point to how the flow of weapons has come to define the United States. The Gun Violence Archive chooses to interpret mass shootings as events in which at least four people – in addition to the shooter – are killed or injured. With that definition, at least 314 mass shootings have occurred in the United States since New Year. The school shooting in Uvalde at the end of May was the most extensive,
President Joe Biden on Monday promised Highland Park residents to continue fighting gun violence – but he can count on massive opposition politically and legally. There is much to suggest that the United States will continue to be a country where young men can obtain weapons intended for firefighting in war.