Gun Violence Is A Rich Person’s Problem
I was traveling for work in Illinois on July 4 and was not too many miles from Highland Park when a shooter killed seven and injured dozens more at a parade that day in that northern suburb. A few days later I was in Austin with a client, a few hours from Uvalde, Texas, the site of an elementary school massacre of 19 children and two teachers a few weeks earlier.
Two of the many shootings that have made the news these last few weeks. Afterall, they occurred at a school and a holiday parade, two very popular things.
I lived in the Chicago area for 20 years and it is still my favorite place to live – except it is so cold. Highland Park is a beautiful city on the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from the Chicago Botanical Gardens. I’ve eaten in Highland Park and visited friends there.
When the Highland Park shooting occurred, I saw a Twitter post almost immediately with a comment about how Highland Park was an affluential neighborhood where “that kind of violence didn’t happen.”
The post infuriated me. In my more charitable moments, I would call the Twitter writer naive. Other times I bristle and call out the welcomed ignorance of the writer. It prompted me to reflect on a conversation I recalled years earlier with a wealthy workmate at the Chicago prosecutor’s office. When I told her of my horror that a 10-year-old had been raped in a nearby city. Her immediate comment back to me, “I didn’t know they had that many poor people there.”
As I calmed myself, I looked it up. The average household income in Highland Park is $232,000. The average household income in Uvalde is about $56,000.
Our sensibilities tell us that grief and sadness is not a matter of rich or poor.
Here in the United States, we are very good at killing people with guns, whether self-inflicted or directed at others. But if we collectively continue to believe gun violence is a poor people’s problem, we will never stop the killing.
