11 shot, including 3-year-old boy, as Chicago gun violence worsens :: 08/23/2014

Chicago is grappling with a crime paradox this summer: Even as overall crime including homicide drops, the rate of shooting incidents isn't slowing down and threatens to surpass previous years.

The city's violent summer continued Friday with at least 11 shootings, including one that left a 3-year-old boy hospitalized in critical condition.

The boy and a friend found the gun while at a home in a neighborhood on the city's West Side, and the boy was shot when it went off, police officials said. The child remains hospitalized in critical condition.

Officers are seeking the boy's father, who owned the gun and is out on parole.

Friday's shootings were the latest gun-related incidents in a recurring struggle for many Chicago communities. The city saw 205 incidents in 28 days, according to the most recent police statistics, with a higher number of shootings this year than the same time last year.

The boy's shooting comes only days after a 9-year-old boy was shot and killed on the city's South Side. Detectives are still investigating that case and have no suspects in custody.

Friday's shooting highlighted what Chicago's political leaders say is one of the main reasons behind the city's stubbornly high gun violence rates: easy access to firearms. A report earlier this summer from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office put it bluntly: "Chicago's violence problem is directly linked to the number of illegal guns available in the City."

Emanuel pushed for stricter oversight of the city's gun shops in May, in hope of cutting down on "straw" purchasers who buy guns on behalf of someone else. The mayor's proposal came after a federal ruling in January that overturned the city's ban on gun sales.

And in June, a new federally run data center in the city was tasked with studying the firearms used in Chicago shootings to detect trends in purchases and use.

Police have used other methods to combat the shooting epidemic, including analyzing social connections among residents of violent neighborhoods to determine who is most at risk of becoming a shooter or a victim. Many of these efforts are based on academic research, including a 2013 study from Yale University that found 6% of residents in a violence-plagued section of Chicago accounted for 70% of the homicides in that area.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-chicago-gun-violence-20140823-story.html