Do These Black Lives Matter? Chicago Sees Deadliest Weekend This Year Amid Protests

Charles Rex Arbogast
AP featured image
An unidentified person is loaded into an ambulance outside a commuter train station Friday, Dec. 8,2006, in Chicago where police said four people were shot. The indecent, in a downtown building that also houses a commuter station, sent people running and stranded commuters. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
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Chicago has seen the deadliest weekend in terms of gun violence this year and if you’re hoping that this is going to be made a national issue by the media or Black Lives Matter organizers, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

According to National Review, as the protests are ongoing, a striking number of people were killed and injured just this weekend alone:

A total of 24 people were killed and at least 61 injured by gun violence, more than half shot on Sunday. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said that 17 of the gun deaths occurred on Sunday alone.

The deaths included many younger people, including several 18-year-olds and victims in their 20s. Among those injured were a 15-year-old and three 17-year-olds.

During the same weekend last year, a much smaller number, 52 people, were injured by guns, eight of whom died. Gun violence in Chicago also spiked last weekend: 10 people were shot fatally and 39 more were injured during the city’s deadliest Memorial Day weekend in five years. A 16-year-old boy was among the victims.

The media began swarming the story of the unjust killing of George Floyd like piranha on a wounded animal, causing special interest groups such as Black Lives Matter to do the same. The killing became a national issue in mere moments as a narrative of old came back to the front; “white officers love killing unarmed black men.”

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Suddenly, people were marching in the street shouting “black lives matter,” turning their social media avatars into black squares, and virtue signaling to no end about the systematic racism of this country. All the while, the media was throwing gas on the flames as riots sparked throughout various cities.

While it’s apparent that there is a problem between the police and the black community that go deeper than distrust, many, like myself, began asking where all this outrage and concern was when it came to black on black crime. What about the black lives destroyed by the riots?

No one seemed to want to answer that question.

Chicago features unmitigated black on black crime with fatalities occurring so often it’s become synonymous with the city’s name. Black men and women die with such regularity there that it should, for all intents and purposes, be considered a massive epidemic that our popular culture should demand an end to given its penchant for doing so whenever a black man dies at the hands of a white officer.

Yet we hardly get a peep about it from talking heads and interest groups screaming the “black lives matter” slogan on television and in the streets. Why?

Apparently, black lives taken by black lives don’t matter much. According to Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal, black homicide among young black men is rampant with 90 percent of said homicides being committed by other black people.

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According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

Where’s the outrage? Where are the marches? Where’s the round-the-clock news coverage? Where’s the celebrity activism? Do these black lives not matter? If silence is violence, then by the left’s own rules, it’s the most violent group of them all.

Apparently, black lives only matter if certain criteria are met. If not, the media will ignore the death in the name of political expediency.

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