Little Village mass shooting is another chapter in the saga of gun violence

A double-parked car is never a sight for sore eyes. A heated argument peppered with some four-letter words is to be expected. But when a firearm is brandished, a petty parking dispute can quickly escalate into a life-threatening one, as it allegedly did on a Little Village block over the weekend.

The details are still unclear regarding the early Sunday morning mass shooting in which four women and three men were wounded. And the gunman remains at large.

But what police and the president of the Little Village Community Council have divulged so far speaks to our trigger-happy culture, as well as the simmering hostility that seems to be brewing between some longtime Chicagoans and the newly arrived Venezuelan migrants.

Not only did the shooter open fire on a “large gathering of Venezuelans,” he kept firing in a backyard and through a first-floor apartment door, according to a police report. All apparently because of a quarrel over a double-parked car.

The mass shooting illustrates “a real poverty of the soul,” in which people don’t think twice about resolving conflicts with a gun, Ald. Michael Rodriguez (22nd) told the Sun-Times. He’s right.

Anger management courses are one solution for the quick-tempered. What Chicago, and America, don’t need is more guns around, when people easily fly off the handle and are triggered by daily inconveniences or by intolerance toward others, including those who don’t share their ethnic or racial backgrounds.

As Rodriguez called for restricting access to firearms, gun rights groups Monday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Illinois’ assault weapons ban, which was passed in response to the Fourth of July mass shooting in Highland Park nearly two years ago. But there is no good reason why anyone, other than a soldier at war, has to have a high-powered, military-grade gun. None.

The damage caused by the handgun believed to have been used in the Little Village mass shooting over the weekend was bad enough. Six of the victims are expected to survive, and one woman, shot in her abdomen and legs, was listed in critical condition. Had the gunman been equipped with a more powerful weapon, the outcome would almost certainly have been much worse.

Sunday’s shooting has been added to the nearly four dozen mass shootings recorded in the country so far this year by the Gun Violence Archive.

The alarm bells continue to ring. Americans are eager for the bloodshed to stop. What a shame too many lawmakers and gun rights advocates would rather look the other way and stall the path forward to keeping all of us safer.

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