7-Year-Old Boy Amari Brown Among 7 Killed in Chicago Shootings over 4th of July Weekend

Beginning Thursday night and continuing through Sunday morning, 38 people were shot–and 7 killed–in Chicago during the July 4th weekend.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the Sunday fatalities was a 23-year-old man who was shot and killed about 2:30 am “in the Northwest Side Albany Park neighborhood.” Two others with him were shot and wounded. In another Sunday fatality, a 26-year-old was “sitting in his car in the 7700 block of South South Shore Drive about 1 a.m. when someone walked up and fired shots into the car.”

A 17-year-old was shot in a separate incident and taken to the hospital, where he is stable.

On Friday, a different 17-year-old was shot and killed while playing basketball with his brother at Hadiya Pendleton Park in the 4300 block of South King.  A gunman opened fire around 4:45 p.m., killing the high school junior. The boy’s aunt said, “He was a loving child, getting ready to be a senior at high school. He was going to start a summer job on Monday. He was very excited about it.”

Another weekend fatality was 7-year-old Amari Brown, who was pronounced dead Sunday morning “at 1:56 am.”

Brown was “standing in the 1100 block of North Harding” with a 26-year-old woman when shots rang out just before midnight. “The woman was also shot in the chest and taken to Stroger [Hospital], where her condition stabilized.”

Brown’s grandmother said, “It’s crazy. Like who would shoot a 7-year-old? He got shot in the chest. Who would do that? To a baby? All the kids that are getting killed out here – it’s crazy. When is it going to stop?”

Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, among which are an assault weapons ban, a limit on where guns can be sold to law-abiding citizens, and of course the statewide requirement to acquire a Firearm Owner ID card (FOID) before acquiring a gun. Yet news of homicides and gun-related crime continue to fill the pages of Chicago papers and news outlets.

On June 6 Breitbart News reported that Rev. Michael Pfleger blamed the NRA for the high crime rate in Chicago and suggested the gun rights group would “will pay pay for the murder of [Chicago] children.”

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.