With More Children in Peril, a Call to Unarm
The pulpit pushes gun regulations in Chicago as deaths of youth increase.
CHICAGO, July 19, 2009— -- Chastity Turner, 9, was bathing the family dog on her grandmother's porch at the end of June. it was the beginning of summer in Chicago. There was sunshine, a garden hose and drool. Then gun shots.
"I've learned that life is short," says Chastity's cousin, Chante Moffett.
Life was much too short for Chastity, ending that day when a bullet pierced the back of her neck, the result of a gang shooting from a moving van. She became one of 40 Chicago school children gunned down this year, but sadly not the latest. Two teen boys were shot Friday evening near St. Sabina Catholic Church, one has been released from the hospital while the other remains in stable condition.
"How many children have to die?" asks Rev. Michael Pfleger, a gun activist and the St. Sabina priest. "How many children have to die before we say, we've got to do something? Everybody waits until it's your child."
In the first six months of this year, 199 murders occurred in the streets of Chicago, more American fatalities than in either Afghanistan or Iraq for that period. President Barack Obama has yet to speak about gun regulation and congress is not set to consider gun legislation anytime soon, so the pulpit is taking action.
Pfleger is taking aim against gun violence and using the church to do so. He is flying the flag outside his parish upside down, a sign of distress used only in extreme emergencies. He says the city of Chicago is in just such an emergency.
"It's an epidemic," says Pfleger. "I've had four funerals of young children so far this year. A 13-year-old going to the store, a 15-year-old killed on a bus. All gun [crimes]."
Some say Pfleger is abusing a national symbol by using the flag to draw attention to gun crimes. But to Pfleger, the flag means nothing compared with the pain he sees in countless grieving parents.
"Some of them use every bit of energy they have to get up in the morning," he says. "Everyday they're fighting to continue on remembering their child's face lying in a casket. Nobody should have to deal with that in a civilized country."
