Good Guy with a Gun #39: Chicago, IL
Original incident: December 9, 2023. Two bad guys with guns jump out of a car and start shooting. The CCL holder didn't let them get away with it.
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What made them pick this guy?
Friday night had slipped into Saturday morning in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. A man was walking down the street when two other men came by in a car and started shooting at him.
But why? I hear things like this and wonder if it’s gang violence. But here are three reasons not to think so:
The victim was 31 years old; the aggressors were 37 and 44. The average age of members of “youth gangs” is 17-181, and the median age of people in the Chicago Police Department’s gang database was 222.
The victim had a concealed carry license (CCL), which doesn’t fit the profile of a gang member.
Chicago is rife with this kind of violence without explanation. For example, this incident appeared in a write-up of three shootings that night, one of which happened literally one minute after this one.
So we don’t know their reasons for choosing this target. Whatever they were, it led them astray.
They hit the victim in the torso with at least one bullet, but he shot back at them to good effect. The 44-year-old, Edwin Lopez, was pronounced dead at the scene by a shot to the chest. The 37-year-old was shot in the shoulder and taken to the hospital.
The victim and the younger shooter were taken to hospitals and were in fair condition at the time of the reporting.
Sources
WBBM / CBS News Chicago and The Chicago Sun-Times carried this story.
I couldn’t find any other local news focusing on this incident; however, Dave Urbanski wrote it up for Breitbart, and it appeared in two round-ups: the Block Club Chicago linked above and another article by Urbanski published in September 2024 called, “10 times concealed carriers in Chicago stopped crooks in their tracks in the last year.”
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
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This data comes from a post that’s undated, but that has its earliest appearance in the Wayback Machine in October 2024.