If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have any questions, please see my policies page or if you would like to contact me, you can do so here. You can find out more about me here. I sincerely thank you for visiting!

As a parent, this story in the Chicago Sun-Times just absolutely broke my heart. The paper interviewed a 10 year old that was walking with his best friend when the friend (also 10) was shot several times by warring gang members further down the block. The kid wasn’t the target, but it appears that he is the only one that was hit.

I can’t imagine even trying to explain to a 10 year old that his friend got shot, much less trying to deal with the aftermath of the kid watching his best friend get murdered. The quotes from the kid, sitting on the porch of his friend’s house, were just devastating.

“I feel real sad,” the fourth-grader said. “I miss him. We would be playing baseball or something or walking around.”

“I would tell them they were wrong for shooting him,” the boy said. “[Arthur] didn’t have anything to do with it.”

An absolutely senseless crime that will now affect that kid for his entire life. How will his rage and sadness play out? Like many in that neighborhood, it may lead to either an earlier death or prison. How will his life change because of a trip to the market on a normal, sunny day with his best friend?

These questions are, of course, unanswerable because no one knows what would have happened anyway. But how many more 10 year old kids need to watch their best friend get murdered before something is done in neighborhoods where crime is so rampant that a gunfight breaks out during the day?

I don’t have the answers, but I can’t imagine that nobody does.