'Put Your Guns Down,' Chicago Police Chief Tells Gangs After Mass Shooting

At least 15 people were shot at a funeral home on Chicago’s South Side, the latest in the escalating carnage that has left the city on pace to record more than 700 homicides for the year and prompted President Trump to send 150 federal agents to deal with the violence.

The 15 were among 23 people shot Tuesday, four fatally. Through July 11, 373 people had been slain this year, 97 more than at the same time in 2019, Chicago Tribune data indicated.

“What makes this especially heinous is the shooters took advantage of family and friends who were gathered to mourn this young man,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said of Tuesday’s shooting at a Wednesday news conference.

The mass shooting was the city’s worst in recent memory. Police Chief David Brown decried what he called a retaliatory attack.

“The cycle of violence in Chicago, someone gets shot, which prompts someone else to pick up a gun. This same cycle repeats itself over and over and over again. This cycle is fueled by street gangs, guns and drugs,” Brown said.

He urged rival gang factions to “put your guns down.”

“We can’t keep meting out violence with violence. An eye for an eye makes us both blind. It’s destroying our families and perpetuates this endless cycle of gunshot victims night after night,” he said.

Trump earlier said earlier this week he would send federal agents to the city to tamp down the violence. Lightfoot initially rejected the plan, saying she would sue to prevent interference with Chicago police operations if the agents were tasked with breaking up peaceful racial justice protests as they were in Portland, Oregon.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Lightfoot, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul have mapped a strategy to ensure the federal government keeps promises not to send ununiformed federal officers into Chicago streets but instead send them to beef up resources at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives.

“That’s a big difference. In Portland, they ignored the U.S. attorney, put these agents on the street and … what happened was not only unconstitutional, it was undemocratic,” Lightfoot said.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump would deliver remarks Wednesday on Operation Legend, the Justice Department’s plan to fight violent crime, involving the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, DEA and ATF.

Trump long has had Chicago in his sights. He has often has claimed to have a secret plan for ending violence in the city but never has laid out anything concrete, instead hurling insults at Democratic leaders. The president has called the nation’s third largest city a “disgrace,” possibly fixating on the city because it launched the political career of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

The insults have gone two ways. City officials have tried to force him to take down or reduce the size of the 2,800-square-foot “Trump” sign on the side of his hotel-condominium building, and the City Council removed the honorary Trump Plaza street sign outside the building, which towers over the Chicago River, less than a mile from Lake Michigan.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump was forced to cancel a rally at the University of Illinois-Chicago because of anti-Trump demonstrators.