How a weekend in Chicago turned into a storm of lead that left 15 people shot — and blew away Mayor Brandon Johnson’s central campaign lie that crime is down
We have a new name in these columns for the “mayor” of the city of Chicago.
We have called Brandon Johnson “Mayor 6.6 percent,” a reference to some particularly dreadful polling numbers that have followed him around; but polls bounce up and down, while records have a nasty habit of sticking around.
Thus, from now until the hour of his long-awaited, imminent, ignominious defeat, he will be known herein as the Notorious MBJ — an acrimonious acronym for “Mayor” Brandon Johnson — a derivative of the moniker we have bestowed upon his longtime political ally and former employer at the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the Notorious SDG, Stacy Davis Gates. This is right and just, as he is her sock puppet, her mini-me. She is the ventriloquist; he is her talking dummy with an empty wooden head.
Johnson was preparing for his doomed re-election campaign, teasing Chicago about his intentions as though coyness might somehow erase the controversies and disappointments of his first term. Having begun his term by focusing on funding the CTU through the shell corporation known as the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) by defunding the Chicago Police Department (CPS) — the formula being –($CPD)>CPS>CTU$ -- he is now playing the tough on crime role as if he is a woke casting director’s choice for Eliott Ness in a remake of The Untouchables, a 21st Century J. Edgar Johnson.
Crime is down, sayeth the Notorious MBJ.
Then came the Guns of August to blow his big lie away. Late on Saturday night, August 29, Washington Park erupted in gunfire. When it was over, 15 people had been shot. One dead. Fourteen wounded.
The dead man was 35-year-old Rontonio M. Guterz, a father of three. You might have heard him, without knowing it. He was an alumnus if the famous “Bucket Boys,” accomplished percussionists whose presence graces local sporting events and other public events. He was reportedly an innocent participant in the event, attending with his girlfriend (who was also hit by the mindless shooter) and her mother. Police recovered at least 36 shell casings.
According to police reports, two men dressed in black and wearing ski masks opened fire from Cottage Grove Avenue, and someone at the gathering apparently returned fire. Police were already attempting to disperse the crowd when the shooting began. Interim Police Superintendent Fred Waller subsequently said investigators believe the attack was “somewhat targeted” and probably involved multiple shooters and an exchange of gunfire. It was the largest mass shooting in Chicago so far this year, amidst the usual stiff competition.
Despite the aversion of local Democrats to the federal government, the FBI is now involved and is offering up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and indictment of those responsible. Don't expect a long line of informants at FBI headquarters, because while the State of Illinois may have banned the death penalty, local gangs — the de facto law on the streets — have certainly not.
This wasn’t simply some mysterious “large gathering” that spontaneously materialized in Washington Park. It was a reunion of people who had lived in the Robert Taylor Homes (RTH). Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, as they used to say on Seinfeld. After all, that doesn’t make the people attending responsible for what happened. Alderman Jeanette Taylor (20) has explicitly said the shooting had nothing to do with the reunion itself, and survivors described it as a “mostly peaceful” community gathering before the gunfire erupted, like 9/11 before the planes hit the World Trade Center.
Unfortunately, the RTH alum Bucket Boys did not provide the percussion; it was provided by other possible alums who use a different instrument to shatter the sounds of a party night — a MAC-10 machine pistol or suitable facsimile thereof. Their revenue model is a little different than getting tips from tourists — it’s the profit they make from killing area victims — the profit they make from junkies’ dreams by shooting drugs and bullets into their furtive brains.
But history matters because RTH are inseparable from Chicago’s long and frequently disastrous history of government attempts to solve social problems through bricks and mortar. Those of us who have lived here long enough remember it well. RTH represented the great bricks-and-mortar theory of social engineering: tearing down deteriorated housing, building enormous new high-rise projects, concentrating on thousands of poor families in them, and expecting the physical environment to produce social improvement.
It didn’t.
The buildings themselves eventually became synonymous with concentrated poverty, gangs, drugs, violence, and government failure. Chicago ultimately conceded the experiment had failed and demolished the complex as part of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation.
But buildings can be demolished much more easily than social problems. People who lived in the projects had to go somewhere. Families were dispersed throughout Chicago, while the city began a decades-long attempt to replace concentrated public housing with mixed-income development and housing vouchers.
That history is complicated. It deserves considerably more seriousness than either romanticizing the old projects or blaming their former residents for Chicago’s present violence. But it also contains a lesson Chicago repeatedly refuses to learn:
You cannot solve a human problem merely by changing the real estate
And on August 29, not far from where those towers once stood, the old problem announced itself with gunfire. Thirty-six shell casings. Fifteen people shot. One man dead, and once again Chicago began the familiar ritual. Police tape goes up. Detectives collect casings. Witnesses are interviewed. Politicians issue statements. Reporters quote the statistics. Everybody announces that violence is unacceptable. Newspaper stories end with the usual throwaway tagline: detectives are investigating. Investigating what? Certainly not any eyewitness reports. Everybody's deaf, dumb, and blind when something like this happens. Why? Because snitches get stitches and acute lead poisoning out of the barrel of a street sweeper.
Then we wait for the next shooting. The wait is never too long, and the victims come in droves. The Notorious MBJ says murders are down, but the numbers make him a liar. Homicides through August stood at 289, compared with 287 at the same point last year. So, he's lying. He’s always lying — like The Terminator, that's what he does, that's all he does. And that's all the rest of the Democrats in this benighted city and state do too. It’s the big lie. Everything’s fine. We don’t need any help here.
Those numbers matter. A serious argument about crime must acknowledge them, but here’s the other number that matters: 15. Fifteen human beings shot in one Chicago park in a matter of moments. In any other city, any normal city, this would be a cause for civic outrage. People would rise up demanding that the “mayor” do something about it. In this sick city, the only outrage is over the fact the Trump administration had the temerity to call out the city for its perpetual status as the murder capital of America.
What is wrong with us? Why do we keep electing people who use a mass shooting, which anywhere else in the country would be an outrage, as a political cudgel against somebody who is not even on the ballot this November, or this March? What kind of stupid pills have been put into Lake Michigan that make people accept this Kafkaesque reality that we live in and direct their anger at guy who doesn't get any closer to Chicago than Medinah Country Club and has absolutely no ability to enforce law and order because our governor and our mayor won't let them. He offers his help over and over again, and he is repeatedly told, "We don't need any help here, we've got it all under control," even as the yellow tape is put out yet again, even as the blood flows on the green grass of our parks. Even as the bodies lie bleeding because there's no ShotSpotter to detect the murders. We can't even clean up the corpses because the funeral homes leave them to rot.
What kind of a madhouse have the Democrats created by abusing their one-party rule? Because the voters of this city seem to be brain-dead and have had their conscience surgically removed. Honestly, George Orwell could not have contracted a weirder sort of Big Brother. Then Big Brother JB Pritzker and his stooge, Brandon Johnson. In this town, truth is far, far stranger than fiction could ever be.
The Washington Park shooting also illustrates why the gang problem cannot be discussed exclusively through the vocabulary of “root causes.” Root causes matter. Poverty matters. Family structure matters. Education matters. Employment matters. Addiction matters. Housing matters. It makes sense to analyze how things got the way they are, because you can't change them without understanding how you got to this point. But fundamentally, it doesn't really matter to the 15 people who got shot in Washington Park, because it is what it is. And you gotta deal with the problem now, in real time, not by getting in a time machine and going back to 1619, but by putting things in place today that may have an effect in five or six generations.
We've got people doing drive-bys right now, right as I write this. That takes law enforcement, folks. That means going after the bad guys, taking away their guns. And putting them in jail and throwing away the key so they don't get out again until they're too old to gangbang, or they don't get out at all, or they don't get out alive.
Remember when we had a death penalty in this state? Now we don't. I don't think that's a good thing, because there's still a death penalty out in the streets. There's a death penalty if you flash the wrong gang sign, or if you're standing next to somebody who flashes the wrong gang sign, or if you rat out somebody who shoots somebody who flashes the wrong gang sign.
Let's keep it real, folks. This isn't about root causes, unless “The Root Causes” is a street gang I haven’t heard of. This is a criminal enterprise that the city of Chicago, if not aiding and abetting it, is at least turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to, pretending it doesn't exist in concert with a cowardly media. No such constraints limited the media in the Roaring 20s, when Irish and Italian gangs were the scourge of the city, and they were eliminated with the full cooperation if the Feds. Maybe we should screen a double bill of Batman and The Untouchables for our Dumbocrats. Of course, back then, no one was concerned about the “adverse impact” on Catholics, Italians, or Irish. They were concerned about the adverse impact on guys found with more holes in them than Swiss cheese, as were the law-abiding Irish and Italian Catholics and the rest of the citizenry, just as today’s Chicagoans are.
That’s what our woke ruling class can’t seem to get through their thick, cynical, self-serving skulls.
But none of those observations about root causes change what must happen at 11:30 on a Saturday night when armed men in ski masks are firing into a crowd. In real time, root causes have no more impact on reality than root beer.
At that moment, the problem is not sociology. The problem is the men with the guns; it's the shooters, not what they shoot. You get the shooters off the street and keep them off the street, and those guns aren't going to walk around town aiming themselves, shooting off their ammo, reloading themselves. They don’t have arms, or legs, or trigger fingers. They'll just lie there until the cops come and pick them up, like they do the spent bullet casings now. It's easy once you get the gangbangers off the streets and into the jails. Lock them up and throw away the key — government has a fundamental responsibility to identify them, arrest them, prosecute them fairly and, if they are convicted of serious violent crimes, incapacitate them.
That isn’t right wing. It isn’t a left wing. It’s a King's thing, if you know what I’m saying.
Public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity, to life itself, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness -- the reasons our republic was created. It’s government’s prime directive. That's why we pay our taxes, folks. And boy, do we pay, and pay, and pay! For what? Acute lead poisoning?
Chicago also must confront the culture of witness intimidation that makes solving gang-related shootings next to impossible. Police cannot solve murders when witnesses reasonably believe that cooperating with authorities could endanger themselves or their families.
Witness protection therefore isn’t some peripheral criminal-justice program. In neighborhoods terrorized by violent organizations, it is part of the infrastructure of public safety. So is adequate police staffing. So is prosecution. So is technology — if technology actually works and survives serious cost-benefit scrutiny.
Johnson’s termination of the ShotSpotter contract remains controversial. Its supporters regarded it as an important tool for rapidly identifying gunfire. It wouldn't surprise me if the notorious MBJ said, "Well, we didn't need ShotSpotter to detect the Washington Park shootings," because that's the kind of brain-dead argument that comes out of this guy's mouth every time he opens it, causing the entire population of the city of Chicago to hit the mute button or change the channel. Chicagoans don't just dislike MBJ, they despise him. And that includes his core identity politics constituency. They may, in fact, despise him even more than the other segments of the electorate in this town, which is amazing. It is a feat that rivals defying gravity or inventing a perpetual motion machine. It's right up there with getting defeated by a Democrat City Council 50 to nothing. A shutout!
You can hear the howls of laughter thundering down from the political pantheon from the ghost of our political Zeus, the late, great Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Chicago should enthusiastically employ technology like ShotSpotter that can help first responders respond quickly and identify the violent offenders EVERYBODY wants off our streets (except gangs including DSA) while respecting legitimate civil-liberties concerns. The same pragmatic standard should apply to cameras, license-plate readers, and other investigative tools. This is not about constructing a surveillance state. It is about constructing a city in which firing a gun at another human being carries a meaningful probability that you will be caught and severely prosecuted to the full extent of the law regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, hair color, tattoos, facial jewelry, political affiliation, or anything else other than guilt or innocence, because deterrence ultimately depends on consequences. If violent offenders believe they can shoot someone and disappear into the city, the deterrent effect of even severe penalties approaches zero.
That is where Washington Park should focus our minds marvelously, even those that are clouded by wokeism and TDS, as in Trump Derangement Syndrome. The FBI’s involvement in this case should also puncture the peculiar Chicago political notion that federal law enforcement is inherently an intrusion. The federal government is already helping investigate this shooting. Good. Contrary to the mindless knee-jerk reactions of the notorious MBJ and Jelly Belly Pritzker, we do need help in this town. We do need help in this state. We need all the help we can get. If we can get it from the most powerful force on the face of the earth in the history of the human race, we're in no position to turn it down over some petty political dispute. We should be putting a big sign up over the skyline that says in big red letters, HELP! We should borrow that bat signal from Gotham City. But there is no Batman.
On the other hand, there is a National Guard. If this massacre in Washington Park doesn't prompt you to pick up the bat phone, I don't know what does. Maybe we should screen Batman movies for Democrats. I might give them a little bit of a clue as to what to do, because clearly they can't handle it, and they can't handle the truth!
If federal agencies have intelligence, forensic capabilities, racketeering statutes, firearms expertise, or investigative resources that can help Chicago dismantle violent criminal organizations, Chicago should use them. That's what our great former police chief tried to tell these knuckleheads, and maybe that's why he's not police chief anymore. Because he got tired of talking to the brick wall we call MBJ. Public safety should not become another front in the endless national partisan war. Chicagoans don’t particularly care whether the badge on the investigator says CPD, FBI, or ATF. They want the shooter caught.
There is another uncomfortable truth buried in all of this. The overwhelming victims of Chicago’s gun violence are not the affluent people like billionaire J.B. Pritzker who spend their time arguing about crime policy on television or social media. They are Chicagoans living in the neighborhoods where the shootings actually happen. They're the people working for an hourly wage in this town. They're the people who hold three or four jobs to make ends meet. They're the people who are just trying to make a living in the city and just hoping they get home at night without getting caught up in the gang crossfire. They're the people who hope they don't come home and find out their baby got shot just for standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus, or sitting in a stroller while some gangbanger starts spraying lead all over the street.
The mayor seems to think the people doing the shooting are his constituency instead of the people getting shot, and don't think they don't know it. He seems to think the people who just came over the border from Venezuela are his voters. Well, they can't vote, or so he tells us. So what's he thinking, or is he thinking at all? Or is he just doing whatever Stacey Davis Gates tells him to do, which is just get more money, more money, more money? And guess what, the Chicago Public Schools get paid per Venezuelan. The system gets paid on student headcount, and it doesn’t matter what color the heads are or whether they habla español or ingles.
The characteristics of the victims. should make effective policing a civil-rights issue rather than something standing in opposition to civil rights. People have a right to public safety no matter what color their skin is and no matter what their zip code is. MBJ seems to be a lot more concerned with the rights of the perpetrators than their prey, and don't think they don't know it. Ask the courageous folks at Chicago flips red. Poor policing can destroy communities. So can no policing. The challenge is to build a system that aggressively pursues violent offenders while holding police themselves accountable to the law.
Those propositions are not contradictory unless politicians insist on making them so, and that brings us back to the divider-in-chief, the Notorious MBJ, who seems to think he's running against Donald Trump, who’s down in Mar-a-Lago or Camp David or the White House, instead of the crowd of candidates that's running against him right here in the town he’s running into the lake like an urban submarine. Oh, yes, the vultures smell death. The lions sense a weak member of the herd, easy political pickings, a wounded animal. Sometimes it seems like the entire city of Chicago is running against the fool, which augurs well that it will vote against him, decisively correcting the grievous error it made in the last mayoral election. It's pretty obvious what he and Fat Boy Pritzker are doing. They're using Trump to deflect the blame from themselves. Down south. Don't take the bait. Don't fall for that. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump. In fact, Donald Trump is offering to help and has offered to help repeatedly, but JB and BJ say we don't need any help. We're doing just fine. Look, only 15 people got shot. It could have been more. The gangs could have dropped a nuclear bomb on Washington Park. It used to be worse, 50 years ago. We used to have dinosaurs in Washington Park. Used to be in the lake.
How come the people of Chicago buy these incredibly insipid excuses? Do they hate Donald Trump so much that it just blinds them to the truth? The mayor of Chicago is accountable for these shootings. Not the president of the United States. He doesn't run the city of Chicago, he doesn't run the state of Illinois. And if you don't believe me, just ask MBJ and JB Pritzker. They will tell him and tell you in no uncertain terms that he's not even welcome in this state. He's not even welcome in DuPage County, much less Chicago, much less being in charge of anything here. No, no, no. You can't blame your finger at Orange Man bad. Mayor MBJ, no sir, we're not gonna let you get away with that. The people of Chicago aren't gonna let you get away with that. Your own identity politics base ain't gonna let you get away with that. You're gonna be held accountable.
The bill has come due. Here are the particulars. One dead. Fourteen wounded. At least 36 shell casings. Masked gunmen firing into a crowd. Return fire. An FBI investigation and reward. This happened in Chicago in 2026, and that's just one night. And what is going on — four years of incompetence, insensitivity, and immorality.
Chicago was once known as ‘the city that works.” It can be again. But the first requirement of a city that works is that its citizens can live, work, raise children, operate businesses, ride trains, walk through parks, and gather with old friends without having to calculate the probability of encountering gunfire.
Economic development depends upon public safety. Housing depends upon public safety. Schools depend upon public safety. Neighborhood investment depends upon public safety. Prosperity follows security far more readily than security follows prosperity.
Therefore, Chicago needs to stop treating gang violence as inevitable. It is a human behavior which responds to incentives, deterrence, and consequences.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out what to do. Enforce the law. Protect witnesses. Support effective police officers. Use technology that demonstrably works. Prosecute violent offenders to the full extent of the law. Cooperate with federal law enforcement when federal resources can help. Fight the vultures who enrich themselves in the exoneration industry. And keep murderers and cop killers in jail where they belong, at all costs. And above all, stop pretending that demanding public safety somehow betrays the neighborhoods suffering most from its absence. Those neighborhoods are precisely why it matters.
The Guns of August should not become another Chicago story remembered for three days and then swallowed by the next news cycle. Fifteen people were shot. One family is burying a father of three. Fourteen other people carry the wounds. Somebody knows who fired those guns. The FBI wants to know. The Chicago Police Department wants to know. And every Chicagoan should want to know. Because whatever our politics, whatever our race, whatever neighborhood we live in and whatever name appears on the mayor’s office door, there ought to be one proposition upon which Chicago can still agree:
The streets should belong to the people who obey the law — not to the people breaking the law with guns in August.
