The day before we spoke, King1, 26, had learned that his friend Lamont had been killed. He was at home when his cousin called to break the news and asked him to come over. ‘I’m on my way,’ King replied immediately, knowing what was being asked of him. He ran up to his room to retrieve his Glock, opened his box of bullets and, one by one, filled the clip.
Lamont was dead, though King couldn’t fully wrap his mind around the fact. He’d seen him only hours earlier, when Lamont and King’s cousin stopped by his house. They’d been shot at by their rivals the day before, and King had warned them to be careful: ‘Y’all need to keep y’alls’ heads up.’ Now the car Lamont died in sat empty on a nearby street, shot up and stained with his blood. King watched a video posted on Facebook of paramedics draping the body with a sheet and carrying it into an ambulance.
King knew what came next. He and his cousin would go out with their guns and ride through the neighbourhood until they found the men responsible. ‘I just wanted my get-back,’ he said. He wanted the people who killed Lamont to feel what he was feeling. And if he couldn’t find them, he’d find someone else he had beef with. King reasoned: ‘It could be a person who I don’t like or who I’m already into it with. I’m going to slide on them too and whoever else. That’s how I grew up with my feelings. That’s how I let off my rage.’
To King, retaliation felt less like a choice than an inevitability. ‘Whether I do it or not, somebody going to do it,’ he said. ‘If it ain’t me, I got other homies who feel the same way I feel. I got cousins, family members, they mommas. That’s how it be, and that’s how it’s going to always be. It’s a repeated cycle.’
His clip was full. Then King decided to do something that a year earlier he would not have done.
For King, and for many Americans like him, gun violence is not an exceptional event but a fact of life. In some parts of the United States, lethal violence has reached a scale exceeding recent wars and military occupations. Between 2020 and 2021, a young man in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighbourhood, where King is from, faced a higher risk of being killed than a US soldier deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. By age 40, around half of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents will have witnessed someone being shot.
Violent crime has fallen steeply across the US since 2021, though not everywhere. According to Chicago’s crime dashboard, fatal shootings in Chicago were up 7 per cent this year as of late September. But even in cities where the decline has held, a citywide figure is a poor description of how violence is experienced.
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