I lived in Chicago for many years. And I read the Chicago Tribune most days of the week. We always had a copy of the paper laying around at my job, and I usually would buy the sunday paper at home. In all those years I've read many stories about people getting killed with guns. And I can tell you how it would break down throughout the year.
In the fall, when the kids were first going back to school there would be a drastic increase in gang shootings. They were fighting to establish dominance around the school, I guess. And they seldom actually hit the people they were aiming at. Most of the time they would hit non-gang bystanders, who were also kids. This would go on for a couple of weeks, until the cops figured out the hot spots, and the gangs figured out who's on top, and then it would subside.
There would also be a sudden rise in gun violence and deaths in and around the month of June. And the reason for this is that the weather begins getting hot in Chicago in June, and people living in the poorer neighborhoods don't have air conditioning. So they begin to hang out on their porches in the evening. They drink, and they argue with the neighbors on the next stoop, and their gang-banger kids clash, and out comes the guns. This is the time of year when people shoot their best buddy, their neighbor, their wife, son, parent, whatever. And it's always over some ridiculous petty grievance, and almost always alcohol and/or drug fueled. In this same category are the bar flies who get to fighting, and on goes home or to their car and comes back with a gun, and shoots up the bar. These weren't weather related, though. they could happen any time.
Then there are the disgruntled lovers. These are almost always men, who upon finally realizing that the love of their life is not the fantasy love that they made up in their heads, decide that they must kill them in some sort of tragic act of vengeance. Sometimes, if the girlfriend has kids, they will kill the whole family. This would happen probably three or four times every year.
Then there were the home invasions that end in someone getting killed. The vast majority of these were done by junky neighbors, and were usually committed against old people. Junky-boy would break into the old lady's house next door because in his addled mind, he has imagined that she has some hidden stash of money, and he's so wasted that he forgets that she's probably home. When she catches him in the house, he decides he has to kill her because of course she knows who he is. So he kills the woman to cover up a silly B&E, steals $20 from her purse, and goes and gets high. He gets caught, thankfully, but what a waste. These idiots sometimes use guns, but usually not. Being junkies, they can't hold on to anything of any value, including a gun. So they tend to kill with whatever they find handy. If they find a gun, though, they will use it and then sell it.
In 23 years of living in Chicago, I don't recall an instance of a hardened criminal planning a crime, carrying it out, and killing people in the process. There was a horrible robbery of a chicken joint, where all the employees were killed, 6 of them. But when the killers were caught, they turned out to be a couple of local high school kids who had never done anything like that before or since. There were many armed robberies, of course, but when the criminals are sober, and plan the crime, they rarely ever actually fire their guns.
The only crimes I recall that involved automatic weapons were gang-banger drive-by shootings. But the bangers have constant look-outs as part of the normal way they do things, so such drive-by shootings would tend not to be all that successful. They were more likely to hit a bystander than their enemy gang members.
The bottom line, though, was that the vast majority of killings involving guns were the result of drunks, junkies, hot heads, and nuts getting hold of gun (often they bought them, themselves) and shooting each other, or the neighbors, or their lovers or even their own family members. Most of the people shot and killed in Chicago in any given year knew the people who killed them. They were not killed by plotting criminals. They were killed by really bad spur-of-the-moment decisions made by family, friends, and neighbors that were warped by drugs, alcohol, and rage.
And in almost all of these cases, if the guns had not been right there, so easy to pick up and pull the trigger in that moment of stupidity, the killings would never have happened.
