Free Republic

Ke’Shon Newman’s daily routine is guided by guns — the hundreds of illegal pistols, revolvers and other firearms that torment his South Side neighborhood. […] The Auburn Gresham neighborhood is flooded with illegal guns: .40-caliber pistols, .380 semi-automatics, .38-caliber revolvers. Police recover as many as they can, searching apartments, stopping cars, cornering people on the street. A buy-back in June brought in hundreds of firearms. And in September, the mayor and other dignitaries gathered to mark a milestone: Police in the 6th District had recovered their 1,000th gun this year. […] Chicago’s gun violence has captured the national spotlight in...

A South Side bar owner’s dress code is generating calls for a boycott. Andrew Balint recently posted the dress code for Twelve Whiskey BBQ and it began circulating on social media. African-Americans in Pittsburgh began to take notice, saying the guidelines seem to target them. “I'm not going to give my money and enrich your livelihood if you don't respect me as a person. This is a matter of respect,” said Khamil Scantling. Twelve's dress code, titled "proper attire," contains a long list of clothing that's no longer accepted, including Timberland boots, Air Jordan sneakers, baggy clothing, flashy jewelry and...

Chicago, IL – A crowd of students swarmed a south side strip mall during Wednesday’s National Walkout Day demonstration, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. “They pretty much trashed this whole area,” GameStop manager Robert Owens told Blue Lives Matter on Thursday. Not all of the protests were peaceful. On Chicago’s South Side, Simeon Career Academy students descended on businesses situated in a strip mall behind the school, and began harassing customers and employees. “Things started out cool,” a Potbelly Sandwich Shop manager, who did not want to be further identified, told Blue Lives Matter. “But then some...

A man shot and killed his 22-year-old son after an argument over who would walk a dog escalated into a shootout Sunday morning on Chicago's Far South Side, police said. Officers responded to a call of a person shot at a home in the 9100 block of S. Woodlawn Ave. at about 8:20 a.m. in the city's Burnside neighborhood.

NOTICE TO FR READERS, DUE TO UNEXPLAINED TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY I COULD NOT GET IT BOLD AND RED ON FR. THAT AND HTML CODES TOO LONG. SORRYAwhile back I read an old book from the last decade called Tea With Terrorists. Why they kill, and how to stop them. You check it out By clicking here but to get to the heart of the matter its written by Craig Winn who went to interview Muslim terrorists in the west bank in Israel and how the Muslim religion commands murder and intolerance and how 9/11 and Islam are interconnected. It was a...

CLICK HERE In July of 2016, Brian Ball AKA mainestategop sat down in a Food court at the Northridge mall in Chicago to interview two men who belonged to the notorious Anti-Racist Action Antifascista Chicago South side gang. This Marxist street gang is the least known of Chicago's many gangs but it is among the most dangerous and lethal. ARA/Antifa has chapters all over the United States and Canada mainly in the upper and eastern portion of the mid-west. They attack neo-nazis, racists and anyone who doesn't agree with them including conservatives and libertarians. The Two men also involved in...

Late at night this month, the pastor’s phone beeped with a text message from an anguished parishioner. Andre Taylor, the church member’s great-nephew, had been shot and killed. “Dre had just turned 16,” the message on the Rev. Ira Acree’s phone read. “I think that it’s time to call for action and solicit help, have the National Guard to take over and patrol the Chicago streets.” Four days earlier, another text had appeared. A different parishioner’s granddaughter, Daysha Wright, a 21-year-old nursing student, had been shot to death in a car, leaving a 2-year-old son. At his desk at Greater...

Hours after six bodies were discovered in a Gage Park bungalow, Noemi Martinez waited by the phone nearly a thousand miles away in Texas, still not sure whether the victims were family members her husband had just visited over Christmas. "This is shocking and I don’t know what to think,” she said. “We’re trying to find out what’s going on.” Finally, about four hours after police found the bodies of five adults and one child around 10 years old, Martinez was resigned to the idea that they were her relatives. But she still had many questions about what happened inside...

Four people were killed and 52 wounded during shootings across Chicago over the weekend. After multiple weekends in a row of increased violence in the city, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is urging a fresh and more proactive approach to gun control. [Snip] At least 2,300 people have been shot in Chicago this year alone, according to the Chicago Tribune. According to their analysis, that's roughly 400 more incidents than during the same period in 2014.

(CBS) – Corey Brooks, the “Rooftop Pastor” from Chicago’s South Side who endorsed Republican Bruce Rauner for governor, now has a paid appointed position with the Rauner administration.Gov. Rauner’s office on Friday announced Brooks, senior pastor at New Beginnings Church, will be a director on the Illinois Tollway Board, the Downers Grove-based authority that controls toll roads.Brooks was among a group of African-American religious leaders in Chicago who backed Rauner, a wealthy businessman, over incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn, saying Democrats had taken black political support for granted.The tollway appointment would seem an odd fit for Brooks, a social crusader who...

Twelve people, including a 3-year-old child, were shot at a Chicago park in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Thursday night, authorities said. Ten adults and the 3-year-old were transported by Fire Department ambulances after in the attack in the 1800 block of West 51st Street in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, said Fire Department Deputy District Chief James Mungovan. A twelfth victim was believed to have driven himself to Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, a source said, citing preliminary information. …

A 15-year-old boy was shot and killed in a backyard about four blocks from President Barack Obama’s Chicago home, police said Tuesday. Cornelius German of Chicago was found unresponsive around 9:40 p.m. Monday. He had been shot in the back and was pronounced dead at the scene on the city’s South Side, police told The Associated Press. No arrests had been made as of late Tuesday afternoon, they said. The teen’s death comes about three months after the fatal shooting of another 15-year-old, Hadiya Pendleton, who was gunned down in a park about a mile from the Obama home in...

In Illinois, the Republican Senate nominee, Rep. Mark Kirk, is making a two-step connection between Saddam Hussein and Democratic candidate Alexi Giannoulias. Kirk accuses Broadway Bank (the shuttered institution run by Giannoulias' family) of giving a loan to an Iraqi businessman connected to Saddam Hussein, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Kirk said that in 2006, Broadway Bank loaned $22.75 million to Nadhmi Auchi and Tony Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer convicted of fraud and money laundering in 2008. Giannoulias' campaign responded that he left the bank a few months before the loan was approved. "Come on, again, that's political smokescreens,...

It was a night of exceptionally heavy violence on a warm summer-like night in Chicago. Six people were killed and at least 11 others were wounded across the South Side in an area stretching from the Back of the Yards neighborhood to the Calumet Heights neighborhood to the Morgan Park neighborhood. There were no arrests in any of the shootings.

While Michelle Obama fruitlessly pimped (oh ok, shilled, promoted) her corrupt, broke and now nationally known violent, native town, as a site for the 2016 Olympics, for the first time in her life she was seemingly proud of it. Her neighborhood "of working families -- families with modest homes and strong values.Sports were what brought our community together. They strengthen our ties to one another." It was also, and still is, a relatively high crime neighborhood. It is a testimony to Michelle and her parents that she emerged relatively unscathed except with a huge, but somewhat understandable, chip on her...

In August 1999, Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians. Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with...

South Side stigma: Scandal, mediocrity, obscurity are lumps fans have taken CHICAGO — Its most famous team is the one that cheated, the one forever branded the Black Sox. Its most enduring image might be the outfielder doused with beer while standing against the outfield wall, or maybe the two drunken fans running onto the field to attack a coach. Then again, it might be the decades of losing. Not the romantic kind tied to some mysterious curse, but the kind that comes with simply playing badly. As the Chicago White Sox take on the Los Angeles Angels for the...

CHICAGO - Its most famous team is the one that cheated, the one forever branded the Black Sox. Its most enduring image may be the outfielder doused with beer while standing against the outfield wall, or maybe the two drunken fans running onto the field to attack a coach. Then, again, it may be the decades of losing. Not the romantic kind tied to some mysterious curse, but the kind that comes with simply playing badly. As the Chicago White Sox take on the Los Angeles Angels for the right to play in the World Series — something they haven't...