War Up Close & Personal

One night in May, the local news broadcast another story about a shooting in a Chicago alley. Two men, one about 40 and the other in his 20s, were gunned down. Sad to say, one gets used to such news.

About a month earlier, on a Saturday afternoon, a car turned into the alley behind our house, then slowed down; a gun was put to the head of a teenager in the car and fired; the teenager was dumped out of the car—dead—about 60 feet from my garage.

A year before that, two teens were gunned down in a parking lot behind a closed and condemned bar at the corner. While my neighborhood is what they call “gentrifying” (the bar may eventually be turned into a Starbucks) and has never been particularly bad, it still has its rough edges.

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James M. Kushiner is the Director of Publications for The Fellowship of St. James and the former Executive Editor of Touchstone.

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