A bumper tally even by contemporary American standards, courtesy of the holiday weekend.
Among the first reports of gun violence over the holiday weekend happened Friday afternoon, when Telemundo Chicago cameras caught a confrontation between two groups of people on Chicago's North Avenue Beach, NBC Chicago reported. The altercation led to gunshots but no injuries. Although Friday's shooting resulted in no injuries, more than eight people were killed and at least 32 others were injured in Chicago shootings over the long weekend, according to NBC Chicago. Reports of shootings dotted the rest of the U.S., though the total number does not appear to be an outlier for a holiday weekend. The U.S. averages about 57 gun-related homicides per day, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. In Baltimore around 3:30 p.m. Friday, an argument between two men led to gunfire, which injured five people, officials confirmed to NBC News.
It's sometimes said that the next civil war in the U.S. would look more like "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland in the 1970s than the cleanly-mapped front lines of the last civil war. In the worst year in Northern Ireland, 472 people (from a population of about 1.5 million) were killed in violence there, a rate of 31 deaths for every 100,000 people; it was about 10 in every 100,000 people over the 1970s as a whole. The U.S. has about 25,000 homicides a year (about 20,000 using guns), for a rate of about 7.5 deaths for every 100,000 people. The methodologies used to assign Northern Ireland deaths to political violence have historical rigor; for the contemporary U.S., it's oil on the water, with some cities having longstanding homicide rates that make even 1972's Derry look like Disneyland. So while one should be on the lookout for Stochastic Troubles, don't panic–unless you're in Jackson or New Orleans.
