‘They knew exactly what to do.’ Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering observes sadly that children responded more quickly than adults to the massacre at last week’s 4th of July parade.
■ The family of an 8-year-old twin paralyzed in the assault calls his survival “a true miracle.”
■ He was set for another round of surgery today.
■ An Army veteran who helped people to safety that day reunited yesterday with an 8-year-old girl he helped save.
■ Six days after the slaughter, Highland Park’s Central Avenue reopened to the public.
■ Rotering asked for a moment of silence at 10:14 this morning to honor the victims and mark the time the shooting began a week earlier.
Awkward timing. President Biden was set today to host a “celebration” of the new bipartisan law aimed at curbing gun violence …
■ … alongside Rotering and a delegation of Illinois lawmakers.
■ Under the banner “March Fourth,” suburban women plan a march on Washington Wednesday to push for more gun controls.
■ One of the organizers: “They f_____ with the wrong moms.”
■ The New York Times profiles a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school teacher who survived the attack that killed all his students: “In what he believed was an attempt to taunt him—or to make sure he was dead—the gunman let a cup of water drip from a desk onto Mr. Reyes’ back.”
The violence continues, every day. The Sun-Times reports that at least seven people were shot in downtown Chicago over three hours early Sunday.
■ Early today, police say, a man was wounded in a shootout with five gunmen at a South Loop parking lot.
■ “A dumb question about gun crime” from Mother Jones editorial director (and son of actor Richard Dreyfuss) Ben Dreyfuss: “Why don’t they just ask the manufacturers … to fire the gun once before they sell it and file the ballistics with the Ballistics Database so that every new gun in America can be tracked back to every bullet pulled out of someone’s head?”
■ Poynter’s Al Tompkins: “The assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shows how determined killers can find a way to build a homemade weapon, even in a country that has fewer gun deaths in a year than some major U.S. cities experience in a weekend.”
Company’s coming. Trump whisperer Steve Bannon says he’s willing to testify to the Jan. 6 committee.
■ A committee member tells CBS that ex-White House counsel Pat Cipollone said “valuable” stuff in testimony last week.
■ CNN’s updated a minute-by-minute timeline of the events that day.
■ The Onion offers an alternative graphical guide to the insurrection.
‘A public health disaster for decades to come.’ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: Limited access to abortion will affect the whole nation.
■ Popular Information spotlights corporations—including AT&T, CVS, Amazon, Google and Comcast—that have cut six-figure checks to gubernatorial candidates pledging to ban abortion.
■ A Texas woman plans to fight a ticket for driving in a high-occupancy lane on grounds that her unborn child was a passenger.
COVID rising—again. The Washington Post explains that the BA.5 variant—“the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen”—is spreading, raising the prospect that even the multiply vaccinated and the previously infected will suffer repeats.
■ Hong Kong is mulling a fresh round of movement restrictions for the infected.
1 p.m. today. The Sun-Times’ new executive editor, Jennifer Kho, takes our questions and yours in a live Chicago Public Square/Rivet360 interview on Twitter Spaces …
■ … to discuss, among other things, the paper’s future under its new ownership by WBEZ’s parent organization (January link).
■ Hear previous Chicago Media Talks podcasts here.
■ Enjoy a free Slurpee as you listen.
‘No aliens, no spaceships, no invasion of Earth.’ Vulture serves up an oral history of the groundbreaking science fiction movie Contact, which debuted 25 years ago today …
■ … a year after the death of its author, astronomer Carl Sagan—who talked to your Chicago Public Square columnist 17 years before that.
Doubly drenched? The Chicago area faced the prospect of two doses of bad weather today.
■ Good weather blessed the weekend edition of Taste of Chicago, but Axios reports it nevertheless “left a bad taste in some mouths.”
While the weekend was unfolding … Here’s some of what you may have missed if you don’t follow Chicago Public Square on Facebook:
■ Columnist Steven Richard Sheffey: “What happened in Highland Park on July 4 is living—and dying—proof that one political party is tearing our nation asunder.”
■ Hundreds rallied there over the weekend to demand a ban on sale and possession of assault weapons.
■ Police records reveal a troubled home life for the alleged shooter.
■ Author and filmmaker Michael Moore’s proposing a 28th Amendment—to replace the 2nd.
■ An ex-Chicago Public Schools teacher faces 16 years in prison for the sexual assault of a teenage student.
■ The Post previews 10 new anti-LGBTQ laws—all targeting schools.
■ A not-so-fond farewell to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson from comedian Tom Walker’s fictional reporter Jonathan Pie …
■ … which brings to mind this Square commentary from 2019: “A disgrace, an abomination, a festering piece of excrement.”
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