Shoot Skeet, Not on Streets!

From reading Mike's blog, my attention and awareness of shootings in my own area, state, region and country has increased. Thank you Mike for focusing that awareness of gun violence, since we share an antipathy for illegal guns and for illegal firearm violence to our fellow humans.  (I'm not too keen on any violence to our fellow human beings, but I recognize that some of it is both legal and necessary.)

Minneapolis, MN (there are other cities with the name Minneapolis) is not a particularly violent metro area, and our crime rates are actually going down in many categories here........ so it has somewhat shocked me to see multiple shootings in the same day, often within an hour or two.  I don't know if before I simply wasn't paying attention well enough, or if this is marking some turn around in those declining crime stats.  But I do like posting these here, because I hope it will get more than the superficial, quickly forgotten, barely perceived level of attention as a public issue.  That's why I post these.  In these specific instances, I posted them because our streets are OUR streets, our public places.  We deserve for them to be safe, not something out of a Hollywood (as opposed to historically accurate) cowboy shoot-em-up movie where they are a location for gun fights.

From the STrib:

One person was shot late Monday in Minneapolis' Camden neighborhood, police said.
Just after 11 p.m., police and an ambulance were called to the scene at 39th and Fremont Avenues N. No other details, including the condition of the victim and whether suspects were identified or arrested, were available.
A Metro Transit bus driver reported hearing possible shots at 11:05 p.m. The shooting occurred on the street, not on a bus, police said.
It was the second shooting reported in Minneapolis in the space of several hours.

and, also from the STrib:

A woman was shot to death and a man was wounded Monday night in south Minneapolis, police said. The woman's death marked the city's fourth homicide of 2011.
A car bearing the victims arrived at Abbott Northwestern Hospital minutes after police received reports of gunshots in the 3400 block of Park Avenue S. about 8 p.m., said police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer. The woman was declared dead in the emergency room, he said. .
Palmer, speaking at the perimeter of a block-long cordoned-off area, said that homicide investigators and canine handlers were on the scene and that details so far were sparse.
 "We're not really sure what the circumstances were," he said, adding that it appeared that the victims were shot on the street.