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PROPOSED RESOLUTION
RECOGNIZING JUNE AS GUN VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH IN COOK COUNTY
WHEREAS, a national coalition of organizations has designated the first Friday in June as the sixth National Gun Violence Awareness Day, to help honor Hadiya Pendleton, a teenager from Chicago who was shot and killed weeks after marching in the presidential inaugural parade in 2013, as well as all other gun violence victims and survivors commemorating this day by wearing orange; and
WHEREAS, Americans are 25 times more likely to die by gun homicide than people in other high-income countries, and more than 100 are killed by gun violence daily on average with more than 13,000-gun homicides each year and 100,000 Americans are shot and injured each year; and
WHEREAS, in 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. This figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three other, less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were unintentional, involved law enforcement or whose circumstances could not be determined; and
WHEREAS, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2017, six-in-ten gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (23,854), while 37% were murders (14,542), according to the CDC; and
WHEREAS, in Illinois, more people are killed by guns than by cars. In 2014, 924 people were killed in car crashes, and more than 1,167 people were killed by firearms in Illinois, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation and CDC respectively; and
WHEREAS, on a per capita basis, there were 12-gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 - the highest rate in more than two decades; and
WHEREAS, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner Statistics there were 582 victims of gun homicides in Cook County in 2019, 114 of which took place in suburban Cook County; and
WHEREAS, the American Medical Association (AMA) h...
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