Gun violence has been an extremely relevant and controversial topic in American news, but this topic has mainly only been discussed recently in terms of school shootings, etc. What isn’t being discussed is the smaller scale gun violence that is affecting people’s lives every day like those living in the inner-city of Chicago. This violence in Chicago is most definitely not a new topic. It is an issue that has been affecting the city for decades yet nobody seems to know what to do about it. It has led to a continuous cycle of brutalities, dangers, and incarcerations, over flooding our jails/prisons, ruining family dynamics, and raising the death toll. As bad as it all sounds, there is nothing being done to change these recurring behaviors and patterns.

People know these dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago exist and that people are being killed and wounded every day from the violence, but because of the way we have been socialized, we are “blinded” by these actions and choose to ignore them. We have this set idea that it isn’t our problem. Because we don’t live in these areas and aren’t experiencing the daily dangers, we feel we don’t have a part in it. A huge aspect contributing to these feelings is the separation between agent and target groups. Bobbie Harro discusses these different groups in her article The Cycle of Socialization. In the article she writes, “If we are examining our agent identities, we may experience guilt from unearned privilege or oppressive acts, fear of payback, tendency to collude in the system to be self-protective, high levels of stress, ignorance of and loss of contact with the target groups, a sense of distorted reality about how the world is, fear of rising crime and violence levels, limited worldview, obliviousness to the damage we do, and dehumanization” (50). All of these are contributing factors to the lack of help agents give to targets. They simply don’t know how to act or help in situations they can’t relate to.

This cycle of violence and no one stepping up to do something is not to blame only on agent groups. There are more aspects to this issue than to simply blame on one group of people. The reason it continues to drag on is because everyone is to blame. Harro mentions this in her article that although agent groups play a large role in creating this cycle, the target groups play a role as well. She says, “By participating in our roles as targets we reinforce stereotypes, collude in our own demise, and perpetuate the system of oppression. This learned helplessness is often called internalized oppression because we have learned to become our own oppressors from within” (50). Since target groups have been dealing with these stereotypes for such a long time, they find it easier to just fall into these stereotypes than to try and counter them.

In the novel, An American Summer Love and Death in Chicago, Alex Kotlowitz mentions this constant feeling of hopelessness of target groups and how easily they can fall into their stereotypes. He refers to a boy he met while living in Chicago named Elio who fell to his stereotype. Kotlowitz writes, “Since Blanca worked the night shift, Elio was often in charge. He wandered. At thirteen he joined the Latin Kings. He told me, ‘I wanted to be known so that they wouldn’t mess with my little brothers.’ He earned a reputation as a wild kid and fearless” (51). Elio’s reasoning for joining a gang is reasonable in the sense that he felt he had to do what he did in order to protect his brothers, yet he was completely blind to any other potential options. He without a doubt in his mind, went for the quicker and more obvious solution of joining a gang. He never considered other ways to protect his brothers because he knew it would have required more work. So instead, he fell into his inner-city kid stereotype and had to deal with the consequences that came along with the stereotype.

There is no one group to point fingers to when discussing the cause of violence in Chicago and the little changes that have been made about it. Agent groups can be blamed for creating stereotypes and in a sense encouraging them, but targets are also at fault for succumbing to their stereotype. We stay stuck in this cycle because no group is willing to step up and break the boundaries.