Highland Park.

No place to hide from mass shootings.

To get to Highland Park from my house you drive north on I-95 until it turns into Illinois 41 by the Botanic Gardens and then go a few miles more.

Highland Park is where Ravinia is, summer home of the Chicago Symphony and other summertime concerts.

It’s an old suburb on the north shore with comfortable homes and a world away from life in the City.

Yesterday many folks around the country heard of Highland Park, Illinois for the first time as it became this week’s site of a mass shooting.

I’m not looking forward to next week.

Six people were shot dead, five killed instantly. Dozens wounded.

It happened at the start of Highland Parks, downtown Fourth of July parade.

I had friends from around the country email and message me to see if I was okay, having no idea where Highland Park was in relation to where we live.

It is not close and we are okay.

Mass shootings have become our new geography lessons.

Who of you ever heard of Uvalde, Texas before a month ago?

What haunts longtime Highland Park resident Dana Gordon now are the words of the mother of one of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting victims.

Just days ago, Gordon helped organize an event in Highland Park dubbed “a community art action against gun violence.” It was prompted by the Uvalde shooting in May, and the names of its 21 victims were read. (Chicago Tribune)

In 2013, while on the city council, current Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering helped draft an ordinance banning the possession of assault weapons.

The police have not released any details about the weapon the shooter used other than it was a “heavy duty rifle”, but it was likely a military style automatic rifle.

It was likely the kind that was banned by the Highland Park ordinance.

But there is no wall around Highland Park that can keep guns out.

Chicago and Illinois have some of the toughest gun laws in the nation.

Yet guns flood into our city from neighboring states like Indiana that have little in the way of gun restrictions.

The Supreme Court just made it more difficult to pass restrictive gun laws.

The said it violated the Second Amendment.

That Amendment was included in the first ten as a gift to slave owners who wanted to preserve the right to organize “militias” to chase after the workers they enslaved but who had escaped.

And Congress is bipartisan when it comes to refusing to pass any genuine gun control laws.

Trump-backed Republican candidate for Illinois governor Darren Bailey reacted to the Highland Park mass murders by telling the crowd at another parade that the people of Highland Park should just “move on.”

Reaction to his insensitivity was swift and negative and Bailey had to walk it back and reverted to what pro-gun Republican say about gun violence whenever there is a mass killing like this. He reverted to talking points of combatting mental illness and calling for law and order.

My money says Bailey will never see the inside of the governor’s mansion.

That’s little comfort to the dead.

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