Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) was tasked on Wednesday to explain the cause of rampant gun violence in Chicago, including the murders of three young children last week.
MSNBC host Willie Geist asked Durbin to respond to a local news clip reporting that two children, two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. and 11-year-old Takiya Holmes, were killed and another child was critically injured from gun violence. The third child, 12-year-old Kanari Bowers, died while Geist played the local news clip.
Durbin said that "heartbreaking violence" had claimed hundreds of lives since last year, and Chicago is breaking records for gun violence.
"I'm proud to represent the city of Chicago, but what we have there with the gun violence and death is absolutely unacceptable," Durbin said. "For the president to say, 'I'm going to send in the Feds,' is one thing. We need more than that. We need resources to strengthen and train our police force. We need to work in the neighborhoods to deal with this violence."
Durbin pivoted to talking about the guns that were used and claimed that "kids who are 13 and 14 year olds have access to semiautomatic weapons that are spraying these bullets."
Geist pointed out that violence in New York is at a historic lows, asking why Chicago specifically was seeing so much violence.
Durbin said that almost half the gun violence deaths occur in two to three specific sections of the city that are in economic devastation.
"The young black men in most cases that are involved in these crimes are in dysfunctional family situations, and they get access to weapons as easily as cell phones," Durbin said. "They have no training and no expertise in shooting them. They fire wildly at other gang members and kill innocent children and others, grandmothers in the process."
MSNBC's Chris Hayes moderated a town hall meeting last Thursday in Chicago where he discussed gun violence and economic issues with local activists. One of the activists, 20-year-old Ja'Mal Green, slammed Chicago's Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel for his policies meant to curb violence, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
"Nobody has really said it, but his name is Rahm Emanuel," Green said. "This mayor that we have in the city of Chicago does not care about black people. I want to put that on the record."
"We walking past boarded up schools, boarded up houses, they're knocking down with red Xs with no plan to redevelop, mental health facilities shut down, the unemployment rate is the highest in Chicago than it is around the country," he continued. "If you want to talk about violence, you've got to talk about the economics, not police."
Emanuel has faced significant criticism over the last year as his administration has not been able to curtail violence in the city. In 2016 alone, there were over 4,300 shootings and over 750 homicides, the Chicago Tribune reported.