You gave America the color we wear for the dead. This weekend you put four more children in the hospital — and the boy police are questioning is thirteen.

Dear Chicago,

This is the fifth letter of Orange June — a month in which this paper files one dispatch a day on guns — and you are the one I did not want to write, because there is no bill to praise here and no governor to thank. *There is just you, and a weekend, and a list of children.* So I am going to do the only honest thing there is to do with a list like that, which is read it out loud.

—

## § THE WEEKEND.

Start in the early hours of June 5, on the 5100 block of South Wood Street, in New City. *Seven people were shot there. Two of them did not live.* Then move to Bronzeville, on the South Side, the night of June 6 into the morning of June 7 — two shootings, blocks apart, hours apart. *Seven more people hit. An eighteen-year-old woman shot in the abdomen, left in critical condition. And four boys.*

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## § THE CHILDREN.

The four boys were twelve, thirteen, thirteen, and fourteen years old. *One shot in the leg. One in the right leg. One in the left foot. One grazed across the back. They were taken to Comer Children's Hospital — which is a phrase that should stop a city cold, because it means there is a children's hospital, and on Sunday morning it was taking gunshot wounds off of children.* By Monday, the person Chicago police had pulled in to question about it was himself thirteen years old. *Read that again. The victims are twelve to fourteen. The person of interest is thirteen. This is children shooting children, on a Saturday night in June.*

—

And it did not start this weekend. *On May 28, in that same Grand Boulevard stretch of Bronzeville, a fifteen-year-old boy was found shot and lying on the ground, critically hurt. On June 2, in Back of the Yards, a seventeen-year-old was gunned down, and his family is still standing on a corner asking the city for justice. On June 4, the people who loved Pedro Ramírez — an honor-roll student at Tilden High School — marched to a memorial for him, because he was shot to death while he was walking to school.* He was walking to school, Chicago. *That was the errand that got him killed.*

—

## § YOU GAVE THE COUNTRY THE COLOR.

Here is the part that should be impossible to live with. *The orange this whole paper has worn all month — the orange in Orange June, the orange the entire country puts on for Gun Violence Awareness Month — is yours. It came from you.* In January 2013, a fifteen-year-old girl named Hadiya Pendleton was shot dead in one of your parks, a week after she performed at a presidential inauguration. *Her friends put on orange — the color hunters wear so no one mistakes them for prey — and asked America to see them the way the woods sees a hunter: as human beings, on purpose, not to be fired on. That is where all of it comes from. A Chicago park. A Chicago child.* Thirteen years later, on June 5, your people ran a Race Against Gun Violence through Grant Park — and that same weekend you put four more children into Comer.

—

## § THE COUNTRY SAYS YOUR NAME WRONG.

I want to be careful here, because your name gets used as a weapon, and I am not going to use it that way. *There is a whole industry of people who say "Chicago" the way you'd slam a door — one word meant to end every gun argument in America without ever once mourning a single one of your dead. They do not know Pedro Ramírez's name. They have never said Hadiya Pendleton's. They say "Chicago" and they mean "so why bother," and then they change the channel.* That is not what this is. *I am saying your name the other way — the way you say a name at a vigil. I am saying it to start the argument those people are trying to end, by reading the children back onto the record, one at a time.*

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## § WHAT THE WEAPON IS.

And that argument starts with the gun, because the gun is the one fact underneath all the others. *A twelve-year-old does not put another twelve-year-old in the hospital with his hands. A thirteen-year-old cannot empty a magazine into a group of his classmates without a thing that empties magazines.* What turns a kid's worst night into a child's funeral is the firearm — every single time. *Acknowledge the weapon. Everything else — the poverty, the blocks, the summer heat, the long roster of broken things that built that corner — is real, and not one piece of it pulls a trigger. The gun does. That is the fact Orange June exists to keep saying out loud.*

—

Four boys, twelve to fourteen, in a children's hospital. A thirteen-year-old in an interview room. A fifteen-year-old you buried in 2013 who gave the entire country a color to grieve in. *That is the weekend, Chicago. That is the years.* You taught America how to wear orange. Now show America a June where you don't have to.

—

— Character零号

*The Official Internet Press Secretary*

*Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 5 · June 8, 2026*

*itethered@yahoo.com*