Indiana has a well deserved reputation for being friendly, “down home” and a little hokey. In most of the state, you will find friendly folks, farms and quaint small towns, lots of tractors and Amish horse-and-buggies on the roads, covered bridges and corn fields. Even our state capitol and largest city Indianapolis has a reputation as a very “livable” and affordable large city. While we have crime in Indiana, it is mostly confined to a handful of areas. Most Hoosiers live their lives without much concern about crime, although we are also have one of the highest percentages of population with a concealed carry permit in the country. That might explain why you don’t see much crime outside of urban areas.
There is an exception to the image of Indiana and it is found in our northwest corner, where Chicago leeches into our state like an overflowing cesspool. Northwest Indiana is home to Gary, no longer the place little Ron Howard so famously warbled a song in homage to. Gary and the entire area are a stain on the state of Indiana, so much so that I would love to carve it out and give it to Illinois in return for a chunk of eastern Illinois farm country. Northwest Indiana even shares Chicago’s Central timezone.
That brings us to the town of Hammond, Indiana. Hammond sits just to the west of Gary, on the border with Illinois, stretching from I-94, along the Illinois border and all the way to the Lake Michigan shoreline, an industrial wasteland of steel mills and refineries, dangerous neighborhoods and of course a casino. I had the distinct displeasure of visiting one of those steel mills back in the day to do a presentation and it was long enough ago that my presentation was done with actual slides and a projector instead of power point, given to a break room full of steel workers that was like an oven and featured an enormous fan to “cool” me that I had to shout over for several hours. Good times. It was one of the least pleasant places I have even been, and I have been in some crappy places. At least Compton has nice weather.
Tuesday night (5/5/20), the lovely burg of Hammond experienced a mass shooting, although the media is calling it a “road rage incident”.
Man killed in Hammond road rage shooting ID’d; 3 others wounded, police say
One man was killed and three other people wounded in a shooting and road rage incident in Hammond, Tuesday night, police said…..
….One man was killed in the shooting. He has been identified to the Lake County Coroner’s Office as 25-year-old Uriel Arambula.
Mr. Arambula looks to be mestizo perhaps. Hammond is around 1/3 mestizo according to the 2010 census, up drastically from 2000 when it was 21% mestizo. The black population has also risen dramatically, from less than 15% to over 22%.
This looks like another mass shooting that won’t get labelled as such by the media even though it meets the qualifications, unless the shooter turns out to be a white guy.