Illinois
Illinois assault weapons ban penalizes lawful gun owners
We must look at violent gun crime as a whole before we begin celebrating successes. The opinion piece titled “Illinois ban on assault weapons is working” warrants a response. Stating the ban has fulfilled its promise cannot take place in a silo.
The author and I can agree that today, Illinoisans cannot purchase certain weapons, magazines and switches. We can also agree that any reduction in mass shootings is good news. However, the author only paints a partial picture of how Illinois is (or isn’t) addressing gun violence.
According to the most recent data published by the Pew Research Center, only 3% of firearms murders during the year of the study were committed by individuals using assault weapons and other “non-assault-style” rifles, as compared to 59% of murders that were committed by criminals using handguns. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer backs up this data. The vast majority of gun crimes in Illinois involve handguns, not assault weapons, and certainly the author, whose life’s work is to prevent gun violence, knows this.
The author also fails to mention how the Protect Illinois Communities Act is silent on the straw purchases that provide the vast majority of weapons used in crimes. The Gun Violence Archive puts Chicago at the very top of the list for mass shootings last year. Gun crime, primarily in Black and Brown communities, continues to destroy neighborhoods and families.
The author is also silent on the fact that Gov. J.B. Pritzker and legislators she speaks so highly of have done absolutely nothing to strengthen penalties against those who commit these heinous crimes and refused to extend a law that mandated high-end criminal penalties for the worst of the worst repeat felony gun offenders.
The day before this op-ed was published, a mother and her three daughters were killed in a domestic violence incident in Tinley Park, and a lone gunman shot and killed seven individuals in Joliet before turning the gun on himself. The weapons used in these mass shootings were handguns. On Jan. 26, in broad daylight in the Loop, two CPS students were shot and killed while walking down the street.
On Jan. 31, two more shootings: one of three CPS students in Edgewater, and a second mass shooting with at least six victims in south suburban Dolton. Early Sunday, Feb. 11, a mass shooting in Little Village injured seven people.
If we are to truly address gun crime, we must come at it from every angle, and we absolutely must make sure criminals know they will face stiff penalties, including the certainty of prosecution in Cook County, if they commit gun crimes. Simply passing an “assault weapons” ban that is ignored by criminals who get their guns illegally, yet places new mandates on lawful gun owners, is not the answer.
State Sen. Craig Wilcox (R-Woodstock), 32nd District
SEND LETTERS TO: letters@suntimes.com. To be considered for publication, letters must include your full name, your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes. Letters should be a maximum of approximately 375 words.
Let noncitizens vote in Chicago school board elections
We write in response to your recent editorial, “Legislators should move ahead on plan for an elected Chicago school board.” While we appreciated that it was insightful, we respectfully disagree with your stance that non-citizens should be denied the right to vote in Chicago school board elections.
As a city, it is past time we acknowledge and respect the significant role that non-citizen parents play in our education system.
Organizations such as Kids First Chicago, supported by parents and community members, have advocated for allowing any Chicago parent, regardless of immigration status, to vote in school board elections. Their position is supported by most Chicagoans surveyed in a fall 2023 Kids First Chicago poll, which revealed that roughly seven in ten respondents are in favor of this approach.
The momentum for such change is not confined to Chicago. San Francisco has already set a precedent by winning a court ruling that grants non-citizen parents the right to vote in school board elections. The issue has gained traction in Springfield as well, with a bill currently in the Senate, although further changes to the state constitution and Chicago voting laws may be required.
The importance of this issue has been recognized by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who campaigned on and included in his transition report a commitment to collaborate with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state legislators to extend voting rights in school board elections to noncitizens.
The involvement of noncitizens in local school councils, in which they are already permitted to vote and serve, exemplifies the positive impact of inclusive electoral practices. Extending these rights to Chicago school board elections is a rational and necessary step toward ensuring that all families have a voice in decisions that directly affect their children, schools and communities.
The rationale for allowing noncitizen parents to participate in school board elections is simple: their children are enrolled in our schools, and they contribute to the tax base that funds these schools. These families have a vested interest in the quality of education and deserve a say in decisions that affect their children’s future.
Hal Woods, chief of policy, and Jessica Cañas, senior manager of community partnerships, Kids First Chicago
About those lead pipes …
I have lived in Galewood for a decade now, and over these 10 years I have seen the city’s water department repair at least a dozen main water pipes that were leaking on residents’ parkways (including my own). Because the city has a plan to eventually replace all the lead water pipes, wouldn’t it make sense to replace the lead pipes while they are repairing the leaks? The parkways have already been dug up and all the equipment and crews are there. It would be more cost effective and efficient. Just a thought.
Michael DiDominicis, Galewood
Trump knows something about dodging bills
What irony that Donald J. Trump is demanding our NATO allies “pay their bills.” Yes, that very Donald J. Trump whose penchant for dodging his own debts for decades and decades is well-established.
“Do as I say, not as I do” comes to forehead-smashing mind!
Dwain Thomas, River North
New federal rules now require certain adults, veterans, and people without housing to work or volunteer 80 hours a month or face a three-month limit on food assistance, with the Greater Chicago Food Depository warning roughly 120,000 Illinois residents could be affected.
Sangamon Auditorium gets a revamped look with a planned opening in fall
Check out the work being done at the Sangamon Auditorium at University of Illinois Springfield. The auditorium has been closed since June 2025.
Get your kicks on Route 66 in southwest Illinois this summer as communities along the Last 100 Miles of the historic highway mark the road’s 100th anniversary with festivals, concerts and themed products.
The centennial celebration officially kicked off April 30, launching a season of events across the region, according to a community announcement.
Local businesses are also joining the centennial. Old Herald Brewery & Distillery in Collinsville partnered with Mississippi Culture in Staunton to create Kicks on 66 Craft Beer, a cream ale with vanilla and citrus notes inspired by classic soda fountain flavors, according to the announcement. Duke Bakery locations in Alton and Granite City added a Route 66–themed soda to their Duke Beverage line of glass-bottled drinks in honor of the milestone.
May events along Route 66
A series of May activities begins with a Big Foot-themed event at the Pink Elephant Antique Mall, 908 Veterans Memorial Parkway in Livingston on May 9. The free, family-friendly gathering includes games, vendors and a Sasquatch Holler Contest outside the century-old building, which is known for its collection of fiberglass giants, according to the announcement.
Additional May events include a Pet Adoption Day on May 23 at the West End Service Station, 620 St. Louis St. in Edwardsville, and an Edwardsville Symphony concert honoring Route 66 on May 24 at City Park.
June festivals and celebrations
Jeep owners and Route 66 enthusiasts are scheduled to take part in the Route 66 Jeep Run on June 6. The run starts at the Litchfield Skyview Drive-In and ends at the It’s Electric Neon Sign Park in Granite City, with registration set at $20.66 per Jeep, according to the announcement.
Collinsville will host the International Horseradish Festival on June 5 and 6 in the Uptown District. The long-running festival, which celebrates the area’s horseradish heritage, is free to attend.
Edwardsville’s annual Route 66 Festival returns to City Park on June 13, featuring live music, vendors and a classic car cruise, according to the announcement.
Classic car fans will see the Hemmings Great Race presented by Coker Tire roll through the region on June 20. The nine-day rally, themed around Route 66 for 2026, begins in Springfield, Illinois, and makes a stop in Uptown Collinsville, where the cars will be on display from about 4:15 to 7 p.m.
That same day, Collinsville is scheduled to host the Catsup Bottle Festival from 2 to 7 p.m. at Old Herald Square, 111 E. Clay St. The free, family-friendly event celebrates the World’s Tallest Catsup Bottle water tower with live music, food contests and activities, according to the announcement.
Other June activities listed in the announcement include a birthday celebration at the West End Service Station in Edwardsville on June 6, a Route 66 Tractor Drive on June 20 beginning in Litchfield, a Route 66 celebration at the Pink Elephant Antique Mall on June 20, a Route 66 Jubilee in Carlinville on June 26, and an Edwardsville Symphony outdoor concert on June 28.
Fall festival and roadside attractions
Organizers also announced plans for the Last 100 Miles Festival on Oct. 10 and 11, when 13 communities along Route 66 in southwest Illinois are expected to host events throughout the weekend.
Beyond scheduled festivals, travelers are encouraged to explore roadside landmarks and long-standing eateries along the route, including the It’s Electric Neon Sign Park and Giants of Granite City, the Chain of Rocks Bridge, and diners such as Weezy’s in Hamel, the Ariston Café and Jubelt’s Bakery & Restaurant in Litchfield, Doc’s Just Off 66 in Girard and the Twistee Treat Diner in Livingston, according to the announcement.
Route 66 in southwest Illinois is widely recognized as the birthplace of the highway and remains a focal point for centennial celebrations highlighting the road’s history and cultural legacy.
This story was created by Dave DeMille, ddemille@gannett.com, with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
Editor’s note: This story is part of the Monitor’s summerlong series following old U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California.
Just a few blocks from the Old Joliet Prison, Johnny Williams is standing outside a tire shop, waiting for a repair.
He’s a lifelong resident of the Joliet area, a father of six and grandfather of 10, and he remembers back in the day when the prison was part of the economic engine that made Joliet run.
Why We Wrote This
Route 66 courses through American cities that once flourished before their economies faded or were forced to change. The story of Joliet, Illinois, reflects the high times, the hardships and the reinvention found along the century-old road.
“I remember when people used to sit out there visiting their people — on the buses, you know?” Mr. Williams says. “I have plenty of people whose parents and uncles worked there.” He gestures toward the 25-foot limestone walls, still topped with razor wire. “And as a child, I would always wonder — what’s behind that wall?”
So, he still marvels at how the once imposing former state penitentiary has been transformed over the past decade. Today, the people walking through its front gate are not prisoners or staff, but tourists and Americana-lovers there to have fun and celebrate the centennial of Route 66. The iconic roadway, noted in hundreds of anthems about America, passed right by the prison until 1940, when it was rerouted a few blocks away.
The prison once housed such infamous criminals as Richard Speck, James Earl Ray, and John Wayne Gacy. But since its closing in 2002, it has become a site for concerts, film viewings, and today, an event dubbed “The Big House Ballgame.”
People wondered about the prison for decades, said Quinn Adamowski, board president of the Joliet Area Historical Museum, which now runs the prison, before the game. “This site defined Joliet in many ways.”
After the prison closed, it was largely abandoned, becoming a liability, Mr. Adamowski said, especially in this neighborhood. “In 2017, 160 years after the first inmates arrived, we had the opportunity to wonder what this site could be,” he added. “It was our time – Joliet’s time – to define the prison.”
The Big House Ballgame on April 30, which is the 100th anniversary of the naming of Route 66, featured the Joliet Slammers, a Frontier League baseball team co-owned by actor Bill Murray. It was one of the featured events of an official five-city kickoff of events commemorating America’s “Mother Road.”
Baseball was also part of the prison’s history. In the early 20th century, inmates formed teams and played games against one another and against outside clubs, part of a broader effort to impose order and routine within the prison. The Big House Ballgame today is, in part, an attempt to revive that history — to connect the present moment to something that had once taken place on the same ground.
What happened to Joliet over the past century and a half happened, in some version, to nearly every city and town along Route 66. The collapse of jobs, travel routes, and movement west – and then a slow, uncertain reinvention.
The roadway passed through working America, and then through America after the work was gone. The centennial is, among other things, a celebration of the survival of places that kept going when the economies that made them no longer existed.
***
Curt Herron, like Mr. Williams, has lived in this part of Will County his whole life, growing up in Lockport, a small city just north of Joliet, before spending 45 years as a sports reporter covering high schools, the Slammers, and nearly every sporting event in between. Today, he’s an assistant at the historical museum.
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
“Joliet was always a real working-class city,” he says, pausing in the shadow of a guard tower as a group of tourists photographs the cellblock windows above him. “The second biggest steel city in the country after Pittsburgh. And then, on top of that, a prison city — two prisons within a few miles of each other, running simultaneously for 75 years. Almost nowhere in America can say that,” he says, noting that the area’s other prison, Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, is still in operation.
The steel came first. In 1869, the Joliet Iron and Steel Works opened along the Des Plaines River, drawing on the region’s coal deposits and its limestone – the same blue-gray stone that built the prison walls, the same stone quarried from just beneath the city’s surface – to become one of the great industrial enterprises of the Gilded Age. At its height, it employed thousands of men and produced the railroad rails that stitched together the American West.
Joliet drew immigrant workers in successive waves: first, the Irish who dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1840s; then Poles, Lithuanians, and Eastern Europeans; then African Americans and Mexican migrants during the First World War. Joliet became, in the language of the era, a city of stone and steel – proud of its grit and defined by its labor, built on the conviction that hard work in a hard place was its own kind of American story.
Then, the steel left. By the early 1980s, the mill was gone, and the unemployment rate in Joliet climbed to 26% – among the highest of any city in the United States at the time. The limestone ruins of the ironworks sat empty along the river for decades, overgrown with vegetation, before the Forest Preserve District turned them into a heritage trail.
A wound, converted in time into a park.
“We were known for being a hardscrabble place,” Mr. Herron says. “Because of the prisons and the steel industry and a lot of working-class people. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s also led to a real competitive area – a lot of great athletes have come from here, a lot of people who’ve gone on to do remarkable things.” These include actors Nick Offerman and Melissa McCarthy, two Super Bowl-winning football players, and a WNBA champion.
But transportation has been, and remains, a major driver of Joliet’s economic engine. The Illinois and Michigan Canal and the railroads that followed in the 19th and 20th centuries once spurred its growth. Today, vast inland port complexes make Joliet one of the major freight hubs in North America.
And then, Route 66, which ran directly through downtown, across the Des Plaines River at the Ruby Street Bridge, helped make Joliet a destination for travelers.
The state is betting that Route 66 travel will continue to help the local economy, said Catie Sheehan, the Illinois deputy director of tourism and a Route 66 Centennial commissioner. “Joliet is one of nearly 100 communities along the Illinois stretch of the Mother Road. These towns bring Route 66 to life in so many different ways.”
Her tourism office has funded a suite of new roadside attractions for the centennial: a 20-foot “Tire Tower” for Joliet’s Chicagoland Speedway, a 12-foot penny for Lincoln, Illinois, and a 14-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln for Granite City.
“A lot of Midwestern industrial towns have fallen by the wayside and haven’t recovered,” Mr. Herron says. “Transportation saved the day – it’s always been about roads and waterways here.”
***
Dan Goedert is sitting in the stands at The Big House Ballgame, dressed as a prisoner with a black and white striped shirt.
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
A retired emergency room nurse, Mr. Goedert has posed for a few pictures already. “I just read about this yesterday,” he says. “So, I just came to have a little fun today.”
The group Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues have been playing in the old prison yard, along with local blues singer Sheryl Youngblood. They do a spirited version of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”
But the old prison, like Route 66, has a legendary pop cultural connection. “We like history, and we’re old, so we remember the ‘Blues Brothers,’” says Sue Bradley, a special education teacher sitting on the grass before the game with her husband John, who works in finance. She gestures toward people wearing fedoras and black suits and ties. “You’ll see people dressed like them everywhere here today. This is the prison they got out of at the beginning of the movie.”
It’s a movie that few people in Chicago have forgotten. In the opening scene of the 1980 film, a paroled convict played by the late Chicago native John Belushi – “Joliet” Jake Blues – walks out of the same prison gate here to meet his brother Elwood, also a small-time criminal, played by Dan Aykroyd.
Jake and Elwood set off on a road trip that is, at its heart, a story about the open road as salvation. It made the prison famous in a way that, at the time, 144 years of incarcerating murderers and gangsters had not.
And it made Route 66 — the road that once passed this gate and ran all the way to the Pacific – feel, to generations of viewers and travelers alike, like a road of freedom.
-
Montana9 minutes agoMontana’s Underrated Beach State Park Has Sandy Shorelines, Swimming, And Birding – Islands
-
Nebraska15 minutes agoFull-length Replay: Nebraska at Penn State
-
Nevada21 minutes agoFire Safe Council executive director, former partner indicted on 29 felony counts
-
New Hampshire27 minutes agoDover SchoolCare ruling could let 89 other NH districts recoup funds
-
New Jersey33 minutes agoHow a ‘Haunted’ House in New Jersey Inspired the Sinister New England Setting for Matthew Rhys-Led Hit ‘Widow’s Bay’
-
New Mexico39 minutes ago10 Historic Restaurants In New Mexico Every Foodie Should Visit – Chowhound
-
North Carolina45 minutes agoNo. 8 Virginia vs. No. 5 North Carolina Live Updates | NCAA Men’s Lacrosse
-
North Dakota51 minutes agoState’s new junior duck stamp overall winner is 9-year veteran of contest