The Fourth of July is a violent weekend for many cities, and Chicago is no different. This year, though, the city reduced the number of victims shot over the holiday weekend by more than 40 percent since last year, from 105 in 2024 to 60 in 2025. Between Thursday and Sunday, 11 people died from gun violence, compared to 22 last year. Chicago also experienced the second-lowest number of Fourth of July weekend shootings since 2019.
Still, there were at least two mass shootings over the weekend. Late Friday, seven people in the Back of the Yards neighborhood were wounded by gunfire. Less than three hours later, four more people in Little Village were shot.
The drop in overall shootings during the holiday weekend came just after Chicago saw its least violent Memorial Day weekend in at least 16 years. Some people thought it was a fluke, because of unusually cold weather. With another holiday weekend showing a significant drop, city officials and violence prevention workers now believe their strategies are working.
“We’re very heartened by the fact that it wasn’t as bad as last year, but still we had some pretty shocking numbers,” said Dr. Miao Hua, the medical director and interim deputy commissioner for the city’s Department of Public Health. “Any victim of violence is one victim too many.”
The holiday weekend decline comes as Chicago’s gun violence continues to drop overall. In 2024, shootings dropped 4 percent compared to 2023, with 2,800 shooting victims. So far this year, there’s been a steeper drop, with 788 people shot by the end of June. By that time last year, almost twice as many Chicagoans had been shot.
How Chicago tried to prevent July Fourth shootings
Researchers and officials expect summer holiday weekends to result in more gun violence, in part because they combine large gatherings with high temperatures, a factor that can make tensions boil over. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has researched the association between heat and violent crime. “When it’s really hot, people’s fuses are short and they’re much more likely to react violently to very small slights,” he said.
Large holiday gatherings also make it more likely for violence to harm bystanders. Fox’s research shows that, across the country, between 2013 and 2024, 66 mass shootings have occurred on July 4, more than any other day in the year. And bringing a weapon to a party, Fox said, can escalate a small argument. “BYOB shouldn’t mean ‘Bring Your Own Bullets,’” he said.
Chicagoans have to be cautious about whom they invite to a party, said William Edwards, the program manager for Acclivus, a community-based violence prevention group. “You’re not being conscious of who is there, what they’ve been into,” he said. “While they’re trying to shoot at that one person, they’re shooting with switches on and they can’t control it — that’s why all these people are getting hit.”
To get ahead of the expected violence this year, Chicago’s Department of Public Health and its partners provided three gun safety awareness workshops leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, and assigned street outreach workers and youth peacekeepers to 21 areas.
The dip this year matches a longer-term trend: the city’s firearm violence during the July Fourth weekend has been declining since it reached a high of 99 shootings in 2021, according to the City of Chicago Violence Reduction Dashboard. In 2023, it fell to 51 shootings but spiked again last year to 105, the worst it had been since 2010. These trends include the number of shooting victims between Thursdays and Sundays, with some adjustments for years when July Fourth fell on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
As the city invested in violence intervention efforts, Vaughn Bryant, the executive director of Metropolitan Family Services — an umbrella organization for violence prevention groups — said his organization added more workers in areas with more shootings. More “eyes on the street,” research has shown, can help create safer environments.
‘People are not robots’
A Trace analysis last year found that the odds of surviving a shooting in Chicago have worsened as it’s become easier to acquire the type of weapons that often are used in mass shootings. The mass shootings that occurred over the July Fourth weekend happened even as the overall number of incidents declined. “It has absolutely everything to do with the type of weapons that they’re using nowadays,” said Gwendolyn Baxter, a hospital response team supervisor for Acclivus. “It’s escalating the type of violence.”
To mitigate the escalation, community violence intervention groups, Bryant said, hire outreach workers who are respected by their fellow community members. “It’s a form of diplomacy,” he said. Their job is to learn about bubbling conflicts and help mediate them. They monitor social media, talk to residents, and negotiate truce agreements.
But because violence is interpersonal, it can be unpredictable. “People are not robots,” Bryant said. “They’re impulsive, and they can do anything, at any time.”
The size and randomness of mass shootings also make it harder to track and prevent retaliations, Edwards said. Acclivus outreach workers collaborate with their hospital responders to try to get ahead of it.
Community outreach workers, Baxter said, don’t have time to celebrate the decline in shootings because their work never ends. And even amid the improvement, city officials and organizers are worried about looming fiscal concerns. “We are working on a shoestring budget,” Baxter said, “and everybody is overworked.”
