We’d like to be more descriptive in identifying the idiot behind Chicago’s latest public embarrassment, but we have no idea who did it. Nobody does, except maybe city police, and they’re either useless or stalling on purpose. Even now, a full week removed from the high-profile shooting that left multiple baseball fans hospitalized, official details remain disturbingly scant. So we, as observers, can only make this deduction: Because guns can neither transport nor fire themselves, there must ultimately be a person at fault. And that person is, at best, criminally stupid.
Circumstances surrounding the apparently unintentional gunfire were only made more confusing earlier this week, when a small crop of too-wacky-to-be-true details began to emerge, including a claim that the suspect was a woman who snuck a firearm into Guaranteed Rate Field by “hiding it in the folds of her belly fat” before shooting herself and two others in the stands a short time later. Another outlet, Sports Mockery (which covers Chicago teams and, despite its name, is not satirical) claimed the woman repeatedly set off the stadium’s metal detectors but was waved through anyway by security guards, who “did not want to overstep their boundaries” by making physical contact with an armed Rubenesque lunatic.
These reports quickly went viral — of course they did — because they are hilarious. As is typical amid any retweet frenzy, skepticism was an early casualty, with many simply accepting the accounts at face value and moving on in search of the next social-media dopamine hit. But the story here just doesn’t smell right. Between the total lack of on-record sources and circular attribution among those actually publishing this information, it’s hard to see the “Belly Fat Gun” scenario as anything other than a flight of unhelpful but well-executed trolling. Video reviewed by ABC7 shows a woman — one of the three injured by gunfire and an apparent police suspect in the case — breezing through the ballpark’s security checkpoints with no incident. Pertinently to the more lurid rumors mentioned above, ABC7 described the woman in the video as “very heavy.” (While it is a relevant detail, ABC7’s story amusingly fails to mention why it’s relevant, leading to this descriptor reading less like additional context and more like a sudden and inexplicable roast of a shooting victim. Which was probably not their intention?)
Anyway, that grand haze of uncertainty brings us back to the beginning — three people were shot, and beyond that, we have only the faintest clue of what actually happened at Guaranteed Rate Field last week. We don’t know anything about the shooter, we don’t know anything about the weapon, and we don’t know anything about any makeshift satchels of flesh and fatty tissue that may or may not have been involved. What was already an amazingly sad and stupid saga has only been made sillier by the utter silence of Chicago police investigators and the proliferation of absurd narratives by fast-and-loose members of the press.
It’s easy to joke about this. It’s hard not to, once terms like “Belly Fat Gun” start getting thrown around and the injuries sustained proved non-life-threatening. For that we are lucky, but why must we tempt fate? Why not just handle your weapons properly?
There is a culprit out there, and whether by malice or negligence, three people were shot and it is their fault. And their recklessness was idiotic.
