These are stories of a highly controversial nature
“America is not so much a racist nation as it is an ignorant one. Ignorance is the mother of manipulation and allows the ignorant to be made to do most anything to anyone at anytime.”
“Social justice is nothing more than code for government by gunpoint.”
“The 2nd Amendment is the fundamental right to protect each other from ourselves.”
“You believe you have a right to take something that isn’t yours? Well come on then and try and take it…”
----------
Chicago, Illinois
5:45 P.M.
Twenty-nine year old Lu Phan heard the news choppers overhead as he stood unmoving inside the family business – a neighborhood shoe store Lu’s father had started shortly after coming to America from the horrifying chaos that was the Fall of Saigon. Linh Phan had fought alongside American soldiers for seven years as an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Even then it took several requests and all the money he had saved up to obtain passage on one of the outgoing U.S. military vessels returning from Vietnam to the United States in the spring of 1975.
Now forty years later a horde of people gathered outside seemingly determined to burn it all to the ground.
Unlike other businesses, Phan Family Shoes did not currently enjoy the benefit of insurance coverage. Lu’s mother Delia, a native of Puerto Rico, was attempting to survive her second bout with cancer and in order to pay the health insurance premiums so she could continue receiving the treatment that was keeping her alive, the family had to let their business insurance expire.
That meant that if the mob outside broke in and destroyed the business, Lu’s family would lose everything, including the ability to continue paying for his ailing mother’s health insurance.
That won’t happen.
Lu had repeated that thought often since making his way downstairs from the family’s second floor apartment that was directly above the shoe store. It was also the place Lu had called home his entire life.
The 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg 500 shotgun felt good in his hands. Lu had shot it just a few times, but he recalled the power of the gun’s kick and the sound of its fury and knew that if required, it could protect him and his family. He stood in the darkness of the store after having placed closed signs over the boarded up windows and waited for anyone who might attempt to break in. Three shells were already loaded in the Mossberg’s barrel and Lu had six more ready in the right pocket of his black and white windbreaker jacket.
A series of loud screams reverberated from just outside the store entrance followed by a thump against one of the front windows covered over in plywood. Lu forced himself to take long, slow breaths as he continued to wait. He couldn’t help but wonder if the fear he felt in the pit of his stomach was similar to what his father had experienced during the war.
Someone was attempting to push the door open. It was secured from the inside by two sizeable deadbolt locks. Then another crash came against one of the windows as several more voices were heard yelling from the sidewalk in front of the store.
Lu’s knuckles whitened as he increased his grip on the shotgun.
“Don’t come in here! Go away! I have a gun!”
For a moment it went quiet outside, and then something very big crashed against the window to Lu’s right with enough force he could hear the plywood crack. This was followed by another even more aggressive attempt to force the door open. Many more voices could be heard yelling and laughing, some of them threatening to take Lu’s gun and shove it up his own ass.
Lu attempted to call 9-11 for the third time in the last twenty minutes and was once again greeted by a busy signal. When he had left the apartment upstairs, telling his nearly seventy-year old father to make sure to lock the door behind him and watch over Delia, the news was showing several large riot areas throughout the city. There were even reports of a white bank executive being shot dead in the street as he tried to escape an angry mob of black youth who had dragged him from his office shortly after the lunch hour. Another report indicated a black man who tried to stop a gathering of twenty or so rioters from setting a police car on fire outside his home was himself set on fire, his corpse smoldering on the sidewalk long after his screams went silent.
The police had withdrawn entirely from the most violent riot areas and took up positions primarily in and around a one block perimeter surrounding City Hall where the mayor and other city officials were hiding behind a wall of blue they hoped would prove enough to keep them safe.
That left families like Lu’s completely on their own.
“We gonna huff and puff and blow your damn house in!”
Lu flinched as another crash slammed into the side of the store followed by a second and then a third.
“I said I have a gun! Go away!”
Lu’s threat resulted in more derisive laughter from outside followed by the sound of cracking wood as several hands began trying to pull the plywood off the windows.
Lu brought the Mossberg up and aimed its barrel at the partially exposed window and prepared to pull the trigger.
“No!”
The voice was that of Lu’s father, Linh whose left hand pushed the gun back down so it pointed toward the floor. The old man was several inches shorter than his son, but even at seventy had the straight-shouldered posture of a soldier who knew well a life in the military and the resulting horrors of combat.
“It’s too soon. Be certain before firing. Be sure you actually have to take a life before doing so.”
Lu glanced down and was shocked to see his father’s Vietnam War-era Colt Commander sidearm hanging from the old man’s narrow right hip. Linh Phan had not worn the weapon since coming to the United States decades earlier.
“Father, you should be upstairs with Mother.”
The former South Vietnamese Army officer shook his head.
“Your mother was the one who demanded I come down here and help keep you safe. We will do this together.”
Both men turned at the sound of wood being pulled back from one of the windows. By the multitude of voices heard yelling, Lu figured there were at least forty or fifty rioter attempting to enter the store. It seemed incomprehensible to him that an entire city could be overtaken by such chaos in less than twenty-four hours.
Lu recalled how he watched the local news reports from the previous night of the young black man by the name of Darnel Watts who was shot dead in the street by an off-duty Chicago Police officer just three blocks from his family’s store. The young man had been armed with an older revolver investigators soon discovered wasn’t loaded. There had been reports of an attempted robbery and when police attempted to question him, Darnel took off running and two uniformed police officers gave chase.
That’s when he encountered Brandon Briggs, a twenty-four year old first year member of the Chicago police force who was off-duty at the time when he spotted Darnel running down the sidewalk with two uniformed officers giving pursuit. The news reports indicated Officer Briggs yelled twice for Darnel Watts to halt and then when the officer saw what he correctly believed to be a drawn weapon, he opened fire, hitting the young man twice in the chest. It took nearly an hour for an ambulance to arrive and remove the young man’s blood-soaked body from the middle of the Chicago Southside street where he fell and then took his last painful gasps of life. By then a crowd had gathered and began taunting the authorities, some screaming that Darnel had been unarmed. Others yelled out the police had tried t
o question him without cause. Still more spread the lie that the young man had been killed in cold blood without provocation.
Some who willingly spread those rumors knew better. Darnel was a low-level street thug, a dropout who had already been in and out of both the local juvenile and adult prison system following a series of drug and assault-related charges. The gun he had on him at the time of his death was stolen.
The truth of Darnel’s troubled past didn’t matter, though. The local media and soon the national media portrayed him as a young man of hope and promise whose life was potentially ended much too soon by a white police officer. Darnel’s death became the leading news story that night and remained the focus of media attention throughout the next day even as protests formed based entirely upon the false and increasingly dangerous race-tinged narrative being actively pushed by this same media.
Hundreds took to the same Chicago streets that had seen black on black murders for decades and shown little inclination to care, and then hundreds grew to thousands, all of them