Ward 7 council member Mollie Ward of Bloomington said she’s pleased with the progress made by the Special Commission for Safe Communities.
The commission brought forward by Ward, which narrowly passed in 2023, presented a six-month progress report to council members during an Aug. 19 meeting.
Commissioners, led by forensic pathologist Scott Denton, have been primarily focused on information gathering, bringing experts into monthly meetings to help identify trends.
“We can’t really address something we can’t measure,” Ward said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “We don’t know what the source of the issue is. Correctly, as their mandate is, they’ve been focusing on gathering information.”
Ward pushed for the commission following spikes in gun deaths in 2018 and 2021. And Bloomington is on pace to have a bad year for shootings, with 30 thus far in 2024, according to Denton [compared to 42 and 57 in 2003 and 2022, respectively].
For Ward, it’s personal. Her home was recently hit by a stray bullet during an Aug. 16 incident that hospitalized a 21-year-old man. A 17-year-old male has since been arrested in connection with the case and is currently being charged as an adult.
Prior incidents in Ward’s northwest Bloomington neighborhood are what inspired her to fill Alderman Scott Black’s seat in 2021. She is the first woman to represent her ward.
“What happens to my neighbor happens to me,” Ward said. “The summer of 2020 was the first time my family and I experienced gun violence on our property.”
Ward said a shooter struck her neighbor’s house from the front yard of her home.
“As I listened to my children talk about that experience, I realized I as their parent had let them down,” she said. “It’s my job as their parent to protect my children and I couldn’t protect them. I thought to myself, 'OK, here’s the moment where I can stop talking about things, stop praying about things, stop marching for things — but actually go do something.'”
Joining the city council and pushing for the commission is Ward’s way of doing something, but it wasn’t universally embraced. Opponents cited Bloomington’s relatively low homicide rate and overall safety compared to peer communities, which Denton said is consistent with the commission’s findings.
Ward said one homicide by gun is too many homicides by gun, and stressed the importance of considering the wider impact of gun violence in a community.
“What was lacking in the community was a comprehensive approach,” she said. “Gun violence is not just about homicides. There’s a lot of gun violence that doesn’t involve a person taking another person’s life. Frankly, there’s more gun violence that involves people taking their own lives.”
Suicide by gun
McLean County Coroner Kathleen Yoder previously noted a concerning spike in suicides involving a gun. In a phone call, Yoder said the percentage of gun-related suicides in the county spiked in 2023 and is trending downward in 2024.
Most suicide deaths in McLean County involve men 40 and older. Yoder said more than two-thirds of those who die by suicide have drugs or alcohol in their system, regardless of the method.
Domestic gun violence
Research also has shown a staggering rise in domestic gun violence in Illinois. According to the Gun Violence Archive, gun violence is down statewide, but the proportion of incidents related to domestic violence is growing exponentially.
Bloomington Mayor Mboka Mwilambwe urged the Special Commission on Safe Communities to explore the intersection between domestic violence and gun violence, a topic raised by the commission during its June meeting as Bloomington-Normal reeled over the murder-suicide of Unit 5 teacher Amy Moore at the hands of her ex-husband.
“If I have an abusive partner who has a gun, that’s a problem,” Ward said.
According to The Network, a collective of Illinois domestic violence agencies, the risk of intimate partner homicide is 500 times greater when the abuser has access to a gun. Moreover, the effects of domestic gun violence that don’t result in homicide are under researched and likely under reported.
“If that abuser is threatening me with a gun, to me, that’s a form of gun violence that we need to be looking at, we need to be tracking, we need to be addressing as a community,” Ward said.
A complex issue requiring complex solutions
During their two-year term, commissioners are charged with compiling a comprehensive report for the city council, providing recommendations for curbing gun violence.
“I think people want simplistic solutions and they tend to paint this issue in simplistic ways,” Ward said. “The reality is that there are lots of different reasons for the gun violence in our community. There have to be, similarly, a lot of solutions.”
But Ward recognizes some challenges cannot be solved by individual cities, such as Firearm Owner Identification (FOID) card revocation following a felony conviction or order of protection.
“One of the things that we as a municipality can do, certainly, is to advocate for those kinds of national and state-level solutions that are above what we can do locally.”
