(CNN) When a city has eight killings in two days, including the death of a 7-year-old boy, something is seriously wrong with the system. 
 
 That's what Chicago's police chief said after a spate of bloodshed that tormented the city over the weekend. 
 
 "We need to repair a broken system," Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters Sunday. "Criminals don't feel the repercussions of the justice system." 
 
 Take, for example, the death of 7-year-old Amari Brown. McCarthy said the boy was the unintended victim of a bullet meant for his father, a ranking gang member. 
 
 The system failed Amari, the police chief said. Amari's father, who has been arrested 45 times and has a lengthy criminal record, should not have been on the streets, McCarthy said. 
 
 Existing laws, McCarthy said, made it easy for the man to get out of jail the day after he was arrested on a firearms charge in April. 
 
 "If Mr. Brown is in custody, his son is alive," McCarthy said. 
 
 HE HAS A NAME: 7 yr old Amari Brown, was shot and killed last night in Chicago while watching fireworks with his dad. pic.twitter.com/VQLqu83Dw5 — Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) July 5, 2015 
 
 According to McCarthy, the father isn't cooperating with investigators looking into his son's killing. 
 
 "He gave us a statement, but it was a vanilla statement that he didn't see anything. You know, I can't reveal the circumstances that we know occurred at that scene at this time, but he could do a lot better for us, let's put it that way. And you know, the fear is, he's going to take care of it himself," McCarthy told CNN's "AC360." "So while we're being held accountable for violence here in the city, and I accept our accountability, as a cog in the wheel, there's a much bigger picture here. If he wasn't on the street, the shooting doesn't occur. Now that he is on the street, I'm worried that the next shooting will occur in retaliation." 
 
 At a vigil Sunday for Amari, family friend Michael Singleton told the media that unless real changes are made, the cycle of violence will continue. 
 
 "All of you all will be back out here next week, on another corner, filming the same thing, from somebody else, saying exactly what I'm saying," he said. 
 
 "So I'm tired of doing news conferences. I'm tired of listening to them. I'm tired of talking about them. Until we make a better decision as a community and as a city, this is all that's going to happen." 
 
 A gruesome weekend 
 
 Even with a 30% increase in the number of police on the streets over the holiday weekend, seven people were killed between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon, the superintendent said. 
 
 Another 40 people were wounded in weekend shootings, McCarthy said. 
 
 And since Friday morning, Chicago police have recovered one illegal gun per hour across the city, McCarthy said. 
 
 "We must stem the flow of guns into the city," he said. 
 
 This year's statistics may sound staggering, but compared to last year, the number of violent incidents is down. For the same period in 2014, there were 64 shootings, 69 nonfatal victims in those incidents and 15 slayings. 
 
 McCarthy said he is incredibly proud of the men and women of his department amid the challenges they face every day. 
 
 But "we need some help here, folks," McCarthy said. "We have to fix this broken system." ||||| Editor’s Note: Over the July 4 weekend, 82 people were shot and 14 of them killed in Chicago. It’s not the first time a holiday was marred by gun violence. Over Easter, 45 people were shot in the city that's come to be known as “Chiraq.” 
 
 President Obama may have gotten our troops out of Iraq, but the gunfire in his hometown of Chicago is still earning it a searing nickname coined by young people who live there. 
 
 Chiraq. 
 
 On Easter weekend, 45 people were shot in the city, six of them children. 
 
 Five youngsters under the age of 15—four girls and a boy—were shot in a playground where they had gone after Easter services at a nearby church. 
 
 Witnesses agree that a car pulled up and one of the occupants asked the youngsters if they were in a gang. There is some dispute about whether the youngsters even got a chance to say no before the people in the car started shooting. 
 
 The most seriously wounded, 11-year-old Tymisha Washington, was listed in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds. She is expected to survive. 
 
 “Prayers Going Up Blessings Coming Down,” read a posting on her aunt’s Facebook page. 
 
 A Facebook argument had apparently sparked a completely unrelated shooting at the start of the weekend. Best friends Jordan Means, 16, and Anthony Bankhead, 18, got into the online spat with a man in his 30s. The man is said to have followed his final post by appearing in the flesh and shooting the two teens to death. 
 
 Two other men were fatally shot later in the weekend as they sat in a car that was also occupied by two kids, ages 3 and 7. The children were physically unharmed but no doubt will join those who are as mentally scarred by living in Chicago as were some combat veterans who returned from the war in Iraq. 
 
 And this bloody Easter weekend was preceded by a weekend in which 37 people were shot, four of them fatally. FBI Director James Comey happened to be in Chicago the following Monday, and he ascribed much of the violence to the gang culture so deeply ingrained in the city. But Comey had little to say about what Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy recognizes as the core problem. 
 
 “Until we do something about guns, don’t expect things to change overnight,” McCarthy said at a press conference that same day. 
 
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 McCarthy noted that Chicago cops have seized 1,500 illegal guns so far this year, but the people caught with the weapons are all too often back on the street all too soon. 
 
 “It’s like running on a hamster wheel,” McCarthy said of the effort to grapple with the problem. “We’re drinking from a fire hose, seizing these guns, and people are back out on the street. They’re not learning that carrying a firearm is going to have a serious impact on their lives.” 
 
 McCarthy invoked the memory of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old who was killed by a stray round in 2013, just days after performing at Obama’s second inauguration. McCarthy noted that her suspected killer had been at liberty despite having been convicted of illegal gun possession just two months before. 
 
 “If he’s not out on the street, Hadiya Pendleton is out there being an honor student and continuing on with her life,” McCarthy said. 
 
 McCarthy emphasized that the Chicago Police Department is pursuing a wide range of strategies to stem the violence, much of which is gang-related. And the murder rate is actually down this year. But even the smartest policing by the most dedicated cops can only do so much in the absence of effective gun laws. 
 
 “If you don’t go to jail for gun possession, you continue to carry guns,” McCarthy said. “You continue to carry guns, and people get shot.” 
 
 Other people who have gotten shot in Chicago in recent days include 17-year-old Ronald Hayes, who was expected to be the first in his family to graduate from high school and who had promised to take his mother to the prom because she never had the opportunity to attend one. He was gunned down in February as he shoveled snow outside a neighbor’s home. 
 
 There was also 17-year-old Gakirah Barnes. Her Twitter moniker was @tyquannassassin, apparently in honor of a 13-year-old relative named Tyquann Tyler who was killed by a stray bullet in 2012. Barnes reportedly was allied with the rapper Lil Jay and the late rapper Lil JoJo, who was killed in 2012 by a not at all stray round after releasing a video dissing Chief Keef, the rapper. Keef’s 30-year-old cousin Mario “BigGlo” Hess was shot to death on April 9. Barnes tweeted a reference to a Notorious B.I.G. lyric the next day. 
 
 “u Nobody until Somebody kill u u dats jst real Shyt.” 
 
 A friend quickly responded. 
 
 “More bodies BITCH This Chiraq.” 
 
 The following afternoon, Barnes was herself shot to death, hit as many as nine times. She was to be buried near her father, who reportedly was shot to death on an Easter 16 years and thousands of murders ago. 
 
 Her death was followed by the April 15 shooting of Lil Jojo’s 16-year-old cousin Keno Blass. Keef’s cousin was buried on Friday, with the star rapper serving as a pallbearer. 
 
 But if a rap war of sorts is behind some of the recent killings and gang rivalries are behind many more and a Facebook spat led to two of the murders, the common denominator in all the shootings is guns. 
 
 The war that now demands the president’s attention is the one in Chiraq. ||||| Dozens shot over weekend, five dead 
 
 A total of 34 people were shot — five of whom died — during a 24-hour stretch from Saturday morning into Sunday morning that was one of the most violent in recent city memory, according to Chicago police. 
 
 The shootings, concentrated on the West and South sides, took place between 10 a.m. Saturday to 10 a.m. Sunday. 
 
 The heaviest amount of violence took place between midnight and 3 a.m., when 30 people were shot. Five mass shootings, in which three or more people were shot, accounted for 25 of the shooting victims during the three-hour span. 
 
 A single shooting in the Gresham neighborhood wounded eight people, including four teenage girls. 
 
 “I promise this city that we won’t be defeated,” Chicago Police Chief of Patrol Fred Waller said during a news conference held Sunday afternoon at police headquarters. “We won’t be overrun by that small element that’s committing these reckless acts.” 
 
 Waller said much of the violence is being traced back to gangs. 
 
 “It’s one of our most violent weekends, there’s no question about that,” police spokesman Tom Ahern said. 
 
 Waller said the uptick in violence cannot be attributed to police resources being diverted to the Lollapalooza music festival. 
 
 Officers working Lollapalooza were on their regular days off and received overtime pay, he said. “So they’re not people who would have been on the street anyway, so we’re not losing any resources to Lollapalooza,” Waller said. 
 
 Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was downtown Sunday to announce plans for improvements to the Riverwalk, was not at the news conference. Police Supt. Eddie Johnson also was not in attendance. 
 
 The aftermath of many of the shootings played out inside and outside the emergency room at Stroger Hospital where extended members and friends were prevented from entering as the staff dealt with the influx of trauma patients. 
 
 Visitation was limited to immediate family members, leaving dozens of people to mill about the parking lot outside the emergency room, where the sounds of crying, wailing and yelling could be heard every few minutes. Tempers occasionally flared. Nearly two dozen police officers huddled near the entrance to the hospital. 
 
 “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said one law enforcement officer stationed outside the hospital who’s seen similar scenes play out over two decades. 
 
 “It’s hot right now. There’s a lot of tension,” said the officer, who asked not to be named. “And it might get worse because you can hear people talking about revenge, saying on their cellphones ‘I know know who did it. You get him.’ ” 
 
 About a half hour later, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis showed up at the parking lot to offer comfort to people, many of whom are constituents. 
 
 “We continue to try to develop enough resources to prevent these kind of incidents from happening,” Davis told reporters, expressing frustration with a lack of government funding for programs that could prevent street violence. 
 
 “I’ll be willing to bet that many of the people who are here right now to express concern are also unemployed, don’t have jobs, are frustrated in terms of daily living,” he said. ||||| Chicago Tribune reporter Adam Sege recaps the night's crime, including a police involved shooting that left a 15-year-old boy dead. (Posted Monday, June 17, 2013) 
 
 As she headed out the door Sunday morning, Adrianne Wilberton put on a brave face. It was time to tell her son the news, and she didn't want him hearing it from anyone else. 
 
 But her composure unraveled as she walked toward the car, a barrage of neighbors hugging her on the way out of her apartment. By the time she reached the front lawn, the mother of six was in tears. 
 
 "Our son is dead! Oh Jesus!" the 57-year-old screamed, referring to Cortez, one of her three sons, who was killed earlier that morning on Chicago's West Side. "Oh my God! Oh my God! We were just talking." 
 
 At least 34 people were shot — nine of them fatally — Saturday afternoon through Father's Day Sunday, stretching from 94th Street and Loomis Avenue on the South Side up to about North Avenue and North Pulaski Road on the Northwest Side, according to authorities. The youngest person killed during one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago this year, 15-year-old Michael Westley, was fatally shot by a police officer Sunday night. 
 
 Shootings from Friday afternoon into Saturday left another 13 people shot, 1 fatally. The combined tally resulted in 47 people shot, and eight killed this weekend. Last year at about the same time, there were 53 people shot, nine fatally in one weekend. 
 
 The rash of violent crime came as Chicago has seen a large dip in overall homicide and shooting numbers so far this year. 
 
 When asked whether this weekend's shooting numbers cast doubt on the department's crime-fighting strategies, Chicago police spokesman Adam Collins insisted they are working, noting the city has so far in 2013 posted its lowest homicide totals in years. 
 
 Collins also reiterated a position that police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has expressed publicly throughout the year when discussing the department's crime-fighting efforts. "There's going to be good days, and there's going to be bad days, which is why we've been calling this progress, not victory," said Collins, who pointed out drops in overall crime. 
 
 Across the city, reminders of the bloody weekend literally stained some of Chicago's streets. In the city's Little Village neighborhood, 15 lit memorial candles stood in blood where Ricardo Herrera, 21, was fatally wounded and two others shot on the 2500 block of South Ridgeway Avenue. 
 
 About five miles away, a long trail of blood remained splattered in a Northwest Side alley — and on the bumper of a nearby car — where 16-year-old Kevin Rivera tried to run from a gunman on a bicycle, authorities told the Tribune. 
 
 Rivera's family was planning to move in two weeks from their sometimes violent section of the West Humboldt Park neighborhood and a social worker was enrolling the teenager in the city's summer jobs program. 
 
 But late Saturday night, someone shot Rivera in the 4100 block of West North Avenue, police said. He attempted to run but collapsed a few feet away. The boy, who lived a few blocks away from the scene, was pronounced dead about 1:35 a.m. Sunday at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, authorities said. 
 
 Grief-stricken and exhausted, Kevin Rivera's family said little about Rivera or his death. "I can't believe it," said Rivera's mother, Maria Figueroa. 
 
 One of six siblings, Rivera could be polite and soft-spoken at home, even as he became increasingly embroiled in neighborhood gang conflicts and faced juvenile court charges. Last year, he was shot in the leg, and he was briefly detained in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and placed on juvenile court probation for carrying an unloaded gun in the neighborhood, according to interviews with relatives. 
 
 His younger sister Yajaira Rivera last year was profiled in a Tribune investigation about elementary students who missed months of school each year. Rivera also missed weeks of school each year at Nobel Elementary School, where he earned an A in 7th grade art class but failed basic courses and had run-ins with teachers and staff, school records and interviews show. 
 
 In a brief Tribune interview last year, Rivera said he had tried to register at Orr Academy High School, but left after a couple of days because he didn't feel safe there. "There is a lot of tension," he said. 
 
 Social worker Emily Runyan, who lived in the neighborhood and befriended Rivera's family, was recently working to enroll Rivera in the city's One Summer Chicago teen jobs program. 
 
 "I don't want to memorialize him because he made some bad choices, but Kevin was a kind, quiet and sensitive kid," Runyan said. "I truly believe he wanted more for his life, but was a victim of many things." 
 
 One of the men killed — 24-year-old Antwon Johnson — was shot by police early Sunday in the Lawndale neighborhood after he raised a 9-millimeter handgun in their direction after bailing from a moving car and falling, police said. 
 
 His mother disputed that account. "It's not true," said Stacy Liberty. "How could someone have a gun and point it to you if they're already on the ground?" 
 
 Liberty said the car had been lurching down the block because the people in the car were trying to identify an address. The presence of a police car behind them must have made Johnson nervous, his mother said. 
 
 Johnson had been convicted three times for drug related charges stemming back to 2006, according to court records. He suffered three gunshot wounds almost two years ago, she said. 
 
 But the father of two five-year-old sons was trying to get his life back on track, she said. 
 
 "He hasn’t been in trouble in a while," said Liberty, who rushed to the scene and recalled seeing her son's lifeless body in the alley. "He was trying to get his stuff together. Black men on the street today, it's tough for them to get a job because the first thing (employers) look at is their record." 
 
 Another victim included 40-year-old Todd Wood, who authorities said was killed after a gunman opened fire at a club in the city's Grand Crossing neighborhood. Three others were wounded in that attack, police said. 
 
 Several hours after the club shooting, Cortez Wilberton, 31, was added to the homicide list. Wilberton had seen plenty of his friends shot over the year, but hit a turning point a few years back when his best friend was killed, his sister said. A former gang member, Wilberton had a lengthy criminal record that included at least 30 arrests, according to court records. 
 
 "That's when he said, 'That's enough of this here … I don't want to be bothered by all this nonsense,' " said his sister, Tanya Wilberton, 37. 
 
 So he left the gang and started focusing all of his energy on his three children, one of whom was born earlier this month, she said. He liked to take his children — two girls and a boy — to the park and watch the older ones ride their bikes, his mother and sister said. 
 
 Sometime early last year, Wilberton was shot in the stomach during a robbery and had to leave his a job as a security guard at a local store, his sister said. 
 
 Still recovering from reconstructive surgery, he mostly stayed indoors at night but was gunned down at 1:35 a.m. on the 200 block of South Keeler Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. A 31-year-old woman also suffered a graze wound to the face in that incident, police said. 
 
 Around the time Wilberton's family gathered Sunday morning to mourn, Karen Sumner received a call at work telling her to hurry home because police officers wanted to talk about her 19-year-old son. 
 
 "I hope my son's not dead," Sumner remembers saying. "Please, I hope my son's not dead." 
 
 But when she arrived at the family's West Chatham home, officers delivered the news she feared most. 
 
 Her son, Jamal Jones, was shot at about 1:15 a.m. Sunday while riding his bike home from a family member's house through the 7400 block of South Parnell Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood, police and relatives said. He died about an hour later. 
 
 Jones was a friendly, motivated young man who steered away from trouble and was always eager to work, according to relatives. He'd sometimes peddle bottled water to passing cars on 79th Street when he couldn't find construction work, his mother said. 
 
 Jones' uncle, Travis Sumner, said his nephew was a reliable member of his roofing crew. Jones worked as the ground man, picking up trash and making sure supplies got up to the laborers on the roof. 
 
 "He worked hard," the uncle said. "He stayed busy all the time." 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, family members returned to the shooting scene. They found the bike Jones had been riding and needles left over from the paramedics. 
 
 As she recalled getting ready for her job at Jewel-Osco on Sunday morning, Karen Sumner said it was odd that her son wasn't there to say goodbye when she left the house at 3:30 a.m. At that time, she still hadn't heard the news. 
 
 "He would always greet me at the door and kiss me and say 'I love you,' " Karen Sumner said on Sunday. "This morning, he didn’t greet me." 
 
 By Monday morning the toll had grown by another fatality when Alexander Lagunas, 18, was pronounced dead at 10:08 a.m. at Mount Sinai, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. 
 
 Lagunas, of the 8100 block of South Scottsdale was shot on the 4000 block of West 31st Street at 12:31 a.m. Sunday morning, according to police. 
 
 Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner, Carlos Sadovi, Kim Geiger, Deanese Williams-Harris and Adam Sege contributed. 
 
 pnickeas@tribune.com 
 
 dyjackson@tribune.com 
 
 mitsmith@tribune.com 
 
 jmdelgado@tribune.com ||||| Shootings over the Fourth of July weekend left 10 people dead and 55 others wounded, a toll lower than last year but one marked by an intense stretch of gun violence over eight hours on one of the nights. 
 
 Among those killed was 7-year-old Amari Brown, shot in the chest as he watched fireworks near his father's home in Humboldt Park late Saturday night. Police say they believe the attack was aimed at the father, whom they described as a ranking gang member. 
 
 Also gunned down was 17-year-old Vonzell Banks, who was shot as he played basketball Friday at a park named for Hadiya Pendleton, a high school student fatally shot in 2013 near President Barack Obama's Chicago home. 
 
 The wounded included a 16-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl shot shortly after midnight Sunday as they walked in Old Town, and a 19-year-old man shot around 10 p.m. Saturday as two groups fought near Navy Pier after the fireworks display there. 
 
 The violence peaked from dusk Saturday until dawn Sunday, when 30 people were shot across Chicago -- nearly half the total for the entire weekend, measured from 3 p.m. Thursday until just before dawn Monday. 
 
 Last Fourth of July, 82 people were shot, 16 of them fatally, over 84 hours. Five of those shot were wounded by police. There were no police-involved shootings this year. 
 
 Mayor Emanuel and CPD Superintendent McCarthy respond July 6, 2015, to another violent weekend after increased security efforts by Chicago police. The youngest victim of this past weekend’s gun violence was a 7-year-old boy; police say the boy's father was the intended target. (WGN TV) Mayor Emanuel and CPD Superintendent McCarthy respond July 6, 2015, to another violent weekend after increased security efforts by Chicago police. The youngest victim of this past weekend’s gun violence was a 7-year-old boy; police say the boy's father was the intended target. (WGN TV) SEE MORE VIDEOS 
 
 The shootings this Fourth of July were primarily scattered across the South and West sides. 
 
 Englewood -- the police district with more shootings than any other in the city so far this year -- did not have a single person shot over the holiday weekend. 
 
 A number of other neighborhoods saw several shootings: Little Village, four people shot; Back of the Yards, six shot; and the Austin neighborhood, eight people shot. 
 
 Two North Side neighborhoods -- Old Irving Park and Albany Park -- each had shootings in which three people were wounded. One man died in the Albany Park shooting. 
 
 Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the weekend outbreak in violence shows the number of officers working the streets isn't as critical in preventing shootings as having effective gun laws that put gun offenders behind bars for a long time. McCarthy has long contended that Illinois' sentencing laws for gun crimes are too lenient. 
 
 "If you think that putting more cops on the street would make a difference, then take a look at the fact that we put a third more manpower on the street for this weekend," McCarthy said. "What's the result? We're getting more guns. Well, that's great. It's not stopping the violence. 
 
 "And it's not going to stop the violence until criminals are held accountable and something is done to stem the flow of these guns into our city."
– Chicago might have been making headlines this weekend for the thousands of people who packed downtown for Lollapalooza. Instead, most of the attention is focused on the shooting violence that occurred elsewhere in the city, leaving more than 60 injured and 10 dead between Friday evening and Monday morning, reports WLS-TV. The worst of it took place in a three-hour span starting around midnight Saturday when 30 people were shot, reports the Sun-Times. Of those victims, 25 were injured in five mass shootings. Police say gang violence is mostly to blame, with shooters taking advantage of large gatherings in the summer weather to inflict the most casualties. "If they shoot you, they don’t even run,” one man tells the Chicago Tribune. "They just walk away, they ain’t trying to run." A police spokesman says the extra police presence at the music festival did not play a role in the violence because officers working it were generally on their regular days off and on OT. The violence prompted Rudy Giuliani to enter the fray with a series of tweets backing Garry McCarthy, a former Chicago police chief who hopes to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "MAKE CHICAGO SAFE AGAIN!" tweeted Giuliani, who worked with McCarthy in New York when Giuliani was mayor. Giuliani called McCarthy a "policing genius" thanks to his work with the data-centric CompStat system, adding, "Chicago murders are direct result of one party Democratic rule for decades." The Washington Post can't resist pointing out that Giuliani misspelled McCarthy's first name as "Jerry" and the current mayor's last name as "Emmanuel," and that McCarthy is a Democrat himself.