This was not an auspicious way to start out 2025.
In Kankakee, an early morning New Year’s Day mass shooting killed two brothers and injured five others at a house party. People ran outdoors in an attempt to flee.
In Chicago, three people were killed and 17 were wounded in shootings over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
On New Orleans' Bourbon Street, police say a 42-year-old man drove a pickup truck into a crowd on a busy street, killing 14 people and injuring 35. The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was an Army veteran born in Texas who got out of the truck and shot at police before officers shot and killed him. Authorities say Jabbar had planted explosives in ice coolers in the French Quarter — which police, luckily, were able to render safe before anyone else could be injured.
And in Las Vegas, the driver of a Tesla Cybertruck died and seven other people were injured outside the Trump Hotel on New Year's Day after the truck, which was loaded with fuel canisters and fireworks mortars, exploded. Police said the driver, Matthew Alan Livelsberger, 37, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, was an active-duty U.S. special forces soldier who shot himself dead before the blast.
It all made for a sobering New Year's Day for everyone who hoped to enjoy the holiday in peace.
Americans are beset by violence. Gun violence alone took 16,576 lives, excluding suicide, in the U.S. in 2024, according to The Trace, which reports on guns and gun violence in America. That was the third consecutive yearly decline, The Trace found. As of Friday, there have already been five mass shootings nationwide in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
In Chicago, the total number of murders and carjackings also were down in 2024. But those numbers remain far too high, and homicides remain far higher than the number of gun deaths in many other nations.
The causes of violence are multifaceted. The solutions need to be, as well.
But efforts to tamp down violence certainly are not helped when disinformation is spread, especially by those in positions of authority. President-elect Donald Trump, for example, said the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks were due to a policy of open borders — but both Jabbar and Livelsberger were U.S. citizens. Trump later insisted he was right, despite being publicly proven wrong.
In fact, disinformation like that makes it harder for people to work together to find solutions. It's corrosive and invites chaos.
It also makes it harder for people to spot disinformation from other sources. On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury said a Moscow-based nonprofit closely associated with Russia's main intelligence unit, and a subordinate organization of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, spread disinformation, including via artificial intelligence, during the 2024 presidential election.
This cannot become the new normal.
What's needed to prevent that is a wide consensus that neither violence nor disinformation is an acceptable way to resolve differences or achieve goals.
Yet a 2022 study found 12% of Americans were willing to threaten or intimidate another person for political reasons. One in five thought political violence could be justified, and 7% thought it could be OK to kill over political disagreements. Half of Americans thought there would be a civil war within the next few years.
Those are troubling statistics, given that a recent Gallup poll found a record 80% of American adults believe the nation is vastly divided on the most important values.
All of this is alarming, and a call to action. Americans, starting with our leaders, should be seeking peaceful ways to reduce violence and come together to settle conflict. We also need to agree to search out and rely on provable facts, not fall victim to lazy fallacies — or worse, intentional disinformation.
The year 2025 is off to a bad start. The rest of the year doesn't have to follow suit.
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