(Bugout.news) As [far too many] Americans mourned the loss of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo over Memorial Day weekend, a real humanitarian disaster that received far less attention was unfolding in Chicago, where 69 people were shot over the same period.

Sixty-nine people.

Never mind the fact there is something wrong in a culture that seems to care more about an animal than a four-year-old boy who somehow climbed into his exhibit (4-year-old boys are a handful – ask anyone who has raised boys). That much is obvious.

But what is far less obvious to many people is that the situation in Chicago will occur many times over in a true SHTF scenario: Loss of power grid; collapse of government; economic calamity; disease outbreak.

Preppers already know there are any number of scenarios that could lead to societal collapse and are generally ready for them. But to get a glimpse of what total anarchy really looks like, just take a look at “a day in the life” of Chicagoans who live in parts of the city that its leaders have simply abandoned.

Since the first of the year there have been more than 274 shooting deaths (as of this writing) in the Windy City; in all, more than 1,300 have been wounded in shootings. In May, 65 people were shot and killed – a figure not seen since the 1990s. Some 341 were wounded.

This is what mayhem looks like, in a microcosm. Now, times the number of violent shootings in Chicago by, say, 1,000 per day, and you may begin to approach the kind of chaos that we’d likely see in a nationwide meltdown of some sort.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

We talk about Chicago in the abstract because, as big as it is, most Americans live somewhere else. But if SHTF everywhere, virtually no one would be able to escape the violence. It would be like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, racially-charged protests in Baltimore and the mean streets of Chicago’s South Side all wrapped in one – and breaking out everywhere, simultaneously.

To put this in context, the U.S. military has not lost as many personnel to hostile fire each month as Chicago, over the course of its lengthy deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And those are legitimate war zones.

What’s more, there is already a sort of growing anarchy in major cities around the country, after police have been told to back off by liberal, left-leaning city administrators in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. The result has been an uptick in murder rates and violence that is reversing a two-decade trend, nationally, of lower rates of murder and violence.

Another place to keep an eye on is Venezuela, which is about to implode thanks to more than a decade of socialist government and redistributionist economic policies. The people there cannot even purchase basic foodstuffs and goods; inflation is in the triple digits, and something like 70 percent of the population wants Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to step down (but he won’t). Unrest, driven by soaring poverty and desperation (in a country that was once the envy of South America), will get soon turn violent and the military will have to be deployed to quell it. Then the fun really begins.

Could that happen in the U.S.? Of course it can. It can happen anywhere. And we can already see what happens when anarchy reins and chaos goes mainstream.

More:

• Top FIVE urban survival mistakes that can kill you
• Have you decided who’s ‘in charge’ of your group when SHTF?
• These 10 items are cheap now but they will be invaluable after SHTF 

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