* Sun-Times…

Drawing parallels between the horrors his family has faced and the challenges facing Chicago, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy laid out plans Saturday he said he would enact to help curb the rampant gun violence in the city.

Several times during a 40-minute speech detailing his plans, Kennedy spoke of the residual effect that gun violence can have.

Kennedy spoke of “a boy” whose father was killed and the troubles he faced and overcame growing up. […]

Kennedy laid out eight areas he said he believes would lead to a decrease in violence: boosting economic development, halting the flow of illegal guns into the state, doing more to mentor at-risk youth, putting a greater focus on using proven techniques to quell violence, acknowledging that violence will continue, making the police department better reflect the communities it serves; and reforming the criminal justice system.

His full speech is here.

* Tribune…

Asked how much his plans would cost, particularly in shifting the burden off property taxes to state taxes, Kennedy said he was speaking about “solutions that drive our costs down.”

Asked what his plan to add up to 2,000 police officers in Chicago with benefits and pensions would cost city taxpayers, Kennedy responded: “Tell that to the thousands of people who were shot last year. Tell that to the people of the families that lost a loved one. Tell that to the children who will be unproductive adults because they can’t process the trauma. Tell that to the taxpayer who’s going to have the burden of those families for their entire lives because we didn’t pay for a few extra police officers today.” […]

“We are using strategic gentrification as a weapon against the poor and people of color. We’re underfunding the schools because we pay for them with property taxes,” said Kennedy, who said education should be funded with “a basket of taxes” including a graduated income tax that levies a higher tax rate based on wealth.

“This is the root of fundamental unfairness, not just in Chicago but across the entire state as well,” he said of the property tax system. “Not only does it cause our kids to be undereducated, it contributed clearly to the violence in our communities. People are dying. They’re being killed because we are not providing them alternative economic opportunities simply because they are undereducated.”

* WGN TV…

Kennedy said there’s a lot of focus on Chicago, but other parts of Illinois have shootings, too.

“Violence which can touch our society anywhere will eventually touch our society everywhere. Just as it did to my family, just as it has done to too many of the people in this room. Just as it has done to too many families across the state of Illinois,” he said.

* NBC 5…

During the speech, Kennedy criticized Governor Bruce Rauner for not doing enough to curb violence in Chicago, saying that the governor’s belief in limited government intervention has been the wrong path forward.

“The Republican party in the state of Illinois was hijacked by a libertarian madman who believes that there is no role for government in people’s lives nor the economy nor in state support for any anti-violence program,” he said.

* Kennedy also sat down for an interview with WGN TV…

Chris Kennedy spent his childhood coping with his father death but also the murder of his uncle President John F. Kennedy.

“We would watch TV and watch the news every night it would just appear on screen on news broadcast or part of a movie screen,” he says. “That was always very disturbing. It would rattle us.”

From a wealthy family, Kennedy had resources to help him deal with the family tragedies, but he worries about all the children of Chicago’s gun violence who do not.

“Today, it’s different in Chicago and elsewhere where you have thousands of those events occurring every year and way too many people being injured physically and mentally and mostly emotionally. I’d say that the bullet that kills the father wounds the child. … We have entire communities deal with PTSD and other issues. … Now we know how to fix now we know how to heal, now we know how to help and yet we don’t help, we don’t heal. We don’t fix because we don’t spend the money to do so.”