A recent news piece about a man in Milwaukee, WI who was beaten by a gang of males after he honked at them to get out of the way: a drive-by shooting in Toronto is blamed by officials there as the fault of the US allowing so many guns to roam around.
I think the two have something in common…mob mentality. Put a bunch of cowards together with low self-worth and it’s a recipe for violence. As much as an alcoholic looks for an excuse to get drunk, these groups of mobsters look for a reason to strike out…guns or not. London had ’em in the 15th century, bands of youth who were homeless knocking down citizens taking their groceries, money and anything else of value.
We’ve just got sophisticated now and started calling them gangs in the late 1950’s. Somehow the idea that the violence is spawned exclusively in the US is unfair I think. One need only watch the international news to see other incidents of bombings, factions fighting…on and on.
I don’t have the cure.. I know escalated levels of violence won’t help. I know pointing the finger at your neighbor won’t help. Locking them up solves the problem for a while until they get out again, more violent than before and it certainly isn’t going to help to deny the existence of the gangs.
It will take a tipping point of people getting involved in the social issues related to the causation factors. Not handouts mind you. Past studies show that the majority of kids in poorer neighborhoods succeed. Why? Because there was a support structure of family and neighbors to hold them accountable and to protect them and there was a desire on the part of the kid to succeed. He/she was driven to meet the expectations of the community.
We need this to happen on a broad scale in our communities. We can’t and won’t arrest our way out of this. The violence will stop when it is no longer tolerated in all the small ways as kids grow up. Bullying in school, in the home, and in the classrooms. Bullies are cowards at heart who surround themselves with guns, weapons and people to insulate them from their own cowardice.
The coward that shot the teenager in Toronto certainly was no hero. He was a cold blooded killer. It shouldn’t be candy-coated it’s just the way it is. We shouldn’t justify the actions of these thugs by saying, “well, we only had XX murders this year compared to city ‘c’ who had XXX, so we must be better off.
Do not become complacent about the small quality of life issues. The resolution of these things helps mitigate the bigger things down the road. The police need to understand this, the schools need to understand this, parents, courts and communities need to understand this.
It means investing the capital: both financial and people to make the difference. Otherwise, we can continue to minimize our problems by blaming our neighbors, immigrants, or finding someone else who has a bigger problem than we do.