After 32 Shooting Victims, a Rallying Cry: ‘Stop the Bleeding’

A mass shooting today in Pensacola. 391 mass shootings this year... so far. 36,516 gun violence deaths this year... so far. This is who we are. Violence is how America historically solves problems everywhere from ending slavery to shutting down pipeline protesters to dealing with other nations. No nation that bombs and invades other nations at will shall ever find peace at home. This is who we are. https://emcphd.wordpress.com

Bloomberg is the only candidate for 2020 with the will, the guts, and the money to CONTINUE his fight against the gun lobby, and gun violence. He has been fighting the gun lobby for years. Wake up, America! Demand a political leader who can do to the gun companies what eventually got done to the tobacco companies, and what is finally being done to the opioid-peddlers. It’s not a lost cause!

With all that is known and available to counter this nonproductive behavior in and of the one's respective community, one can only conclude that these events are nothing less than Social Darwinism at work. Evolve for survival or self destruct.

Gang violence. It is an aggressive cancer that is metastasizing. According to the NYPD press release, the new NYPD Commissioner, Shea, use "precision policing and Neighborhood Policing to target gang-related violence, take guns off the streets and continue the city's remarkable reduction in crime." Gun violence requires that guns be removed from criminals' hands. It's not rocket science. It was the impetus for the Stop-and-Frisk effort. If people knew they might get frisked, they were less likely to walk around with guns. We shall see how the NYPD addresses this problem now.

I have taken Newton’s laws of physics and adapted them to human dynamics. And it goes like this: For every action there’s an opposite and unequal overreaction. Stop and Frisk was meant to remove the plethora of illegal guns in the City. It appears it got out of hand and the NYPD overreached. But they also confiscated a lot of weapons. I can’t help but notice that shootings in the City seem to be rising. And even more so brazenly. We need a policy that respects constitutional rights when it comes to searches - certainly. But instead of simply revoking Stop and Frisk we need to revise and revisit it. If not expect even more death and injury from gun violence.

The criminal justice policies embraced by the Mayor and the City Council are largely responsible for these murders which have increased by 9% this year. The City is proclaiming that overall crime is down by 1.3% in 2019, but this is absurd. The Times recently reported that 90,000 packages a day are stolen or disappear in New York City without explanation. Yet for the past 28 days, NYPD reported only 6,806 petit larceny crimes city-wide in its Comstat report. Disorder, not poverty, breeds crime and city officials are allowing disorder to spread like a cancer.

This story moved me deeply. "Community gun"?! Is this the pass we've come to? Pity and horror, more than enough to go around.

"The Police Department, he said, had responded to the murder by increasing police presence in the area." What is it that the police did not know previously to have engaged in preventive policing as opposed to reactive policing?

The two legitimate reasons for punishing criminals is to stop them from committing new crimes and convincing others not to commit similar crimes. When we fail to enforce our less serious laws we are inviting more people to break the law and commit more serious crimes. People know who these shooters are. They get in trouble in schools for years before they shoot someone. Authorities choose to let young people get involved in criminal activity without punishment and then are surprised when people get shot. The problem is not the guns. It is the local politicians who fight against enforcement of petty laws. It is the leadership of the police department who don't speak up as a union against lenient policies which avoid punishing small crimes. District Attorneys who don't prosecute low level crimes. The list is long.

Here is the thing: In this very neighborhood, Southeast Jamaica, if the police are chasing a suspect involved in some shooting, the streets are lit with flashes of cameras in smart phones. Those cameras are directed at the police, not at the shooter; the residents are intent on catching the police officers in using excessive force or breaking some other rule. But when the gang members are fighting each other, shooting at each other (and often hitting innocent bystanders), selling or "renting" guns, committing robberies and burglaries, the upstanding residents of this neighborhood keep their smart phones tucked well away. And when the police come looking for witnesses after a gang shooting or even a murder, the upstanding citizens living in this neighborhood suddenly have the case of mass amnesia. They have heard nothing, seen nothing, remember nothing, and have taken no pictures. Until and unless these attitudes change, the deadly violence will not abate.

I grew up not too far from where Aamir was slain and like the police chief, also took two buses to the exact same high school. So this story touched me deeply. However, I disagree with the oft-used sentiment that kids that gravitate to gangs do so because they don't have anywhere to go. There's plenty to do in the neighborhood: Homework. After-school programs. Chores. Babysitting. Bagging groceries at the local supermarket. Sweeping up inside and outside the local bodega or barbershop. Stocking shelves. Helping out at local churches. Food delivery. Choir practice. Band practice. Bible study. Movie nights at the library. Handing out flyers for this or that local business and earning the trust of the employer who would reward you with more fulfilling work. It's not politically correct to say it, but it's up to the parents to find things for these teens to do, not the city or state. Aamir's parents by all accounts tried so hard for him. My heart breaks for them. The parents of the kids that took his life bear some of the blame for cutting this promising life short.