“Nothing stops a bullet like a job”
The title of this article is the motto of Homeboy Industries, a self-help entrepreneurial organization that’s been serving former gang bangers in the Los Angeles area for quite a few years now. Participants seek to trade-in gang affiliations and drive-by shootings for opportunities to create legitimate revenue streams and sources of income. The group’s most recent venture is the opening of a diner located in Los Angeles City Hall.
According to the organization’s website, they provide a variety of services, from a charter high school to tattoo removal… from poetry classes to solar panel installation training. After completing job-readiness programs, the young people are placed in one of “four businesses, where former [gang] rivals work side by side baking bread, learning to silkscreen, developing retail skills, or running a restaurant and catering business.”
This sounds like something we’re in dire need of here in Cleveland, especially in light of the incident last Saturday where four people were shot by a teenage gunman and a 16-year-old victim died. But instead of seeking solutions that hold out real promise we’ll probably hold another weepy candlelight vigil and place some stuffed animals at the scene, as if an accident took place. But dammit this was no “accident” — this was a young fool with a gun.
Sudden loss of life is always tragic; and when it’s a young life, lost in such a senseless and wanton manner, it’s even more tragic. The teenage gunman will eventually be caught and will spend (at minimum) the next 30 years of his life behind bars. Two families ruined.
I’m going to go out on a limb (but not by much since this is so easily predictable) and venture to guess the perpetrator was an unemployed high school dropout, probably raised in a single-parent home with little guidance… possessing little or no sense of any kind of future. “When you ain’t got nothin’… you got nothin’ to lose.”
Even the best raised teenagers can be unspeakably cruel, but give a juvenile from a dysfunctional background a gun and suddenly, perhaps for the first time in his young life, he feels powerful, brave… but it’s only “pistol courage,” and it’s spreading throughout minority communities like a plague… an epidemic.
Of course poor communities have more dysfunctional behavior and violence… but given the bleak futures inner-city kids face, what the hell do we expect? But add in automatic weapons and fistfights become gunfights.
Thanks to National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbyists, the proliferation of guns continues unabated in America. Lax (actually non-existent) enforcement at gun shows means virtually anyone — without any form of I.D. — can walk in empty-handed and walk out armed to the teeth. Many of these gun shows are conducted on public property, such as the Berea Fairgrounds.
And then there’s the “straw” purchaser: Any 18-year-old without a criminal record can legally buy gun after gun after gun week in and week out without a question being asked. Indeed, some young people subsist off of the income they earn buying guns and then reselling them on the black-market. Unfortunately, as powerful as the NRA lobby is in this country, none of this is going to change anytime soon.
For the eighth year in a row I was part of the team that planned Family Unity in the Park at Luke Easter Park. Gunfire broke out at the end of the event after people had left the park and already were a few blocks away. Police had escorted and dispersed the crowd up the street, but how far can police accompany people… all the way home to their doors? There simply are not enough officers in the world to accomplish that.
I was in every meeting, every planning session with the police… and every precaution humanly possible was discussed and taken. With a crowd in excess of 20,000 people, and an event that ran from noon to 10PM, only one arrest was made, for drunk and disorderly conduct. People came out to have a good time, and they did. Nonetheless tragedy struck.
There’s only one real, surefire way to prevent buck-wild teenagers of any race or color from acting out foolishly — go back and read the title of this article one more time.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.