New Year, Same Story
I hope everybody had a great "holiday season", whatever holidays you celebrated. And all the best for the upcoming year to everybody. Because it was that time of the year, I decided to lay low from blogging, and enjoy the freedom of not having deadline pressures for the past week and a bit. Maybe that was a bit decadent of me, since I'll be on a boat for a week later this month and certainly not blogging, but the rest was nice. For now, I'm back to the grind.
Unfortunately, the year has started with more bad tidings from the city in which I reside. It didn't take long for the first gun murder of 2006, after an especially mean 2005. The year ended with the shooting death of a 15 year old girl, an innocent victim of gang shootings in the middle of a busy downtown street on Boxing Day. That was an incident that everyone in the city took to heart, and had everyone wondering when this would end.
My fear is that a culture of gangs and guns is like an infestation of cockroaches - you never totally get rid of it. There are no easy solutions. Stiffer sentences? We've seen from our friends to the south how that isn't a pancea. I have no problem with violent criminals getting tougher punishment, but that in itself won't reduce the frequency of gun violence, which is what we want to achieve, and could lead to increased racial tensions if not properly implemented. There has to be more than just that. Meanwhile the Liberal government wants to ban handguns, as if that will keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It's time for them to work on real ideas rather than knee-jerk symbolism.
Despite what my political leanings might lead you to believe, I'm not a big gun control guy. If somebody wants to have a handgun or ten to protect themselves, that should be their right. It's the military-style assault weapons that ought to be controlled if anything, because nobody can claim that an AK-47 is an instrument of self-defence. But a ban on handguns will work about as well as prohibition of alcohol, and will create a new level of criminalization that will clog our already-congested law enforcement and legal infrastructures.
Really, this has little to do with guns and everything to do with gangs, who account for just about all of the increase in gun murder over the last couple of years. And while trying to crack a larger, organized crime structure higher up the food chain doesn't provide the same kind of instant gratification you get from cracking a few skulls on the street, it's the only way you can hope to get the gangs to disappear. In the meantime we'll deal with the individuals involved, and they will be replaced by others. (There are plenty of parallels with Islamist terrorism.) And the cesspool will continue to flourish. I sure hope I'm wrong about that.
Unfortunately, the year has started with more bad tidings from the city in which I reside. It didn't take long for the first gun murder of 2006, after an especially mean 2005. The year ended with the shooting death of a 15 year old girl, an innocent victim of gang shootings in the middle of a busy downtown street on Boxing Day. That was an incident that everyone in the city took to heart, and had everyone wondering when this would end.
My fear is that a culture of gangs and guns is like an infestation of cockroaches - you never totally get rid of it. There are no easy solutions. Stiffer sentences? We've seen from our friends to the south how that isn't a pancea. I have no problem with violent criminals getting tougher punishment, but that in itself won't reduce the frequency of gun violence, which is what we want to achieve, and could lead to increased racial tensions if not properly implemented. There has to be more than just that. Meanwhile the Liberal government wants to ban handguns, as if that will keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It's time for them to work on real ideas rather than knee-jerk symbolism.
Despite what my political leanings might lead you to believe, I'm not a big gun control guy. If somebody wants to have a handgun or ten to protect themselves, that should be their right. It's the military-style assault weapons that ought to be controlled if anything, because nobody can claim that an AK-47 is an instrument of self-defence. But a ban on handguns will work about as well as prohibition of alcohol, and will create a new level of criminalization that will clog our already-congested law enforcement and legal infrastructures.
Really, this has little to do with guns and everything to do with gangs, who account for just about all of the increase in gun murder over the last couple of years. And while trying to crack a larger, organized crime structure higher up the food chain doesn't provide the same kind of instant gratification you get from cracking a few skulls on the street, it's the only way you can hope to get the gangs to disappear. In the meantime we'll deal with the individuals involved, and they will be replaced by others. (There are plenty of parallels with Islamist terrorism.) And the cesspool will continue to flourish. I sure hope I'm wrong about that.
posted by Jaymeister at 1/02/2006 08:13:00 p.m.
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