Doin’ What America Is Good at – Killing Its Kids

Most of America lives in or around cities. It’s been that way for decades. But our system of government was designed to protect rural votes, rural values and rural political dominance. It was designed that way by farmer-gentlemen Founding Fathers, bartering with their untrusted city-folk brethren. Senators represent states – land mass – not population (dem city folk got the House). The electoral college, with enhanced gerrymandering, allows rural districts to elect a president against a majority popular vote. 

That power, which includes that only the Senate is needed to confirm federal appointees, especially judges, seeps into the modern urban world with results that should shock city-dwellers big time. Take for example the Second Amendment, which was nothing more than a reaction to British practices, a demand by our citizen soldiers (militia) that they be allowed to keep their muskets even when they were not on active military duty. But rural values and NRA’s paid lobbying efforts (thank you gun industry) began a campaign in 1976 to promote gun ownership as a fundamental right, pushing for a change in America’s social consciousness… all designed to change the long-standing laissez-faire approach of the federal courts toward gun control and reinterpret the Second Amendment.

“Even the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which incorporated almost all the provisions of the Bill of Rights in the 1960s, largely ignored the Second Amendment. Until very recently, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment is not ‘fundamental to liberty, unlike the rights to freedom of speech, religion and assembly, which state laws cannot restrict.’

“From United States v. Cruikshank in 1875 to District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court held that states can impose broad restrictions on firearm possession without violating the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.” Ammo.com, a pro-gun-ownership Website. Heller changed all that. The NRA effort to cast the Second Amendment as making gun-ownership a fundamental right kicked in as violence-plagued Washington, D.C. attempted to control hand guns outside of homes and practice ranges. Right wing activist Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, reversing decades of practices and expanding the interpretation of the Second Amendment to a new twisted view that ubiquitous gun ownership, with very few exceptions, is a fundamental right. The NRA’s efforts paid off.

It’s more than obvious that having a gun on a farm is dramatically different from having a gun in a crowded city. But since rural values trump (pun very much intended) urban necessities under our system of government, those rural gun values now apply to the most dangerous, gang-infested inner cities as well. Today, I am not focusing on mass shootings, schools under assault by shooters with semi-automatic assault rifles or a Las Vegas massacre. Today, I’m talking about my city, Los Angeles, not unlike so many major American metropolitan areas, and what the gun culture has done to those young students in our inner city… not just in their schools… in their daily lives.

 

“While much of the recent national conversation on campus violence has focused on mass shootings, schools also are dealing with other physical and psychological harms that thousands of students experience directly or indirectly near campuses.

“In Los Angeles County, at least one homicide occurred within a mile of 89% of public high school campuses, according to a Times analysis of data from 2014 through 2018. Fifteen campuses saw at least 50 homicides within a mile during those years…

“The impact of that violence can be devastating and costly. Campuses have begun incorporating the inevitability of trauma into their curricula, addressing stress reduction and how to settle differences without resorting to violence. Students suffer symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychiatric social workers are now a staple on many campuses. Because there is too little mental health funding to meet the need, teachers and staff are often on the front lines in identifying the warning signs of emotionally needy students.

“One concern is practical: getting safely to and from school, avoiding not just bullets but gang flashpoints, street harassment, hit-and-runs and muggings. With limited district busing, some students opt for public transportation or other ride-sharing options. On their journeys, they sometimes pass candle- and flower-filled memorials to fallen friends…

“Jaleyah Collier had just said goodbye to Kevin Cleveland outside a doughnut shop a few blocks from Hawkins High School on a spring afternoon in 2017. Get home safe, she told him before walking away.

“Minutes later someone drove into an alley nearby, got out of the car and asked Kevin, 17, and two others about their gang affiliation. The gunman then sprayed them with at least 10 rounds, killing Kevin and wounding the others.

“Jaleyah, then a high school sophomore, barely had time to grieve when a month later, her best friend, Alex Lomeli, 18, was shot and killed when someone tried to rob a market about a mile from the same high school, located at 60th and Hoover streets.

“In the early hours of Mother’s Day 2018, two other teens Jaleyah was close to, Monyae Jackson and La’marrion Upchurch, were walking home with friends when they were fatally shot near Dymally High School… Each of Jaleyah’s friends was killed within walking distance of public high schools in Los Angeles.

“‘You don’t know when it’s going to be a person’s last day,’ said Jaleyah, a senior at the Community Health Advocates School, one of three small schools on the Hawkins campus. ‘[Kevin] woke up not knowing.’” Los Angeles Times, March 3^rd. 

In some communities, the only way for most male teens to survive is to affiliate with a local gang. But there’s a catch, as Tom Branson, former Gary, Indiana Police Chief, tells us: “Among gang members, there is an ‘assumed destiny,’ and many have told me they don't expect to live to be 19 or 20, so they are going to ride as hard and fast as they can, while they can. They are correct; the sad reality is the average life expectancy of an active gang member is 20 years and 5 months.” New York Times, 2/5/14. Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Miami, Philadelphia, Houston, St Louis, Newark and on and on and on.

It never ceases to amaze me how even after a mass shooting, the response from gun zealots, represented by the NRA, is never of remorse or a call for reasonable gun control. More guns in classrooms, they cry. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” As there were a litmus test and assuming good guys never do bad things or become bad guys. Or justifying why we even allow military assault weapons in civilian hands. Since most of the world that is not at war seems to be able to work quite well without open and ubiquitous gun ownership, none of those slogans is correct. 

Almost everyone agrees that known criminals and those with serious mental issues should not be allowed access to guns. Yet there are so many guns out there, that stealing, “borrowing” and buying a lethal weapon, even an assault rifle remains accessible to just about anyone who wants one, crazy or dangerous alike. Even in liberal California, the numbers of known people who have guns but shouldn’t is staggering, and the state lacks the resources to shut it all down. 

“The number of criminals and mentally ill people who improperly own firearms in California has increased in the last year to more than 23,200, as a record number of people have been added to the list by the courts amid a surge of gun buying, state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said.

“The first program of its kind in the nation, the Armed and Prohibited Persons System in the California Department of Justice matches the names of people who have bought firearms with those later prohibited from possessing guns because they have been convicted of crimes or found to be severely mentally ill… The number of people on the list is up from 22,574 prohibited gun owners at the start of 2018 — a figure that was revised drastically upward from last year’s initial report — and 10,266 a decade ago… The backlog [of confiscation] grew even though agents with the state Department of Justice seized firearms from a record 4,142 people last year, Becerra said at a Sacramento news conference surrounded by confiscated rifles and pistols.” Los Angeles Times, March 3^rd. California wants to control the tsunami of uncontrolled gun ownership; think about the red states who don’t.

“Oh, we just have too many guns to be able to do anything about it… the criminals will never give up their weapons” is another excuse. We got gangsters with Tommy guns to stop in the 1930s, Australia got control of guns after a 1996 mass shooting and so can America do so today. Or the Supreme Court, now firmly tilted to the right, can continue to enable the gun culture that defines the United States today… and shocks most of the rest of the world. More dead people. Most of them dead teens and young adults. America?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly what have we done to ourselves?!