Lazy Legislation

By David Anderson and Cindy Peak

“A girl was shot off her porch – mistake.  The newspaper story quoted a Chicago police officer: There’s a gang feud in the area, it’ll take a while to die down, we’re monitoring it.  Monitoring it?  Gary French and I looked at each other across breakfast.  We knew what to do. Go out there, find one guy from each side, say, One more shot fired and DEA comes calling.  Monitoring it?  Made you want to go shake somebody.”[i]

As lazy as is “monitoring” the gunslingers, just as lazy is confiscating guns. The first is relatively passive, under the misguided notion that very little works.  The latter is active, but equally misguided: doing anything MUST be better than doing nothing.  Besides, everybody’s hollering to ‘do something!’ 

And this time they mean it.

Justice – perpetrators of gun violence being brought to justice, and doing justice to the gun violence problem - is what’s needed.  But “justice (is) frequently not only blind, but also deaf, dumb, and stupid.”[ii]

And lazy.

When David M. Kennedy and his team were invited to pay a visit to Chicago, it was because of the success in other parts of the country of a program they developed called Ceasefire.  Their story is told in “Don’t Shoot – One Man, A Street Fellowship, and The End of Violence in Inner-city America.” 

Ceasefire brought about the cessation of fire not because of what the headlines implied in the media frenzy that followed the laying down of weapons in Ceasefire’s first city - “The Boston Miracle” - but because of “hard damned work.”[iii]

“It wasn’t a miracle.”

Nor was it more legislation.

Vice President Biden believes bullets will stop producing bodies if more laws restricting access to weapons, gun magazines (of the firing kind) and ammunition are passed, even though the laws already on the books are too many to enforce, according to a report by Caroline May, in “The Daily Caller.”

“If we are not going to enforce the laws that are on the books,” said Jim Baker, National Rifle Association (NRA) director of federal affairs, “it not only engenders disrespect for the law but it makes law-abiding gun owners wonder why we are going through this exercise we are going through now.”

Wonder they should but what’s a wonder even more is - with all this blather about the laws on the books – the lack of wondering why we don’t just throw the book at those who don’t abide by it.

Ted Nugent, member of the board of directors of the NRA, says “The truth is that we don’t have a gun-violence problem. What America has is a gangsta-violence problem and a failed court system that keeps unleashing them onto our streets.”

Nugent points to “the president’s hometown, not-so-sweet Chicago.

“According to Chicago’s finest, up to 80 percent of the Windy City’s murders and shootings are the result of gangsta violence. Estimates on the number of gangstas roaming the streets of Chicago are as high as 70,000.”

Other city’s body-counts are similar says Nugent. 

“‘Gangsta violence’ in Los Angeles accounts for the vast majority of killings among 15 to 24-year-olds.”  Across the country, in state after state, “gangstas are responsible for almost 50 percent of violent crime with some jurisdictions reporting that gangstas are responsible for up to 90 percent of crime.”

“Even more alarming, the number of gangstas is rising - 1.4 million comprising more than 3,000 different violent gangs in America, a 40 percent increase from the estimated 1 million gangstas in 2009.”

All of these statistics lead Nugent to the conclusion that “removing so-called assault weapons and high capacity magazines from law-abiding citizens,” is not the answer.

There’s a better way.

“One bullet, you’re done, count on it.  You’re not going stateside but federal, and there’s no parole in the federal system anymore: You serve your time.  Everybody you’re running with is done, too.  Patrol, narcotics, the gang guys, FBI, DEA, ATF, they’re all going to make your crew a special project.”[iv] 

That was the message delivered to city after city – after city – over 70 cities and counting, in what was “essentially a giant intervention.”  Everyone joined together, “gang members, drug dealers, cops, and community members”[v] and cities went silent.

And safe.

But that takes perspiration, not legislation; coordination, not confiscation.

The typical “piece-of-the-elephant approach” – more playgrounds, better parenting, less broken windows, additional government-sponsored-grant-funded-social-service-provided programs, censor violent video games, censor violent Hollywood, return prayer to schools and people to churches, to which we will now add gun laws piled upon gun laws --- are about as effective, and fanciful, to ending gun violence as expecting the soon arrival of the handsome prince on a white charger.

But replace the fairytale with the practical, “woofing-bluster” with trumpeting-whole-pachyderm arrival, and you have a more appropriate analogy and affective elephantine-like “coerced demand reduction,” aka “heavy enforcement announced ahead of time,” and you get what works. 

Because it takes work.  Coordinated work.  “Hard damned work.”

Then “never write a check you can’t cash.”  One bullet.  Mean it. Do it.

[i] “Don’t Shoot – One Man, A Street Fellowship, and The End
of Violence in Inner-City America” by David M. Kennedy, 2011

[ii] “Don’t Shoot”

[iii] “Don’t Shoot”

[iv] “Don’t Shoot”

[v] “Don’t Shoot”