On Urban Violence

Today's Boston Globe contains a letter by one Virginia M. Allen of Hyde Park chastising the City for its failure to spend everyone's money on something called the "ShotSpotter" gunshot detection system as an antidote for gun violence:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2011/07/09/to_stem_tide_of_violence_city_must_expand_its_gunshot_detection_system/

Poor Mrs. Allen. 

Tacitus observed thusly: "A corrupt society has many laws."

I propose a modern corollary: "A debased liberalism resorts to money and technology."

To amend slightly a self-evident progression: Guns don't kill people. The absence of a ShotSpotter system doesn't kill people. People kill people.

Do Lincoln or Concord have ShotSpotter systems?

Here’s another question: Would the “progressive” citizens of Newton, Brookline, or Cambridge countenance for an instant violent conduct by marauding, gun-wielding black or white youths in their communities?

Hardly. They would instead react like liberals who have been mugged (i.e., like conservatives) and deploy instantly sensible, illiberal measures to end the crime so that ordinary citizens would not have to live in fear.

The ACLU would howl (natch). So what? ACLU lawyers get paid to howl. 

Look. After nearly fifty (50) years of expensive “War on Poverty” programs and solid liberal representation by all-democrat-all-the-time Congressional and Senatorial delegations, Boston's ghetto communities are aflame with drugs, guns, and violence.

Why? Because they are suffering from the terminal effects of what the late Senator Moynihan called "the soft bigotry of low expectations”: that thoroughly discredited amalgam of feel-good, 1960s notions that if white society were to impose its standards of common decency on black neighborhoods, then somehow white society would be behaving in a repressive, colonialist, or racist manner.

But I’ve got news for guilty white liberals: blacks too wish for the same standards of common decency to prevail in their neighborhoods.  

The short and long term answers to gang violence are actually fairly simple and straight forward.  

Short term: cops know who the bad guys are, and Massachusetts has one of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Put the two together and, consistent with Constitutional requirements of due process, put the bad guys in jail. 

“But”, you say, “the ACLU will howl.” Again I say: “Relax. ACLU lawyers only get paid if they are howling.”

The long-term answer: be not afraid to teach in families and schools the enduring values that made America once a great nation, not shying away from the principal axiom “In God We Trust.”

Again you say: “But the ACLU will howl!” Again I say: “So what?”

Be not afraid.

And I hear a rich black chorus behind me answering: “Amen!”