Before the community could heal from the death of 5-year-old Ramon Burnett (mindlessly gunned down during the Labor Day weekend), 3-year-old Major Howard dies from a gunshot wound to the chest, the victim of a supposedly errant bullet that was fired at a former gang member. How many more will it take?
How many more innocent children have to be slaughtered before we initiate solutions that will bring about a cessation to the gun violence that has engulfed our community?
How high does the body count have to go?
There’s a form of “chaos theory” that posits “The best way to bring about change is to overwhelm.” This is in part what is finally bringing about a change in our prison systems around the country — so many new prisoners were going into the facilities they simply overwhelmed the capacity and the public will to build more and more new prisons when obviously that wasn’t the answer.
Does the same thing have to happen with dead babies? Does the number have to rise so high it overwhelms the opposition to finding and funding solutions?
I once wrote that instead of the number of deaths by gunshot being stretched out over a period of weeks or months, I wish they would occur virtually all at once, one on top of the other. Is that what it’s going to take, another child killed before week’s end, and then another, and another, and yet another after that until we finally come up with solutions that force it to stop — or risk collectively going stark raving mad?
Indeed, madness is already creeping in. While I was standing in line at my nearby Dave’s Supermarket earlier today, the woman in front of me — who by all appearances seemed sane — was haranguing the woman at the register, telling her in all sincerity that she believed the high number of killings in the black community is part of a conspiracy, entered into by the stuffed animals manufacturers and the balloon industry, businesses that profit from all of the shrines that immediately pop up every time someone dies in the streets in the black community.
I was tempted to grab the woman and shake her back to reality, but thought better of it; at least she has some kind of explanation to believe in, and that belief, no matter how totally wacky it sounded to me (or to you), might be the only thing that prevents her from going over the edge — from winding up being carted away in a straight jacket, frothing at the mouth.
In the absence of logical explanations, people will come up with any kind of reasoning, simply to keep their sanity. She ended up by telling the cashier that she would be attending one of the vigils/grieving/bitch sessions that will be held at four recreation centers around Cleveland this coming Saturday. Maybe that will provide her a degree of succor since the sessions damn sure won’t provide anything else — at least not in terms of solutions.
And as I’ve written before, the “solutions” (if one can seriously call them that) being put forth by those in power in Cleveland are not only unworkable, but, upon examination, are downright laughable — or would be, if the current state of affairs were not so desperate.
Demanding that the thugs who perpetrate these drive-by shootings turn themselves in is more than just a waste of breath, but clearly demonstrates how out of touch with reality our police force is. Similarly, demanding that the public step up and tell what they know is, in most of these cases, asking them for information they don’t possess.
The few who know who the shooters are ain’t telling, and those who do tell usually end up dead.
But there are solutions that happen to be working in other parts of the country, and I’m going to keep writing about the program in a California city that has greatly reduced gun violence there in less than a decade. And when enough babies are killed people will begin to go online, look up the Richmond Office of Neighborhood Safety, and find out for themselves what actually works.
The question is not one of if we’re going to seek out real solutions — we eventually will. The question is, how many more innocent children have to be killed before we do it?
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://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
