Let's end violence violence

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal (May 23-24, 2009) reports that community activists are begging president Obama to intercede in an epidemic of murders of young people (“Chicago student killings spark appeals to Obama”). Chicago has suffered the killings of 37 school age children so far in the 2008-2009 school year – which we can all agree is 37 too many.

Two thirds of the murders were drug or gang related, others may involve cases of mistaken identify. Activists decry gun violence and are calling for stricter gun control. This focus may be dangerously wrong headed in that it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.

The Reverend Michael Pfleger (of “America is the greatest sin against God” fame) urged his congregation to sell and wear t-shirts emblazoned with an upside-down American flag (a sign of distress) and the exclamation “Gun Violence – An American Emergency.” Reverend Pfleger also asked them to wear American flag pins upside down. Reverend Pfleger thinks that America is sick.

Imagine that Mr. Obama could cause all of the guns in Chicago to be magically atomized. Do you think for one instant that the violence would end? That guns are the underlying cause of violence and, that by “disappearing” them, the violence would leave with them? If guns are the source of violence, then I must have had a blessedly lucky childhood. We had guns down on the farm and in all of my friends’ homes, too. None of these guns ever forced one of us to murder a classmate. No, there is something else at work here.

There are creatures in Chicago (hard to call them human) who do not blink to kill in cold blood. The willingness to pull a trigger would transfer with ease to the willingness to swing a baseball bat, crushing a skull, or wield a knife to stab the heart, or slice a throat, or rip open an abdomen. It is that willingness that is the problem. That is our enemy, and that which must be eliminated. Magically atomizing guns won’t make that willingness go away.

But from where does it arise? Much has been written on this, but I suggest that it is lack of boundaries, skewed values, and distorted social and cultural norms. The willingness to kill in cold blood is evil incarnate. So it is not gun violence, or knife violence, or brickbat violence, or dynamite violence, or motor vehicle violence that is the issue – it is violence violence. And until we address the root cause, we are tilting at windmills.

In this, I side with Dr. William Henry “Bill” Cosby, not with Reverend Pfleger. I wonder whom Mr. Obama favors.