So we are a little behind the times. The important thing is
that D.C. and Detroit and
Dekalb got nothing on us. Not any more.
Our Town has finally experienced its first drive-by
shooting.
It was a tragedy, to be sure. An innocent teenager was
killed in the melee. Police think he just happened to be at the
wrong place at the wrong time, hanging out in front of the wrong
house, when he should have been home hiding under his bed.
Our inaugural drive-by has been a long time coming. Crime
rates have been soaring and murders are a dime a dozen, which I
guess is a gangbanger’s idea of a bargain. Even so, our homicides
usually involve robberies or rapes, the sort of youthful pastimes
where someone is bound to get shot eventually. The whole drug
gang war era drove right past us without even honking.
Obviously a lot has changed. But perhaps the biggest shift
has been the revolution in the art of the drive-by
shooting.
Readers may remember how a quarter of a century ago
drive-bys were all the rage among drug gangs for their highly
efficient manner of dealing with conflict. You’d spot a rival
gangster hanging out on the street, you’d call your friends,
fetch your semi-automatics and drive over and take care of a
little business. It was always about business, about who got to
be territory sales manager of the month. Sure, sometimes an
innocent kid got in the way, but it was never personal.
These tactics were no different than the tactics of the
Irish and Italian mafia. It was Prohibition gang leader Bugs
Moran who gets credit for popularizing the act of driving by a
rival’s hangout and spraying it with Thompson submachine gunfire.
As with any war, there is bound to be some collateral damage, but
even the most callous gangster would try to minimize that.
Today, however, it’s personal.
The 15-year-old who was gunned down in my hometown wasn’t a
gang member. Nor was the kid who was supposed to be gunned down.
So why was he targeted? Because he had offended the shooter or
the shooter’s mom or maybe the shooter’s cat. Whatever the case,
he had been disrespectful. For a large part of our urban street
culture, being disrespectful is tantamount to a death
sentence.
A recent series in the Washington Post
tells how one D.C. teenager reacted when his cheap bracelet
turned up missing. The 19-year-old became obsessed with avenging
this show of disrespect. This set off a tit-for-tat series of
drive-by shootings that resulted in five deaths. It turned out
the bracelet hadn’t even been stolen.
IT HASN’T ALWAYS been thus. When I was a kid and you said
something nasty about another kid you could expect a punch in the
mouth. Sometimes the rivals would meet in the parking lot after
school and there would be a very well attended dust-up. I’m not
sure how grown-ups settled their differences — perhaps by
dumping their grass clippings on the offending neighbor’s
perfectly manicured lawn. It certainly wasn’t pistols at dawn, as
was the habit of Southern gentlemen of a bygone era. It’s too bad
we’ve abandoned the art of dueling. There was at least a degree
of honor in it, and it afforded a fair fight. Men of the highest
renown dueled. Andrew Jackson fought at least 13. Duels were so
popular, in fact, that anti-dueling societies popped up in most
Southern cities. The Civil War ended dueling and many other
dubious southern practices, which was fine, until now.
Now, as part of our urban street culture, he who is
dishonored or “disrespected” is expected to gun down the
offending party in cold blood. The thinking — if you can call it
that — goes like this: “You have insulted my masculinity,
therefore I will do the cowardly thing and shoot you from a
speeding car.”
Why can’t our urban teens simply challenge one another to a
bout of old fashioned fisticuffs? Why is the yellow-bellied act
of shooting an unarmed boy in the back of the head seen as the
proud and manly thing to do? Why aren’t such people ridiculed as
pansies and pantywaists — I mean, besides the obvious reason
that they will shoot you if you say anything.
Obviously, I am just an old crank trying to make sense of
the inscrutable ways of the youth who are Our Future. I just wish
Our Future would learn the difference between a fair fight and
the actions of a coward.
