Teens shooting teens

We’ve grown so accustomed to its ache and sorrow that the barbarous calamity of young people shooting each other seems like part of our civilization now.

It isn’t news to any observer of America’s gun crime problem that teenagers are disproportionately rep- resented.

Even though 18-to-20-year-olds represent just 4% of the U.S. population, they account for 17% of known gun homicide offenders. In 2017, young people (mostly males) between the ages of 10 and 21 made up nearly one-third of all firearms offense arrests for that year.

It also isn’t news that this situation has persisted for decades. People under age 21 being at “elevated risk” of engaging in gun violence has been a “crisis” for at least 35 years now.

Stories of teens shooting teens still predominate news reports, especially in population centers. Pine Bluff suffered a tragic gun murder at a junior high school last month. North Little Rock had another teenage shooting victim — and a couple of teen suspects arrested — last week.

The frequency goes up in more populous states, and is concentrated in larger cities, where it has become routine.

Most teenage shootings are drugand/or gang-related. Take away all the low-income, gang-involved gun murders in a city like Chicago, and its homicide rate plummets.

Gun-control advocates smack of Marie Antoinette-style indifference to obliviously assert, “They’ll obey this new law,” and believe that will solve anything for armed drug dealers and gang members — or their gunshot victims.

Research of prison inmates has shown that young gun criminals almost never legally purchase their firearms. More than eight out of 10 guns used by a criminal under age 24 are either “hot” (stolen or otherwise illegally acquired) or borrowed/bought from family or friends, both of which are beyond the reach of lawful regulation or reporting.

Thus laws requiring background checks or waiting periods or other restrictions can only hope and pray — at best — to affect 10% of young violent gun offenders.

Juvenile criminals flagrantly and carelessly flout the federal law that prohibits the possession of handguns and handgun ammunition by any person under the age of 18, as well as laws in most states prohibiting the purchase of a handgun by anyone under 18.

One of the most foolish thoughts ever is that restricting the rights of rural and suburban firearm owners will somehow magically affect inner-city gun crime.

Even if we make someone who is never going to shoot anyone go through a dozen background checks and six waiting periods, that will have zero effect on criminal gun violence. Gun control can only be effective when it affects guns in the hands of criminals.

As wholly ineffective as such laws are, however, they do offer a pacifying dose of the feel-good elixir of false accomplishment to politicians and voters alike.

Members of Congress don’t live in high-crime areas and don’t send their children to schools in those neighborhoods. Their salaries are higher by multiples than the median in every single state, and higher by magnitudes than the worst-crime localities.

Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate receive a $174,000 base salary; party leaders in both chambers earn more — $193,400 — and the Speaker of the House hauls in $223,500. By comparison, the U.S. per capita personal income for 2020 is less than $50,000.

In high-crime urban communities with the most gun violence, median personal income is often under $15,000. In Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhood, Fuller Park, it’s below $10,000.

This lawmaker-lawbreaker gap is an unbridgeable chasm. Little wonder when legislators try to solve gun crime based on ideas that would apply to themselves, those ideas fall flat. They (and most any middle-class-or-above citizen) can’t conceive of the terrifying reality endured by people in the brutal places that push gun-crime statistics up so high.

It’s not only silly to legislate for non-criminals, but also cruel. The prolonged abstract arguing over unneeded nationwide restrictions allows highly localized gun violence to daily claim and maim more lives.

For all the news coverage surrounding gun crime, the voices of those stuck in beleaguered high-incidence, low-income areas are rarely given a microphone. Such victimization without representation needs to stop. Poor people in crime-ridden areas are most worried about practical perils, like stray bullets hitting their children. The special-interest lobbies and pundits claiming to speak for them are most concerned with political power.

On some issues, like police presence, the disconnect is diametric.

“Defund the police” protests in favor of redirecting resources to non-policing community support and social services were championed by many liberal elite and civil rights leaders. But a 2020 Gallup study showed that 54% of people in fragile communities want police officers to spend more time in their neighborhoods. That’s nearly twice the percentage of Americans overall who want a higher police profile where they live.

We can learn a lot from lawful residents in communities plagued by gun-toting teen violence, who deal most intimately with the tragedy of lives prematurely lost.

They deserve to be asked, heard — and heeded.