Try a patient approach to tough problems

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of a story President John F. Kennedy used to tell:

To say that Americans and their leaders today do not exactly take the long view is to state the case mildly.

A general was inspecting his new headquarters. He met the gardener, who was puttering among the flowers and had before him a young tree, ready for planting. The general observed that the gardener seemed to be in no hurry to get the tree planted.

“Sir,” the gardener said: “… this tree will not mature for another 50 years.”

“In that case,” the general replied, “begin immediately.”

To say that Americans and their leaders today do not exactly take the long view is to state the case mildly.

We don’t plant many trees. We don’t look forward. We haven’t the patience.

But there may be another force at work. Americans seem to be losing their faith in their own capacity for action and agency. We have come to regard some problems, like police violence and gun violence, as beyond solution. And both problems do seem at times to be hopelessly intractable.

In the case of guns, we, as a society, have allowed so many guns to flood our cities and streets — and so many guns that should never have been accessible to citizens because they are weapons of war — that anything we do will take years, if not decades, to have any effect. We know that many of the guns used in mass shootings were acquired legally, and that feeds our sense of futility.

So, we must begin immediately.

The scope and range of the problem, far from proving we should give up, shows that we should do as much as we can, and start now — knowing that we must be patient, and learn and adjust along the way.

A ban on assault weapons, a ban on ghost guns, gun buybacks, tightening background checks, enhanced enforcement of rules already on the books — none of this will eliminate gun violence. But all, if sustained, should reduce it over time.

The trouble is that we constantly lose our collective attention span and then we lose heart and confidence in ourselves. We cannot allow that. For what sort of self-respecting culture allows a mass shooting a week with no societal or governmental response?

Another aspect of the gun violence problem almost totally ignored is mental health. Yet we seem shy about admitting this and investing more in detecting and treating mental illness. Is this a panacea? No, but it will help.

Similarly, incidents of police violence and of excessive force against unarmed, often teenage, usually Black, people are reported almost daily. But defunding the police is really giving up on the problem and subjecting the most vulnerable in our cities to more violence.

What we are not talking about, for some reason, is better training and yearly retraining for police officers. Human error will always be a factor. But experts and law enforcement veterans say that mistaking a gun for a Taser is very likely a training issue.

There are some problems, like poverty, that are so deep and complex that they cannot be ameliorated in a year, or a presidential term, or by one approach. That does not mean we cannot make progress.

So far as urban violence is concerned, we have to stay focused and be creative. A range of options should be considered, from more cops on the beat (better trained) to actively recruiting new cops from our most at-risk neighborhoods.

Criminologist David Kennedy has developed a model of crime prevention that targets a few of the known, mosthardened criminals in an urban neighborhood and arrests them at the first, even minor, infraction, both to disrupt and retard their activities. It has had at least some success almost everywhere it has been tried. But some cities lose faith and focus and forsake the program before it gets a good run.

Kennedy also says it cannot succeed unless the police build public trust and confidence in the given community.

In short, we have several ultimately insoluble problems and many years of work before us. But we do have tools and a reasonable hope of at least some success.

Therefore, we must begin immediately.