In Memoriam

I've talked about it. I've mentioned that even though I'm now in my 72nd year I don't know anyone who has been shot, or has been a victim of any crime involving guns although I did know a couple of murder victims.  Perhaps, as with most things in life, what you know is  about who you know.  There are, after all at least two Americas, often almost congruent, like parallel universes.

Living in Florida and living with trees on your property means you need someone to trim large hedges, palm trees and oak trees and assorted vegetation too big for the lawn mowing service to handle. It's especially true in hurricane season and I made the acquaintance of  a couple of local men in 2004 and 2005 after a series of hurricanes came roaring through my neighborhood.   Over the years it became a regular thing.  I got to know them both after a fashion.  Some years ago I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I remember they seemed happy for me when it turned out to be a bad diagnosis. I can't say that about a lot of people I know.

I was shocked and saddened to hear that Mr. H  had been found dead on the street a mile from here, shot multiple times just before sunrise. People who knew him stressed that he was a well-loved guy and was helping look after an invalid.   The other fellow, I found out had been arrested having been found to have some drugs at home and because he lived within a thousand feet of a school, the mandatory sentence would be very long.  Both these guys had a history of minor drug arrests.  Hard working men, working since their teens at hard things in the hard Florida heat.  Both are dead now.

I didn't mention that they were both black men.

We read these statistics and we make "common sense" judgments about what will help and what needs to be done, but how often do those ideas we put so much faith in, mention the fact that we have two Americas, two cultures.  Life is different for black men.  Things that might get lawyered away, things involving a warning or some order of tolerance sometimes turn out differently depending on what you look like and if you've been caught doing what so many white, European looking young men do will turn out differently for you.  I wonder what kind of gun control would have made their lives different.  I wonder what kind of drug policies might have resulted in both of them being outside right now trimming those 18 foot sea grape hedges.

Federal background checks, gun registration, ballistic "fingerprinting," gun owner registration, waiting periods, banning guns with plastic stocks.  I don't think so and I get shouted at for suggesting that things that repeatedly and often dramatically fail need to be re-examined, that we need to look at whole pictures and not arguments in gold frames.  Is it like trying to control reckless driving with air bags?

The community these men lived in is right down the road from me, right across the tracks from neighborhoods where houses start at 5 million.  It's peaceful, well kept and historically black, but life is very different as I have to notice, and it's not just because the real estate is so much cheaper.  It has a nice little park, it has more than one church from which you can hear some wonderful music if you go by on your bicycle on a Sunday morning.  It has a little grocery store that's been owned by the same family for most of a century, but life is different. I'm willing to bet there are very far fewer guns per capita than on my block. More people there can't own guns because of some prior offense that might have been bargained down to nothing in a different community.  It's not really crime ridden, it's not really run down, but it's been a black community for a century and things are different in such places and people there are treated differently.  Until we take an interest in knowing why, all our posturing about common sense but unscientific and emotionally driven causes isn't going to change anything.

So now I can't say I don't know anyone murdered by gunshot.  I'm not an island any more.