Newark Murders. By now most Americans will have seen reports about a dastardly crime in my city this past weekend, a bit more than a mile from my house. Four young people, three college students and one kid who had just been accepted to college, were shot in the back of the head, in what media insist, insanely, on calling "execution-style". Oh? Where, exactly, are executions performed by shooting people at point-blank range while they stand? In Communist China, the Government executes people by making them kneel and then shooting them in the back of the head. No U.S. jurisdiction, not Federal, not State, executes people that way. So why do U.S. media insist on using the grotesque expression "execution-style" for cold-blooded murders at close range?
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That, you see, is the way criminals kill people, and there is in this abuse of language, "execution-style", the extremely ugly reality that media equate gangland murders with governmental executions, which means (a) the Mafia, Crips, and Bloods are the exact moral equivalent of Government, entitled to kill people, and (b) execution of criminals by Government is the exact moral equivalent of murder. Everyone in media who uses the term "execution-style" for murder should be tied to a whipping post and flogged 100 lashes or so for each offense, then warned that if they don't take back that outrageous misstatement they will face death in actual "execution-style": by lethal injection, electric chair, hanging, or firing squad.
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In any case, tho I have hesitated to address this vile crime in my city because not all details are known publicly yet, it seems almost certain that this was not a random crime, botched robbery, or anything like that, but that the killers knew the victims, and, unfortunately for the victims, vice-versa. One of the young women shot did not die, and did offer some information to police in the hospital. What she said has, however, not been released to the public, so the public is speculating about the cause of the crime. I find it most unlikely that this was a crime that you or I would fall victim to, as strangers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Far more likely is it that some kind of interpersonal conflict led to this outrage.
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Our local newspaper, The Star-Ledger, posted an editorial online today, which said in part:

There are no short, easy answers for wiping out the culture of gangs, guns, drugs and disrespect for life that has been replicating itself in Newark for too many years, feeding off a host of social ills, which include individual and municipal failings. * * *

In the face of each murderous outrage, the city's leaders insist on spouting insipid statistics, trying to make the claim that crime is down. Stop it.

The percentage points mean nothing in the context of weekends like the one just past. For one neighborhood, the violence quotient climbed exponentially. For a few grieving families, the homicide rate hit the stratosphere and is never coming down. What good is it to claim that Newark's 60 homicides so far this year are three fewer than this time last year when one bloody weekend proves that statistical victories can be obliterated in a staccato of gunfire?

There's a war going on in Newark. This is a time for a show of forceful unity and strength among those connected with the battle for the salvation of the city.

I placed the following comment on the NJ.com forum where that editorial appears online, in response to that editorial and to comments from other readers that I found objectionable.

DON'T blame the victim, and don't expect people who have jobs, family responsibilities, and other demands upon their time and energy to do the work we hire politicians and police to handle. It makes no more sense to say that individual Newarkers have an obligation to police the streets than to say they have an obligation to put out fires.
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As for the suggestion [made in a comment by a reader] that we will all be safer if there are more guns on the streets, that is madness — certifiable lunacy. The bulk of people killed and injured by legal guns are not criminals but gun owners and their friends and families, due to suicide, accidents, and momentary rage that leaves people fallen and bleeding before the rage passes. A hidden camera on a TV newsmagazine showed that children play with guns IMMEDIATELY AFTER being told not to. Legal guns are stolen when their owners are out of the house, and then become illegal guns. No, the answer to gun violence is to round up and destroy guns, not to put them in every hand.
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The solutions to crime in Newark, and in most other places in this country, are plain: death, not trivial imprisonment, for murderers, and the suppression of the drugs that fuel this lawlessness, by extremely harsh punishments: death for dealers, imprisonment or flogging for users of hard drugs.
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We have tried to educate people away from drugs. That is an utterly failed strategy, doomed ALWAYS to fail, because people who use hard drugs KNOW that drugs are dangerous, and that is precisely WHY THEY USE THEM, because they hate their lives and have a will to self-destruction. They don't care that hard drugs are dangerous as long as those drugs can give them a few hours when they don't have to think about their problems. It's no use telling them that avoiding problems doesn't solve their problems but only makes them worse. People never unlearn destructive behaviors, save thru punishments. That's the nature of the creature. It's the carrot and the stick, not the carrot alone.
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Our "wars" on drugs and violence are Phony Wars, one-sided "wars" in which all the dead are on the side of the good. In war, the people attacked fite back with lethal force, and a genuine war on drugs would kill the pushers, a genuine war on violence would kill the killers. Until we do that, we can forget about Peace in the Streets [a slogan of indignant Newarkers who demonstrated outside City Hall]. The innocent must not be the ones who die. But until New Jersey starts taking its capital-punishment laws seriously and actually starts executing the subhuman slime who ravage society, all the brave words about taking back the streets are but contemptible posturing. Conversely, however, if New Jersey does start killing the killers, we will see crime rates plummet like a stone.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,679 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:51 PM