(no subject)

[elizalavelle]

The reaction to the shootings in TO is driving me crazy. First of all, we live in a big city. How long did the government and the general population think we'd avoid big city crime? Honestly now!

I of course don't like that it took a little blond girl getting shot to finally get some public attention. How many black people were shot this summer? Can we even name them? And now some blonde princess gets shot and the city stops. It's not a fair thing. Not her fault either, just not a fair part of society.

However I think that now that there's attention being paid to gun related violence in the city it's the wrong sort of attention. Saying that we're going to get "tougher on crime" and make more laws to ban guns does nothing. Did I miss it being legal to walk downtown and shoot at people? Did I miss the fact that the shootings this year have been committed with guns which were lawfully purchased and registered? No? So what was done was already against the law and it didn't stop anyone. So how is making more laws going to solve the problem?

The issue for me is this: no one seems to really want to examine why it is that people are picking up guns and shooting people in the first place. We just classify them as "bad guys" and the people who get shot are the "good guys" and there's no grey area to be had inbetween. I think there's a world of grey area there with nothing is exclusively bad and we should be looking at that. What is it about our society or the particular neighbourhoods that the people who were the shooters are from that made them feel they needed a gun in the first place? No one seems to be thinking about maybe funding more community projects in those areas to keep the younger kids out of trouble so they don't grow up and buy guns.... instead we're thinking of harsher laws to punish people after society fails to help them in the first place.

Also the media's spin on the stories is terrible. When the girl was shot on boxing day they just played it in a "it could have been your kids" paranoia way. My mom started worrying and I haven't been shopping there on boxing day in at least 6 years! It's complete garbage which is broadcast not to give us news but to make us afraid to go outside and then to make our fear push the police into working "harder" or more violently... I mean this is just the start of how big cities in the US end up having black people being afraid of the police because of racial profiling. And no one seems to talk about that, it's okay as long as "they" are stopped.

Absolutely insane.

Comments

[doreah.livejournal.com]

"We just classify them as "bad guys" and the people who get shot are the "good guys" and there's no grey area to be had inbetween."

Except most of those who were shot were "bad guys" because they were also gang members.

*grumbles*

And as I said in reaction to that comment, "Does that mean that their lives meant nothing and it's okay to kill them?"

Tougher laws do nothing but distract the general, ignorant public and trick them into a false security. I was listening to a thing on the radio months ago about how this one basketball program changed the lives of a bunch of would-be hardtime gang members. It gave them something to look forward to, to take their focus off how tough the hood was. Thenit had insufficent funding, and was scraped, leaving these kids to go back to what they were doing.

Of course, where you live determines HOW you live. Even I tend to act tougher and dress differently depending on where I'm going. People laugh at the idea that you gotta "be tough" but in certain neaighbourhoods, you really do. And up where these kids are coming from, it really is "Join a gang or be killed". Not to mention the prescribed culture that you must fit into, or else.

There's a ridicuosly HUGE scope of issues to comprehend and laying down one blunt law will do nothing at all. That why we need to hire more sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers... Not more lawyers and politicians.

So, that was a roundabout way of saying, Here! Here!

[elizalavelle.livejournal.com]

Where you are really does determine how you live. Hell I used to act differently in my neighbourhood vs going to school in the Beaches. Different areas of the city are very different cultures but things like that basketball program and other projects like that are the solutions. I just wish more people could see that and would find ways to help fund that instead of just going on about how the new gun laws will solve the problem. Ha! Like I said before... were the old gun laws something that allowed people to shoot each other legally? Then how the hell will new laws stop the problem?

Society sucks sometimes.