As we predicted, the man arrested for the New Orleans’ Mother’s Day parade shooting was a gang banger with a record. In fact, Akein Scott was out on $15k bond for a weapons charge when he opened fire on the crowd. Or, more likely, someone in the crowd. While the civilian disarmament industrial complex initially seized on the shooting to promote their agenda, they backed off when they realized it was a black-on-black crime, perpetuated by a hardened criminal, who’d been enabled by a lax legal system, overseen by a black Democrat. For them, the fact that Akein Scott should have been locked-up isn’t the key variable. Oh no. Check out this comment by DRZM underneath the CBS post . . .
I work with delinquent youth and young adults like Akein Scott every day and also conduct research on violence. This is a growing social epidemic that we need to organize collectively to solve. Many (but not all) of these kids are raised in violent homes or neighborhoods surrounded by poverty, drugs, and antisocial role models, with little hope or sense of how to really make something positive of their lives. They start affiliating with other delinquent peers and gangs, and get way more exposure to aggressive and violent media (videos, game, music) from a very early age than they get exposure to prosocial messages.
Some of them have untreated individual problems that make them more vulnerable, like ADHD and learning disabilities. But most of them probably start with healthy brains that are gradually broken by their environments. Gun access is part of the problem. I realize most legal gun owners would never commit this kind of act. At the same time, I wish the growing number of youth who are at risk for violence — both those who are easy to identify like this one based on their history, and those who are not — had ZERO gun access AND better mental health care AND better access to healthy role models and social messages from an early age. Until we tackle ALL of these problems, we and our children are increasingly potential targets.
Gun laws that assured ZERO access to guns for bad guys would severely infringe if not eliminate law-abiding Americans’ human, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, and thus increase crime. This thought doesn’t occur to DRZM or his fellow gun control advocates.
But it’s a nice package of proposals. Let’s start with locking-up bad guys who use guns and see how that goes. M’kay?