The Human Toll of Violence in America
by rovertheoctopus
Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 12:05:54 PM PDT
These are the stories and the sad details of an escalating crisis of gun violence in the United Staes.
- rovertheoctopus's diary :: ::
-Minneapolis recorded 60 murders in 2006, the highest since 1996 when the city had 88 murders. But that isn't even the most disturbing part. 29 of those murders were in a 6 sq. mile sliver on the struggling north side. That's nearly 5 murders per sq. mile. Five, which is worse than some of the most hardened neighborhoods of Baltimore, Washington, and New York. In that part of the north side, that's a murder rate of 55 per 100,000. In comparison, Washington's murder rate in 2006 was roughly 35 per 100,000.
-What is the deal with these murder binges and sparks of violence around New Year's?
Boston
The New Year was not even six hours old when 14-year-old Jason Fernandes was shot dead outside his grandmother's house in Dorchester [a neighborhood in Boston] yesterday.
The eighth-grader at South Junior High School in Brockton, Boston's first homicide victim of the year, was one of five people shot in three separate attacks, all of which occurred within a few blocks of one another in the span of 20 minutes, police said.
.....
The slaying, in a neighborhood that absorbed much of Boston's violence last year, rocked residents who were just waking up to the New Year yesterday.It came just after the conclusion of one of the city's bloodiest years in a decade and a little more than 12 hours after the final homicide victim of 2006 was shot near South Station. The 74 slayings recorded in Boston last year were one shy of the total in 2005.
-Also in Boston, where an Iraqi veteran lost his life to the battlezones of America, ironically.
April 5, 2007
RANDOLPH -- James L. Jacobs served nearly a year as a US Army sergeant in Iraq, where he saw combat and witnessed children being blown up.
He came home in August 2004, moved in with his mother in Randolph, and started working as a mortgage consultant for a Mattapan lending firm. After nearly five years in the Army and far from battle, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, but his family thought he was finally safe.
But last Friday night, he was shot and killed outside a friend's house on McLellan Street in Dorchester, less than a mile from Rosseter Street, where he grew up.
Moments before the shooting, a neighbor said she saw Jacobs outside by his Range Rover. His tires had just been slashed, his family said, and he was waiting for a tow service.
The neighbor told the Globe she saw three men approach Jacobs and an argument start. Moments later, she heard a dozen gunshots. Jacobs, 27, was pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center, the 15th homicide of the year.
-Murder is so common in Baltimore, citypaper.com runs a weekly report listing how many murders there were each week. It will undoubtedly be found buried in the local newspapers, not even worthy of the front page. Here's a sample.
Friday, March 30
1:12 a.m. David Johns, a 23-year-old African-American man, was shot repeatedly in the 3400 block of Noble Street. He died 24 minutes later at Hopkins Hospital.
2:16 a.m. An hour later, near the city’s northern line, Pelvin Derrien, a 23-year-old African-American man, went to a friend’s house in the 6800 block of Sturbridge Drive near the Perring Parkway Shopping Center. Derrien and a friend were playing video games when one or more people walked in the front door and shot them both. Derrien was hit repeatedly in the head and died at Hopkins Hospital at 3:04 a.m. His friend was hit several times in the arms and legs but survived.
-A double murder in late 2006 in Chicago
Chicago Tribune
By Andrew L. Wang
November 19, 2006
The witness observed four people go in and only two people come out
Two men were fatally shot Saturday night in a home on the Far South Side, police said Sunday.
A witness told police that the two men went into the residence in the 9200 block of South Blackstone Avenue with two other men about 11:30 p.m., said Officer Kelly Liakopoulos.
'The witness observed four people go in and only two people come out,' she said. When the other two didn't emerge from the house, the witness went in and found one man in the basement and the other on the main floor, both shot multiple times, authorities said.
2006 was a year of mass murder
March 2006: Over 500 people in Philadelphia; Camden; Wilmington, DE; Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis die from a highly toxic form of heroin with added fentanyl a.k.a. "tango and cash" in the ealry 1990s.
September 6, 2006: Thirteen are murdered over Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles
September 24, 2006: Quintuple homicide in the overwhelmingly blighted East St. Louis, IL; pregnant mother found dead on a vacant lot with abdomen cut open and fetus taken out; mother's 3 children found dead in a washer and dryer
October 2, 2006: A 32-year old man breaks into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, bounding 11 girls and shooting them in the head. Six dead (including the murderer), 6 injured; it was the 3rd fatal school shooting in a week.
October 15, 2006: Four found dead along Florida Turnpike; Family of 5 shot to death in Iowa
Mutiple family murders in arsons, stabbings, and shootings; Louisville, KY; Columbia, SC; Kansas City, MO
February 12, 2007: Five shoppers are killed by a young gunman inside a Salt Lake City shopping mall; 3 are found shot to death at an office in Philadelphia, tied up and muzzled with duct tape
April 12, 2007:
A 10-year-old boy and two teenage girls were wounded yesterday in a brazen lunchtime shooting in East Baltimore. Police were investigating the attack as possibly having been aimed at a 20-year- old man amid a dispute over a jacket.
Two men jumped out of a green sport utility vehicle and shot the man playing dice with others on the sidewalk about 12:30 p.m. Bullets also hit the boy and two 15-year- old girls as they stood on a sidewalk in the 1700 block of N. Bradford St., near the old American Brewery building.
April 13, 2007:
[Baltimore] homicide detectives are investigating the death of a man whose stabbed and beaten body was found early yesterday in the basement of a Northwest Baltimore house after firefighters extinguished a blaze there.
April 16, 2007: At least 30 are murdered and dozens other wounded by a lone gunman in mass execution shootings style in a two-hour span on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA. It's the second mass murder on that campus in less than a year.
Ironically, or maybe prophetically, this came up, days after my initial draft of this blog. On Mondays, I have an archaelogy class at 10 a.m. On this particular Monday, I set my alarm an hour earlier by mistake. I woke up at 8:30, believing my class was at 9 a.m. My roommate was asleep and I, myself tempted to stay asleep, got out of bed, groggy and depressed by the environment out my window on the 7th floor. The wind was battering against my dorm room window with clouds hanging over. April 2007 has been a dreary month, the coldest April I can remember. Before I go to class, I usually leave CNN.com on, so I see what is happening when I come back. At 8:45, the website’s top story was the massive rain storm in the northeast. In Maryland, we have seen plenty of rain and clouds recently. I left 5 minutes early. At 8:55, I checked my cell phone, to see how I was doing for time. When I arrived at my classroom, the lights were illuminating the room. I saw a man in the room I did not recognize, and I knew I was too early. He was fixing a projector or something. I went back to my dorm, trying to fall back asleep. I couldn’t. I was lying in my bed, in vain. Around 9:40, I went back to class, at 10 a.m. I finished my classes at 2. I was extremely tired. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but before I did, I checked the website. "Holy fucking shit." My mind froze, but my eyes scrolled across violently anyway, "VIRGINIA TECH RAMPAGE." I felt acid jet up my esophagus. "What the hell happened?" I had not been that shocked since September 11th. I will remember this day, just as I have remember others, but only a few. I turned on the television. Yes, CNN said it was at 9:55 a.m. I remember where I was at 9:55. I had checked my cell phone as I walked to class the second time, just as I did an hour earlier. I saw a young man’s video, a student at Virginia Tech. I saw the grey clouds and wind weaving through still barren trees. The gunshots can be heard. I began to tremble violently, nauseous. Watching that student's footage of the shooting sounds, you could hear the gunshots. Pop! ... Pop pop! ....Pop pop pop!........ Pop! Each shot, you figure, someone just died. It's haunting. Unbelievably terrifying. I cannot wrap my brain around how those people who saw it with their own eyes felt. I will say, one muggy night last autumn, my dorm window was open. Around 3 in the morning, I would up and heard loud high-pitched metal crashing and squeaking. My eyes zoomed outward as I looked frantically out the window. I thought I heard people screaming and dying. It was a damn dumpster truck. College Park, Maryland is violent. We have robberies quite often. A couple weeks ago, there was an armed robbery 100 feet from my dorm, in the daylight. The homeless roam the campus, because the city is too dangerous. They groan and cry out, but students all pursue their quest to the classroom. There are nightly shootings just blocks from the campus, in the poor suburbsof Washington. You can’t hear them, you only read about them. Sometimes, the crime will penetrate the campus. But there are robberies from time to time. You hear nothing of shootings or murders on campus. Still, at times, there are many times I am paranoid at the sight of police cars and ambulances merging in front of the dorms. I heard a fire truck just now. Acid rushed up again, but it’s a false alarm. The sirens are wailing, on and off, on and off. I don’t know what to think anymore. Then, April 16, 2007, this, for real. Real life and no hallucinations, no false alarms. Teachers stumbling out of buildings, bleeding profusely. Students ducking down, shrieking and sobbing as bullets sprayed at their classmates, their fellow humans. Students in the dorm waking up to violence. On the other hand, I cannot believe it. I wonder if I’m dreaming, if it’s the dreary weather playing tricks. I’m trembling again. Each time my nerves calm, noises keep making me shake again. Perhaps Aprils are just violent. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the death of dozens in Los Angeles in late April 1992; Columbine, April 20, 1999.
Robert F. Kennedy:
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
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