Despite the facts that Peter Moskos got his Ph.D. from Harvard and teaches at John Jay College of Coppery and Shoe Repair, he’s got a point. A good point. An important point. It begins with a twit showing a video of shooting in what otherwise appears to be a quiet, well-maintained suburban residential street.
NEW VIDEO: SHOOTING
4 shooters open fire on N Frazier St on 03/20/23 striking 3 teenaged males.
Over 50 shots fired
— PhillyCrimeUpdate (@PhillyCrimeUpd) March 23, 2023
Based on this video, Moskos goes on a tear.
Forget about the shooters or victims for a moment. Thing about everybody else on the block. Well kept homes with gardens. They matter, too. Not just for their sake but for our sake and the sake of Philadelphia.
How many of you wouldn’t move if this happened where you live?
While picking up and moving isn’t quite that simple, that’s not the point.Who wants to live on a street where you or your children could well be killed in the crossfire? Who wants to live on a street where crossfire is a possibility, if not a reality? There were four shooters. Three teens were shot, a 13-year-old and two 16-year-olds. It happened at about four in the afternoon.
There are many levels to stories like this, shoot outs like this. There are the stories surrounding the shooters. The stories of the victims, who may or may not have done anything to cause the shooters to go after them. This isn’t usually a random act of violence. And then there are the stories of the people who live on North Frazier Street and have nothing to do with the shooting, other than being too close for comfort and thanking their favorite deity that the bullets didn’t find their way into them or someone they loved.
What about them?
Also f*ck the "gun laws are racist" crowd. Say you arrest one shooter a block away with a gun. What if nobody was hit? What's the crime? The case will get dropped. It's why you need to go hard against illegal gun possession. All you have is criminal gun possession. It matters.
— Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) March 25, 2023
He’s right, it matters. Much as gun enforcement, such as stop & frisk, has been executed in an outrageously racist way, with cops tossing black kids at random for a search in the hundreds of thousands, that does not mean illegal guns don’t exist and people don’t do what the four shooters in the video did.
And yeah, the shooter will say, “I didn’t feel safe; The gun was just for protection.” And next thing you know the Marshall Project will make it into a whole damn boo-hoo series.
And they’re not lying.
It doesn’t make it right. https://t.co/gyU6FpqWGQhttps://t.co/gyU6FpqWGQ— Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) March 25, 2023
When a kid is nabbed with an illegal gun, the routine is to claim it’s for self-defense. What sort of idiot would say otherwise? Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But as long as the person isn’t a shooter, it can’t be disproven. Not that it wins in court, but it does convince the people who want to empathize with the defendant. But who wants to empathize with the person who lives across the street when the shooting starts?
As is so often the case, there is no “right” solution to most intransigent social problems, and guns are a particularly fraught problem. For better or worse, our Second Amendment has been held to establish a personal fundamental right to keep and bear arms. That doesn’t mean that four kids at four o’clock shooting up a house on a quiet street is either a fine exercise of constitutional rights or a sad reflection of systemic racism. It’s a problem.
Will some otherwise innocent people get banged by gun enforcement? Of course. But nobody who isn’t carrying an illegal gun will get banged. That’s the beauty of enforcing gun laws. Enforce gun laws. I can’t believe this is now a controversial opinion in “progressive” circles.
These four shooters weren’t merely exercising their right to bear arms, but were committing the crime of attempted murder. Whatever beef, if any, they had with the people in the house is one thing. But they had no beef with the people next door or across the street, or on the street behind the house, because bullets don’t stop traveling at the property line. Do the neighbors have a right to quiet enjoyment of their homes without being in the middle of a shootout? If you lived there, would you?
The debates about such matters almost always come from the opposite extremes. Either no gun enforcement because it’s a right, or no gun enforcement because it’s racist, or toss every black kid against a wall to see if a gun falls out because everybody knows that it’s black teens carrying. None of these positions are adequate or tenable. We can’t violate constitutional rights for reasons right or left, and yet everybody else on the block wants to survive as well. As Peter Moskos says, their right to live shouldn’t be forgotten in our theoretical debates over constitutional rights.
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