Gun violence in major cities is mainly due to gang violence and as I’ve said many times in the past, we need to address the reason why people join gangs if we want to tamp down on the violence.  More policing or pushing a harder law & order agenda will do absolutely nothing to solve this problem but I get it, politicians are lazy and prefer easy answers…  Maybe we can have sane leadership one day but in any case this was a pretty good article.

“People have this notion that police are in the preventative business, but that’s not their job. Their job is to react,” he says. Whose job is prevention? “It’s the community’s job, it’s our job… it’s the parents’ job, it’s the education system — it’s our job to make sure these things don’t happen.”

So, no, Wilson doesn’t believe throwing more cops at the problem is the answer, either.

Instead, he and other activists are urging the city to adopt alternative approaches to addressing gun violence, at least until society fixes the underlying conditions giving rise to it — such as poverty and the unwinnable drug war.

Source: The Star

There’s an annoying paywall but if you press escape quick enough while the page is loading you can get around it.  We’ve been doing the war on drugs for the last what 40-50 years or so and it’s gotten us no where, there are definitely underlying conditions to why people join gangs and we’d be much more successful if we addressed that.