Gunplay: A Spiritual Perspective

In the wake of the shootout in Scarborough yesterday, I'm going to break one of my ironclad current events blogging rules and speculate before all information is in, to wit:


I'm willing to bet that the perpetrators are black.


I could be wrong, of course...but I doubt it. We're not permitted to collect crime statistics based on race, because that would be (gasp) racist. Never mind that Jamaicans, Somalians, and assorted other melatonin-enhanced people have been shooting each other since time out of mind in the cores of countless cities, Toronto no exception. Unless you're the Harper government, the first step towards solving any problem is collecting reliable data on its scope. We can't do that, because it might offend a few people, and being offended is so much worse than being shot.


Obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against black people, brown people, or green polka-dotted people...only people who don't play by the rules. And if it is found, as I suspect it would be, that a higher percentage of black people don't play by the rules, the next question we must ask ourselves is why.

There is no shortage of specious theory being advanced to answer that question. It's American gun culture. (How many of these people have ever lived in America--which, for all its warts, is infinitely safer than so many other areas of the globe?)

It's the restrictions on gun ownership and use in Canada: if everybody had a gun, this line of "reasoning" goes, people would be afraid to draw theirs, let alone fire it.

Uh, okay.



It's the lack of meaningful sentencing: if, say, we handed out a mandatory ten-year sentence for possession of an unregistered firearm, all the gang-bangers would be in jail in short order...

...except that (a) you'd have to catch them first, almost always after they've shot somebody and (b) the sort of person who goes out and shoots people generally either doesn't care about consequences or is actually incapable of thinking them through--which is why mandatory minimum sentences don't reduce crime. Even the death penalty has no effect on crime.

So let's put aside all our reflexes to cry racism and look dispassionately at the cultures that produce the majority of the gang-bangers. I see two major issues here, each one insufficient in itself to create a criminal, but both together tending to produce them.

The first is a specific kind of poverty.

Yes, most poor people are law-abiding. So, incidentally, are most rich people, or most middle-class people. But culturally encouraged poverty is another matter.
Poverty is a hell of a disease to shake, it's true, especially when everyone around you is afflicted with it. But some people try to throw it off, and others simply give up. When you give up, that's when you're most vulnerable to the 'glamour' of the gang war: dulce et decorum est pro amici mori.

(Linguistic aside: the word 'glamour' originally meant a magic spell cast to convince its victim that somebody or something was attractive. That's in English. In Scots Gaelic, the term denotes a malevolent shapeshifter. Both definitions fit war of any kind rather well, I should think.) 


What factors 'encourage' poverty? I would argue the biggest one is the second factor in producing criminality: familial breakdown, leading to  community breakdown.

In certain cultures, it seems that fathers no longer have any obligation to mothers or children. The way women are portrayed in hip-hop videos reinforces this: they are simply receptacles to be pumped and dumped. That they line up for the chance to be receptacles tells you men produced the videos.

I wish I had a solution to this: it is so pervasive, and so damaging. Fatherhood binds a man to his family and offers a foundation on which a son (particularly) can build. I'd suggest further than except in extreme cases, even a poor father is better than no father at all. Poor fathers can be learned from: don't do this, don't do it that way. A void for a father breeds nothing but an attraction to voids.

Without cohesive families, 'community' is a nebulous concept at best: people tend to degenerate into an 'every man for himself' attitude that fosters shortsighted, often criminal, thinking.

As I said, I don't have a solution to this--far greater minds than mine have wrestled with it to no avail. But we have to talk about it. I can't solve this and I doubt you can, either....but together we stand a fighting chance. That's what family and community is for: together, we build each other up. As human beings, if we really want to achieve what Neale Donald Walsch calls "the greatest version of the grandest vision we ever had about who we are", we need to expand our perspective outward, beyond our comfort zone. Some of us care only about ourselves. Others care about their close families and friends, others about their tribes. A very few have demonstrated caring towards the entire world. That's where we need to get to. It seems like a hell of a long way to go, but it the journey can and has been made in a single leap of insight.

In the meantime, as with any evil act, the thing to concentrate on now is what next. If we continue along the path of least resistance, these victims will have died in vain. If we choose to really delve into the hows and whys of this tragedy, perhaps something good and lasting might be gained from it. That's my hope.