Wes Skoglund Was Right

There are people creeping around Minneapolis who want to kill people.

Oh, they're not concealed carry permit-holders, of course. No, they're the ones that Wes Skoglund wasn't verbally worried about during last spring's caterwauling about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

Five children have been shot in Minneapolis in recent weeks - none have died, thank God, but if this pattern continues it's only a matter of time before Minneapolis gets its next Tyesha Edwards , another Daneisha Gillum.

Back in 1986, when Minneapolis was going through its first burst of gang violence, a Minneapolis cop told me the safest place to be during a gang shooting is the target. He was being sarcastic - sort of. That week, as two groups of gang-bangers blazed away at each other across a Northside street, the only injury was a boy in a second-floor apartment, a block away and 45 degrees off the line of fire, who was (if memory serves) paralyzed.

It's only gotten worse:

Carisa Opdahl's eyes grew big when she heard about the 3-year-old boy shot by a stray bullet as he walked out of a Minneapolis store with his mom and little sister this week.

"It's terrible," she said. "Why would they do that? Why don't they stay in their own neighborhoods and hurt people?"

She speaks with such mature bravado because two weeks ago the 12-year-old girl was also hit by fragments from a bullet meant for a group of young men hanging out at a nearby corner. Carisa was sitting on her front step with friends and relatives after a play date when one of the bullets went inches above their heads and into the house.

In the past six weeks, Minneapolis police have scrambled to the scenes of five children hit by crossfire. All will recover, but a 15-year-old girl remains hospitalized with a slug in her chest. Police say the victims were inches away from becoming the next Tyesha Edwards, the 11-year-old girl killed in 2002 by a stray bullet as she did homework in her Minneapolis house.

Minnesota is a welfare state - the one with among the nation's most generous benefits.

Subsidizing anything will increase the supply of that thing. In this case, we subsidize poverty. That brings more poor people to where the money is. The government, especially the factions in it that are stakeholders in the welfare system we have today, will deny it, and slather the debate with carefully-culled statistic to downplay the issue - but if you live in either of the inner Twin Cities, you can see what's going on; the subsidy of poverty brings more of the poor to the state. And the state warehouses the poor in the inner city.

Where criminals prey on them.

It could come from economic pressure, said activist Ron Edwards. If somebody doesn't have a job or is making minimum wage and has to decide if they can afford to pay the rent or buy food, it becomes a 24-hour stress factor with no time for relaxation, he said. Throw in the recent rise in gasoline prices, which affects all classes and races, he said.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of the shooters are working for any wage, much less minimum?

Posted by Mitch at August 12, 2005 12:05 PM | TrackBack