Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Focus on the Causes of Gun Violence

A lot of time and effort is going into reforming police. Today, a school bus driver was shot in the head in Minneapolis. Perhaps more time and effort should be spent on the reason police are out pursuing criminals--like why are people shooting each other and also killing and maiming innocent bystanders in the city and streets? Police reform is a byproduct... an effort to fix a symptom of the true problem. It's easy to yell and scream about police brutality, but that doesn't address the crime that necessitates the reason police are deployed in the first place. If you can fix the crime problem, the police won't even be needed.

It was a while ago, but when I grew up in Richfield, and bought my first house in Minneapolis (both have had shootings already this month), there wasn't continuous shootings like there is now. So ask yourself, what has changed? If we focus on the cause of the dysfunction rather than reacting to the results, perhaps real solutions are possible. Because so far, protesting the police hasn't stopped the gun violence.

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