Reducing Violence in the Cities

I have had some feedback to my post about the shooting death of little eight year old Heather Center.  Many objected to my anger directed at the gun lobby for the many shootings each year, telling me that guns don't kill, people kill.

That is without a doubt one of the stupidest arguments ever.  No one has ever claimed otherwise!  (The second most stupid argument is that people can kill with knives, baseball bats, frozen turkeys, etc.  so it will do no good to implement gun control measures because people will just use something else.  The parallel to this argument is that we shouldn't try to find a cure for cancer because people die of lots of other things too so if we cure cancer people will still die of something else. Yeah, that's pretty stupid).

But I digress.  Yes, people kill people, and they frequently use guns.  This has become a real problem in the inner cities (much to the gun lobby's delight).  At first we tried to control the flow of guns into the cities, but there are just too many gun owners and gun shops only too happy to make a profit, so we could only stand by and watch the carnage, but now there is a new program called CeaseFire that has shown promise in reducing the shootings (and other violence) in the cities.

The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as "uncool" both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute. [...]

"Violence gets transmitted the same way as other communicable diseases, so we train 'violence interruptors' to prevent escalation," says Gary Slutkin, founder and executive director of CeaseFire.

"They change the norm from 'violence is what's expected of me' to 'violence will make me look stupid'," says Slutkin. [...]

A three-year independent evaluation of CeaseFire published by the Department of Justice last year found that in Chicago, it reduced violence in every community where it was deployed.

Shootings and killing fell by between 41 and 73 per cent, with drops of 17 to 35 per cent the result of direct interventions by CeaseFire. Retaliation murders fell by 100 per cent in 5 of the 8 communities covered...

So, yes, this is a recognition that people kill people, and the focus of this program is on the people who kill (or injure) other people.  The idea behind the program makes sense and it would be great if it works, even if it only reduces killings by 50%.

--Trakker