Forwarded without comment ....
     From a column by Gregory P. Kane, who happens to be African-American,
in the Baltimore Sun, Sunday, September 15, 1996:
                GUNS RULE IN FACE OF OFFICIAL IMPOTENCE
     The Dream came to me again.  It came as it often does --
intermittently, without warning, just when I think it's safe to go to
sleep again.  How long has The Dream -- which, actually, is more of a
nightmare -- been with me now?  Eight, nine years?  Ray, my son, must
have been 12 or 13 then.  His mother and I had just bought him a
bicycle as a reward for finally bringing home a report card we could
live with.
     He was riding along about a block from our house when a group of
four or five hoodlums -- most around his age, at least one younger --
stuck a gun in his face and demanded the bike.  They shoved him down a
dirt path, told him they lived in the Park Circle area and dared him to
come get his bike.
     I heard about this sorry state of affairs when I got home from
work.  I grabbed my son and set out -- baseball bat in hand -- looking
for the punks.  This was a time of my life when I obviously had more
macho pride than brains.  Exactly what kind of match-up was a baseball
bat against a gun?  But there I was, huffing my way down Park Heights
Avenue with what I'm sure was a look of menace on my face (I noticed
folks tended to give way rather eagerly) and then up Reisterstown Road,
where one of the brigands brashly and stupidly yelled out, "We got that
bike!"
     Not exactly the kind of thing a 200-pound man with a bad attitude
and a baseball bat wants to hear.  When I confronted the punk his
knowledge of a bike suddenly vanished.  Several grown men gathered
around and tried to defend the thief.
     "Man, why you come around here with a baseball bat?" one wanted to
know.
     "Was I talking to you?" I demanded, stunning even myself with the
icy surliness in my voice.  It's important to understand what was going
on here.  I couldn't whip a Brownie if the lass gave me the advantage
of tying one hand behind her back.  But here I was displaying bravado I
didn't even know I had.  Having a son who has to face the cruel
realities of the mean streets of America's cities does strange things
to a man.  Strange and downright frightening.
     Because, you see, the issue here wasn't the bike.  We could always
get the boy another bike.  The issue was, "Stay away from my son or
folks will come looking for you."
     Another man implied he had a gun and intended to shoot me.
     "If you got a gun, you had best use it or shut the **** up!" I
shouted and stormed off up Reisterstown Road.  There was that bravado
again.  Here I was daring a man to shoot me, but at that point I didn't
care.  I had resolved that even if I was shot, I'd stay alive long
enough to choke the life out of the bastard.
     The reality of it set in when I got home.  The punk with the gun
didn't feel like shooting his robbery victim that day.  That was the
only reason my son was alive.  It was on that day The Dream started,
usually having one of two endings.  One was with my son dead or injured
from some act of violence.  The other was with my son in jail from
defending himself from some act of violence.
     The most recent occurred the week before Labor Day.  In this
nightmare, my son was with some friends who were firing guns into the
air.  Cops came and arrested the lot of them.  I took a vacation to get
away for about a week.  I had to get this latest Dream out of my system
and try to get some sleep.
     I came back Sunday night, Sept. 8.  This particular Dream had a
bit of prophecy in it.  According to police reports, at about the same
time I was getting into Baltimore, police were arresting my son on a
handgun possession charge, his second.  He had one about two years ago
after yet another thug who had robbed him at gunpoint promised to kill
him.  He'd also been robbed at gunpoint in Mondawmin Mall.  He told me
he bought the .32-caliber automatic handgun police found in his
basement for protection against muggers.  I can't well blame him.  It
doesn't take too many times to have a handgun jammed in your face to
realize that neither the police nor Kurt L. Schmoke's [Mayor of
Baltimore City] platitudes about getting handguns off the streets offer
you not a tinker's damn worth of protection.
     So the boy, who was first victimized by criminals at the age of 12
or 13, is now a man who has been branded a criminal by the same state
and city that have failed to protect him and thousands more like him.
The state says they -- and you, and I -- have no right to protect
ourselves from armed robbers.  We should all flip the state the
collective bird and tell it we'll disarm ourselves when it can keep
miscreants permanently off the streets.
---
 * The GreyHawk BBS (410)720-5083/290-3260 USR/DS
 * PostLink(tm) v1.20á GREYHAWK (#837) : RelayNet(tm)
---------------