Stricter gun laws alone won't stop America's urban violence
Getting guns off the streets or out of the hands of criminals won’t by itself address the problem of gun violence in poor urban communities. America needs to address the underlying circumstances that lead people like my inmate students to gun violence in the first place.
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“It was either him or me” was how Basil ended a poem describing a shoot-out.
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I’ve never been in a war zone, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare one to the streets where my students live when they aren't behind bars. And like many veterans, my students, too, are physically and mentally scarred: like Mike, after that Charlestown brawl, when he discovered at the age of 13 that he was capable of beating someone nearly to death. Like Harvey, who tried and was unable emotionally, to write about getting shot. All of them, out on the street expect to be ambushed, and are traumatized from witnessing the sudden and violent deaths of friends, siblings, and cousins. My students also lose loved ones to suicide, and some attempt it themselves.
Yes, they are part of the violence; they contribute to this way of life, and many of the younger men, the ones in their twenties, are still seduced by it. But once they hit 30, most of my students want to find their way out. And one way, temporarily, is prison.
Prison, my student Robert wrote, was the first place he ever felt safe. If there were any weapons on the inside, he said, he could be pretty sure they wouldn’t be guns. Suddenly, the fear that had dominated and determined the direction of his life, was gone. Free from fear, Robert was free to begin to discover who he was.
The majority of my students grow up on society’s margins, so a centralized issue like the one on gun control has little bearing on their lives. After all, they purchase their guns illegally. Yes, we should keep guns out their hands, but if the criminals I know had been given no reason to want one they’d have never become criminals in the first place. Implement and fund the social policies and programs that will eradicate the causes for their fear, and my students won’t be condemned to find sanctuary behind prison walls simply because they were too young to know that they would never find it in a gun.
Peggy Rambach is the author of a novel "Fighting Gravity" (Steerforth Press) and the editor of two anthologies published by Paper Journey Press that emerged from her work teaching writing in the social service and health-care sectors. A second novel is forthcoming from Paper Journey Press. You can read her students’ work at www.peggyrambach.com.
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