The Nightmare Continues

So the guy that was the target of the bullet that killed Tyesha Edwards last year was, himself, shot.:

"More than a year after 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards was killed by a stray bullet while doing homework in her dining room, police say the gang member who the bullet was intended for has been shot and killed.
Timothy Oliver, 18, was shot several times early Wednesday as he stood alone on a street in south Minneapolis. His death is the city's first homicide of the year.
'This wasn't a random act,' Minneapolis Police Lt. Mike Carlson said."

These gangland shootings never are - and still are, always.

It was five years ago that someone shot my house - three times. There was a punk kid living two doors down the street that was dealing drugs, and he'd apparently run afoul of a couple of other worthless scum. Late one night - about 2:30 AM, as the neighbor kid was walking past my house toward his place, the other punks drove by, and one of the other vermin, firing (one of my neighbors noted) from a primer-colored Toyota wagon, fired eight shots, then reloaded and fired eight more. None of them hit the neighbor punk.

Back in the eighties, a Minneapolis cop told me - mostly jokingly - that the safest thing to be when gang-bangers started shooting was their target. It was true enough that night. Of sixteen shots fired, one hit my porch, another dug into a window frame - in the attic - and one broke a window in my library, fifteen feet from where my son was sleeping, and bounced off a wall, coming to rest under my computer.

The police did the usual perfunctory "investigation". The only fallout - a bunch of neighbors saw the car, it was linked with another shooting in the neighborhood, and a few weeks later I saw it myself, driving in front of the kid's house down the street. Driving a pickup, I ostentatiously drove up behind it, weaving and swearing. They accelerated, and I chased them - the sight of a 36-year-old guy swearing and honking the horn must have scared them worse than the thought of chasing a couple of punks with guns scared me. Nobody saw them in the neighborhood again.

"OK, Mitch. So...?"

Right. Three points:

• These gang-banger scum need to be rooted out and jailed. Or killed.
• The thing that gives these vermin their reason to organize - the "War On Drugs" that gives them their main reason to kill - is a bigger mistake than Vietnam.
• I haven't seen Citizens For a Supine "Safer" Minnesota commenting on this yet. Apparently, none of the killers held legal concealed carry permits. So, C"S"M - who are the dangerous ones? Any time you'd care to answer that, I'll be waiting

As a parent, I can't help but think that there are two families mourning children now; Tyesha Edwards' father's statement yesterday was a gut shot.

As a parent to my own kids, though, I want one thing; for the people, the police, and the idiots at Citizens For a Supine "Safer" Minnesota to focus on the real enemy here.

Posted by Mitch at January 30, 2004 07:25 AM