It was panic stations at Lakeside Shopping Center the other day when shoppers mistook thunderclaps for gunshots.
The fleeing hordes might have invited derision elsewhere, but let no one call them nervous Nellies around here. It's not paranoid to assume a shooter is on the loose when a loud crack interrupts proceedings. Mass shootings have become commonplace in this country, and last year New Orleans' murder rate led the nation.
Valiant efforts are afoot to stem the violence, with the so-called violence interrupters program leading the way in New Orleans. The idea is that “credible messengers” can defuse violent encounters through “peer mediation,” which means employing reformed hoodlums to talk sense into the latest crop of delinquents. The program is apparently a great success, thanks to the efforts of such credible messengers as Danny Allen, who made a million dealing drugs by the time he was 17.
If he hadn't then gone straight, he would probably have wound up with a load of his acquaintances in the morgue. Allen has proved a highly effective violence interrupter since 2010, when he started working in an earlier version of what the city's health director Dr. Jennifer Avegno terms an integral part of a “violence prevention ecosystem.”
When gangland veterans switch to a supportive role in this ecosystem, statistics suggest they affect a marked reduction in homicides, in particular the tit-for-tat kind that are a gangland feature. It would be churlish to deny great credit to everyone toiling to reduce killings. “We saved a lot of lives,” Allen says, and there's no reason to doubt him.
Still, there are a lot of lives that haven't been saved and plenty of killers are walking around without a care in the world. A homicide detective's lot is not a happy one in New Orleans, as a severely understaffed New Orleans Police Department wilts in the face of a crime wave. Since the start of 2020, over 500 murders have failed to bring an arrest, let alone a conviction. In the same period, police closed 287 murder cases.
The United States is supposed to be a country of laws, not of men, and we have held to that admirable principle, in theory, ever since John Adams enunciated it. But a country that does not enforce its most consequential laws — and murder is about as consequential as it gets — is flirting with anarchy.
A lot of laws designed to keep the murder rate down may go unenforced regardless of NOPD's staffing problems because the courts seem increasingly protective of our right to keep and bear arms. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a few years ago that that right was not dependent on membership in the "well regulated Militia" that the Second Amendment avers is “necessary to the security of a free State,” but went out of its way to aver that it is subject to some legislative limitation.
Of course, no constitutional right is absolute, but the federal judiciary is notoriously right-wing these days and will pounce on most any attempt to disarm citizens, even anti-social ones. They don't come much more anti-social than Zackey Rahimi, who got 73 months for a slew of crimes committed while he was under a domestic violence restraining order.
That conviction was overturned, because the law that made it a crime for Rahimi to carry a gun in those circumstances was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, the appeals court in New Orleans ruled, citing recent Supreme Court precedent. We leave violence reduction to former felons around here.
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.