Sure enough the commentary is already out there that the murder of UNC Student Body President Eve Carson — allegedly by two or three black males who are members of a gang — was society’s fault for its racist past. This view is usually propagated by white extreme liberals. Black political leadership is predictably quiet. When it comes to black gangs, they are nowhere to be found. This failure of leadership is a hardship on the vast majority of decent, law-abiding blacks who shuddered when the arrested suspects were black — and connected to gangs. They have a bigger stake in what happens next than the white majority.
The propaganda machinery claiming the perpetrators are “victims” themselves cannot overcome the outrage over the murder of Eve Carson. Sadly, this anger was not palpable when a Duke student was murdered in a random shooting just weeks before — allegedly by one of the suspects in the Eve Carson murder. It was simply accepted as par for the course in today’s society. But Eve Carson was an attractive, achieving and spirited female with a high profile. As is the case when leaders are assassinated, the entire society shares in the grief.
If you go to www.metronc.com, you can access my interview with DG Martin on WCHL radio in Chapel Hill — where Eve Carson was killed — and hear me say that this time the old sociological approach isn’t enough. Since the two suspects already arrested are connected to gang activity in Durham, we’d rather not hear anymore of the usual drivel from academics and public bodies that focus on the symbolism of their tattoos and baseball cap logos, as if membership in one of these criminal conspiracies is a chapter out of Margaret Mead. The anthropology of gangdom has been shrouding the reality that these people are thugs of the first order who use murder and robbery as initiation rites, endanger the citizenry and create fear and disgust by their very presence. Too much emphasis is placed on economic issues and not on attacking gang crime.
Rather than study them, as if they are prehistoric tribes hiding out in New Guinea, we must confront gangs, as we do terrorism, to end their reign of violence by creating laws that make membership a criminal conspiracy. The FBI used laws that mafia figures consorting with other mafia figures was a crime. With this sort of law on the books, gang members will endanger their own if they commit a crime and be implicated and arrested as accessories at the outset, sending a message to other gangs — and to the rest of us.
There are other accessories to the murder of Eve Carson. How about the doctors here and around the country — and their cohorts in the anti-death penalty crusade — who have forced the suspension of the administration of the death penalty, claiming lethal injection is “cruel and unusual punishment”? Would these recent murders have occurred if the perpetrators knew they could be executed? Are the anti-gang groups already in place accessories for their failure to prevent random murders in the community?
Naturally, the anti-gun lobby will be out preaching that the murder of Eve Carson would not have happened if firearms were banned. I am hardly an enthusiast for unregulated gun proliferation, but with gangs and their related types roaming the streets, a well-armed citizenry is a better solution than simply wringing our collective hands until the next murder. And how about the overburdened parole system, crowded prisons and the inept courthouse failures that allowed Eve Carson’s alleged killers out on the street? Accessories to murder — all of them. A sharp prosecutor would indict them too.
In effect, we are all accessories to the murder of Eve Carson for not forcing our legal system to act on our behalf, and not constantly on behalf of those who break the law — and murder people as an afterthought. The pendulum has swung so far over to the rights of criminals in our society that we accept the mayhem without demanding a change. That’s because it’s impossible to hack through the embedded sociology that generates legislation. While the rest of us are going about our daily business, dozens of activist groups are chipping away at our domestic tranquility by inventing new rights for those who deserve none. Our lawmakers react to these squeaky wheels and not to the generally hard-working majority of citizens — black and white — who don’t have time to influence legislation.
We can do one thing: force the creation of a Gang Task Force, but not another federally funded toothless group that ends up talking and observing — and often blaming “society” for the actions of gang members — but a well-armed police unit backed with legislation that allows them to arrest gang members for associating with each other. The GTF should be empowered to enter neighborhoods and homes and make arrests based on the suspicion that a crime is to be committed.
What’s it going to be? Are you going to sit on your backside until you end up being blamed for the murder of Eve Carson? That’s what’s coming from the nanny state activists as the case wears on. Will you watch as we evolve into a vigilante culture with blacks and whites glaring across an ever-widening social divide? Better we all work together to create the Gang Task Force — and now.
Notes from La-La Land
Red Charles Meeker and his moronic Raleigh City Council may have finally gone too far. Rushing to enact edicts while the water shortage was in full swing — greenies think development caused it — a resolution was enacted to ban garbage disposals (or, generically, disposers) in one fell totalitarian swoop. No new homes can have one and existing machines cannot be replaced — enforced by draconian fines usually reserved for dumping nuclear waste and PCBs.
I learned this intrusive and preposterous act was motivated by a nationwide program that recruits green-leaning mayors into environmental action city by city in response to President George Bush’s refusal to sign the ridiculous Kyoto Protocol — an effort to shut down capitalism in the name of fighting “man-made” global warming, a theory transformed into a manifesto by the washed up Marxists who lost the Cold War. Get it? Capitalism is killing the earth, so shoulder-to-shoulder the new green proletariat will save living creatures by shutting it down. Old Karl would be proud.
And like the old one-world Bolsheviks, the green apparat has no use for individual rights or the facts of the matter. Meeker could slip into Lenin’s uniform with no alterations. I wrote him a little note you can access at www.metronc.com. Click on my online only Between Issues column.