“Everybody’s Problem,” For Now

Wells-Goodfellow

Fluff on the postmortem of the latest gun buyback feelz.

Except:

In an earlier telephone interview, Ed Dowd Jr., president of the bar association, repeated a common refrain from officials.

“Guns and violence in St. Louis are everybody’s problem, and we need everybody in St. Louis to work on the solutions to gun violence,” he said. “The gun buyback is one piece. If it stops one person from being shot, one person murdered or robbed, I would consider it successful. It will have a bigger impact than that.”

“Everybody’s problem?”  Usually, the “common refrain from officials” is that it’s nothing more than thug dindus on the wrong side of the tracks bing-banging other thug dindus on the wrong side of the tracks, and the only real difference between perp and vic is who gets to a gun first.  This has been a perpetual source of frustration for me, that various cities’ civic elites, including our own, can so easily dance back and forth on this narrative, between “it ain’t your problem cracker” and “zomg it concerns every living being in the galaxy lol.”  Such switching up depends on what the civic elites either want or don’t want from us.  In this case, because they wanted good PR from a useless fluff effort, photographic and otherwise, it was time to switch up to “zomg whole galaxy lol.”

Dowd was U.S. attorney here from 1993 to 1999, a period when homicides went from 267 to 130. He said the numbers were drastically cut by a “community-wide effort.”

Dowd, being St. Louis’s U.S. Attorney during the Bill Clinton Presidency, as in Democrat Party, as in the party and the President that helped enact a bunch of changes in the law which made the ’90s violent crime plunge possible, as in the party that can’t do enough today to apologize to loudmouth big mouth black gays, lesbians and trannies (“BLM”) for ever having done so.  Dowd had tools available to him that a hypothetical Presidency of Bill Clinton’s wife would have made sure the U.S. Attorney she appointed for St. Louis would not have had, because criminal justice reform, or something like that.