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Government and Community Relations

Speeches and Presentations

Revisit fruitful `94 effort to quell violence in city
Elizabeth Laidlaw
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Democrat and Chronicle
12/05/2002

Guest essayist, Tamara Walker argues that Michael Moore’s latest effort Bowling for Columbine missed the true point or youth gun violence, namely that youth wield weapons as a way to gain our attention. She doesn’t fault the media who merely report the news, defined as “anything abnormal or out of the ordinary” in her words. Nor does she see any solution to the killing.

We do live in a violent society. But children dying from gun violence is not a global reality. The number of children fourteen and under killed by firearms in the United States is 12 times greater than that of 25 industrialized nations combined. Center for Disease Control, 1997 A recent Harvard study shows that children living in the five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were 16 times more likely to die from unintentional gunfire, seven times more likely to die from gun suicide, and three times more likely to die from gun homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership. "Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, Suicide, and Homicide among 5-14 Year Olds," The Journal of Trauma, Harvard School of Public Health, Feb. 2002.

Yes, our children are screaming, shooting, and dying for attention, but this need not be so. To accept gun violence as a part of the good old USA is to admit that we are powerless over it. In fact we are not powerless over it. In July of 1994, after months of researching and defining the parameters of gun violence in the city of Rochester, hundreds of volunteers, through the Rochester Challenge Against Violence, devoted thousands of hours to listening to the victims and perpetrators of violence.

Mostly, we gave these young folks our time. We listened to children while we cleaned neighborhood streets with them, we listened while playing midnight basketball with them, physicians and social workers listened to victims of violence as they presented themselves for treatment in local emergency rooms, and police officers called on mediators at neighborhood safe houses to listen to the disputes of domestic and neighborhood quarrels. And in July of 1994 there were no murders in the city of Rochester.

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I take the purpose of the press to be a noble one. At its best, the news media seek to inform and uncover causes and remedies of societal ills. To that end, Michael Moore’s latest effort is quite noble.

Locally, let’s call on the news media to inform us of what went right in July of 1994 and to ask important questions of our community leaders. What are the obstacles to making these efforts, instead of guns, part of our everyday life, part of what we see when we turn on the channel on glance at the front page?


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