Free Gang Violence Essay Example

It is a dark night when gunshots ring out on a dimly lit street. The sound will not come as a surprise to anybody in this neighborhood, nor will the sirens that follow. These and the sounds of running footsteps, squealing tires, and barking orders from the soon to be convicted assailants are all too common in a place like this. People grow up poor, with a bad education and no prospects. They have two choices: work a dead-end, minimum wage job until you die, or find other means to survive. Some, like the gangs, find other means, and it leads to violence.
Lawmakers and police like to act as though these individuals have a choice. When a baby like Robert Carlson is born to a single mother who is already parenting two brothers and a sister, while trying to waitress at night in order to feed her children, their answer is the child should pay attention in school in order to get ahead. He will get a good job if he does, and be able to do better than his mother did. She wants this, of course, and demands Robert and his siblings go to school. However, nobody mentions the Carlsons live in the poorest neighborhood in the county and, as such, the children are going to a school that receives the least amount of funding.
With no resources, Robert starts hanging out with the wrong crowd. They sell drugs and stolen items. Robert does not want to hurt anybody or steal from anybody, but his mom needs help. He needs help. His whole neighborhood needs help but he has finally realized nobody is going to help him but himself. He steals, he sells, he listens when cops tell him it is his own fault, and the neighborhood brings it on himself. All the while, he wonders why the rich neighborhoods, who have never seen a gun or a day of violence, receive all of the money, after school programs, and good schools, while he and his siblings were born here in the shadows to rot. He feels like they planned it.
Robert thinks about school, and about what he wanted to be as he ducks under gunfire. He knows none of this is his fault. He was born at the bottom so he could stay at the bottom. One of his friends falls, lifeless in the street. He thinks to himself that everybody else needs somebody to stand on, that they are all just bodies in his neighborhood to be told what to do. He wonders if his younger brother will get out as they put handcuffs on him. He hopes that he will as the officer tells him he should have paid more attention in school. He rolls his eyes, as he realizes his neighborhood as more prisons and police stations than schools to begin with.
“This violence is your fault,” he whispers.