St. Louis CofCC Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Decades ago, James Earl Tartt didn’t fear sitting on his front stoop, watching the neighborhood kids scurry up and down his block.

These days, however, Tartt says he shutters himself inside his Semple Avenue house after dark because he’s grown frightened of youngsters whose games increasingly include guns and drugs.

I wonder what has changed on Semple Avenue between “decades ago” and “these days.”

“These kids are going crazy,” said Tartt, 64, a retired hospital worker who lives a block from where St. Louis police Officer Norvelle Brown was shot to death last week. “How do they get these guns?”

They steal them, and the stolen guns are sent into a black market. But don’t tell the ATF and Michael Bloomberg that — they’re still obsessed with straw purchases, and anything else that will make white gun shop owners and not black thugs look like the devils.

The explanations for violent crime among youngsters are rooted in widespread poverty and a lack of parental guidance at home, experts say.

But contradictorily:

She said many teenagers who seek help there have grown up exposed to rape, assault and drug abuse in their own homes.

This means that as bad as it is, it would be worse if there was more of such “guidance” from these kinds of parents.

“Where are their parents?” she asked. “Evidently, they haven’t been raised in loving, nurturing, Godly environments.”

The Post-Dispatch praising a Godly environment here? What’s good for black homes isn’t good for any public schools or halls of government, eh?

Violent juvenile offenders often fail to realize the harmful effects of their violent behavior, said Ray Grush, St. Charles County’s family court administrator.

“I always say the definition of adolescence is irrational behavior — impulsive thinking,” Grush said. “They tend to think of victims as inconsequential. When a person doesn’t have empathy for another person, it’s of no consequence to hurt them or maybe even take their life.”

This is the “youthful exuberance” excuse that this same crowd sometimes uses to explain away black crime. The flaw in that argument is that most “exuberant yoots” do understand right from wrong. There’s hardly anyone that could be punished if we couldn’t punish people who couldn’t write a thesis about the micro- and macro-economic, and the individual and collective ramifications of their decisions. At that rate, the only people that could be held accountable for their crimes are business school graduates. However, knowing right from wrong is something that is so basic that everyone but those who are blatantly retarded can understand it.

“Youthful Exuberance” is a two-edged sword. The same “exuberance” and “impulsive, irrational” behavior of young people is what drove both a 15-year old teenage boy to murder a cop, and that selfsame murder victim to become a cop at the age of 21 to “make a difference,” to “be a positive role model” for the class of “troubled yoots” that wound up killing him, and to “give back.”

Teens and young adults on Semple Avenue seem to accept violent crime as a part of life.

(snip)

Another resident, Cliff Wilson, 17, said, “It’s the ‘hood,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “It just happens. It’s the ‘hood.”

And I agree with that assessment more than Mr. Tartt’s conclusion that “these kids are going crazy.” None of this is indicative of mental illness, it’s simply unfettered Africans in their element.