The right to keep and bear arms is a natural human right, and it shouldn’t matter where you live. That’s especially true if you’re in the United States, where we at least recognize that right. However, in New York City, law enforcement maintains a pretty aggressive posture toward people who carry firearms. Many of them aren’t carrying lawfully, admittedly, but that’s long been because no one could really carry lawfully. Even after Bruen, New York did what it could as a state to make sure the status quo didn’t change all that much.
And so, a lot of people get jammed up.
But a report out of the Big Apple suggests that there’s another way.
For the past year, Thawney has worked in community-based violence prevention for the Brooklyn nonprofit Camba, which has operated for nearly 50 years. He started as a violence interrupter for Brownsville In Violence Out (BIVO). BIVO is part of the city’s Crisis Management System, a network of community-based organizations who employ credible messengers to mediate conflict and connect at-risk youth to services.
In April, Thawney started working as a peer advocate for Camba’s Project Restore Brownsville, a violence intervention initiative supported by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office that provides intensive mentorship to members of two rival groups in Brownsville.
“The goal is to … change the community from looking at each other as enemies to looking at each other as neighbors,” Thawney explained.
Last summer, Thawney also started his own organization, Save the Next Generation, with a fellow violence interrupter whom he once considered a rival. He hopes the organization can build community and give youth a safe space to be themselves and fulfill their potential.
“When we invest in youth, conflict mediation, community-led solutions, we save lives,” he said.
Community-based solutions grow, but the NYPD dominates
In the past decade, the community-based strategies that Thawney promotes have grown in prominence. The city’s Crisis Management System (CMS) has seen investment increase from $4.8 million per year in 2012 to nearly $100 million per year today.
“The dominant approach of the city remains one of criminalization through surveillance, harassment, arrest, mass prosecutions,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. “However, there has been growing political pressure over the last 10 years, slightly more, to invest in alternative strategies.”
Now, much of this likely stems from anti-police attitudes that came to a head in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, but regardless of why it’s a thing, the question we really need to ask is whether it works.
It’s one thing to pontificate about feelings and the power of conversation and all that, but if people keep being killed at the same rate as before, it doesn’t matter how eloquently you state your case. Deeds, not words.
And, well, there is some evidence that these programs accomplish some good.
While measuring the causal effects of the CMS system is difficult, researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the NYC Comptroller’s office have found that these CMS sites have contributed to reductions in gun violence. In addition, researchers at Columbia University found that Project Restore BedStuy, a precursor to Project Restore Brownsville, was associated with a 28% reduction in shooting incident victims.
A 28% reduction in shooting incident victims sounds fantastic. The other two studies showed different percentages, but still significant. Then again, since there’s a vested interest in academia to push narratives, there’s still room for skepticism.
Still, much of what these groups do actually makes a lot of sense. So-called gun violence doesn’t just happen in the spur of the moment most of the time, particularly in large cities like New York. What happens is that someone disrespects someone else, so the aggrieved party decides he needs to save face, and so he shoots the person who showed him disrespect. Then the victim’s buddies get angry, so they shoot the previous shooter, and it escalates from there.
Interrupting that escalation is important to stop the overall rate of shootings, as many are in response to something previous. So yeah, I can see this actually working.
And I want it to work, because gun control doesn’t reduce violence, and the Big Apple’s history of violent crime ebbing and flowing over the years, despite having had some of the strictest gun control laws on the books for decades, is proof of that. So, let’s try something that actually works, doesn’t trample our rights, or the rights of anyone else instead.
You know, just to shake things up.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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