S.F. teens duck hail of bullets! (Not)
I'd panic if I were raising young kids in San Francisco and read Leslie Kirk Campbell's article BULLETPROOF: When San Francisco teenage gun violence comes too close to home in today's Chronicle Sunday Magazine. It portrays our teens as being forced to choose between living in a Wild West urban landscape where violent strangers fire bullets into them as a matter of course — or cowering safely at home behind drawn curtains at all times.
Of course I know there are shootings in our city streets, especially in high-crime neighborhoods, in which low-income families struggle to survive and keep their kids safe.
But for a family that doesn't live in a really blighted neighborhood? It doesn't feel to me like my kids are in danger every minute. Fear that he will be shot is not high on the list of reasons that I'm relieved that my 16-year-old is not inclined to go out roaming much — he has too many scheduled activities and is fond of electronic entertainment and books at home. (Though it's not like he stays home at all times.) The article made me wonder if I were in denial and think about whether — like Campbell's son — my son is paying hospital visits and mourning friends and classmates who have been gunned down.
Actually, I can't think of a single one. My kids have been lucky in so far escaping tragedy closely touching their lives (I think I'm supposed to spit three times here to keep the evil eye away — shouldn't there be an emoticon for that?).
Hmm. Maybe we're living in a bubble or a delusion, but my teen seems to be living in a different world from Campbell's. It can't be a totally different world geographically, as she mentions living four minutes from Glen Park, where one of his acquaintances was gunned down, and we also live four minutes from Glen Park. It's hard to speculate on why her son's world and mine are so different. Her son spends a lot of time roaming the city at night, and I can't help wondering what kind of crowd he has fallen into at his "college-prep charter school." If I were this boy's mom I'd be worried too.
Property crimes? We got 'em. Only yesterday my son's school held a fundraising event to replace musical instruments that were stolen in a break-in over spring vacation.
But based on my kids' lives (invoke whatever other charms, superstitions and spells are appropriate here), parents of younger children, assuming they can afford to live outside truly dangerous parts of town, don't need to panic about flying bullets. For the record, I'm a strong opponent of access to guns. But in my world, they're not the scourge of our teens that the Chronicle article portrays.
— Caroline
Of course I know there are shootings in our city streets, especially in high-crime neighborhoods, in which low-income families struggle to survive and keep their kids safe.
But for a family that doesn't live in a really blighted neighborhood? It doesn't feel to me like my kids are in danger every minute. Fear that he will be shot is not high on the list of reasons that I'm relieved that my 16-year-old is not inclined to go out roaming much — he has too many scheduled activities and is fond of electronic entertainment and books at home. (Though it's not like he stays home at all times.) The article made me wonder if I were in denial and think about whether — like Campbell's son — my son is paying hospital visits and mourning friends and classmates who have been gunned down.
Actually, I can't think of a single one. My kids have been lucky in so far escaping tragedy closely touching their lives (I think I'm supposed to spit three times here to keep the evil eye away — shouldn't there be an emoticon for that?).
- A schoolmate of my son's, whom my son barely knows by sight, has been hospitalized for months with major injuries from an accident involving the L-Taraval.
- A popular and widely admired recent graduate of his school was killed in an auto accident on I-80 on the way to Tahoe. My son didn't know her, but his older schoolmates did, and the school held a huge celebration of her life.
- A student at his middle school was tragically shot to death — nowhere near school — the spring before my son started sixth grade there. The boy was killed near his home in the Alemany Housing Projects; as I recall it was a bullet aimed at his brother, a gang member.
- As we have many friends who are families at Balboa High, we know people who knew the student who was tragically shot to death on a Muni bus after school a few years ago.
- And our friends Lynn, Margo and Kenny were held up at gunpoint on Arlington Street in Glen Park/Fairmount years ago, when Kenny, now a high school sophomore, was about 6. It was terrifying, but no shots were fired.
Hmm. Maybe we're living in a bubble or a delusion, but my teen seems to be living in a different world from Campbell's. It can't be a totally different world geographically, as she mentions living four minutes from Glen Park, where one of his acquaintances was gunned down, and we also live four minutes from Glen Park. It's hard to speculate on why her son's world and mine are so different. Her son spends a lot of time roaming the city at night, and I can't help wondering what kind of crowd he has fallen into at his "college-prep charter school." If I were this boy's mom I'd be worried too.
Property crimes? We got 'em. Only yesterday my son's school held a fundraising event to replace musical instruments that were stolen in a break-in over spring vacation.
But based on my kids' lives (invoke whatever other charms, superstitions and spells are appropriate here), parents of younger children, assuming they can afford to live outside truly dangerous parts of town, don't need to panic about flying bullets. For the record, I'm a strong opponent of access to guns. But in my world, they're not the scourge of our teens that the Chronicle article portrays.
— Caroline
2 Comments:
I agree with Caroline.
Sometimes you just have to read between the lines:
1) This mother lets her boy roam the streets in his own car after 11PM.
2) He hangs with the hip-hop crowd.
3) My guess from the article is that he attends the Gateway high school, a charter school full of white kids that has a reputation for drugs (according to my son, a high school student).
So, isn't it possible that she is being overly permissive, and exposing her son to danger?
Just to be fair, I understand that it's not Gateway.
It's not that I would pin blame on the mom, or the boy, or the school. (My standard position is to defend schools against being blamed for issues that are far beyond their scope, whatever I think of the individual school.)
But for whatever reason he seems to be in harm's way and spend his time with kids who are in harm's way to an abnormal degree. I do have issues with the mom scaring the wits out of people by indicating that all San Francisco teens are in the same kind of jeopardy.
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