There was another shooting of the nonfatal variety in Baltimore on Tuesday morning around 10:30.
You might have been going about your business, living life in a way most of us would consider normal, but on South Morley Street, in a rowhouse neighborhood on the city's west side, a 50-year-old man took a bullet in his left heel.
The police said this about that: "Preliminary investigation revealed the victim was in a dispute with an unknown suspect when that suspect pulled a gun and shot the victim."
Spare as it is, ordinary as it is, I mention the report because motive is not usually something we get from police. Until arrests are made and more information provided, we — that is, all but next of kin — seldom learn why one Baltimorean shoots another.
Of course, there's a lot of history that informs speculation. Shootings often stem from disputes between men over drugs, money and women. Maybe a gang member kills a rival. Or a drug dealer decides to kill an addict who owes him money or steals some heroin. Maybe someone with a gun gets drunk, or a teenager tries to prove his manhood, or some angry guy feels dissed by another. Maybe the shooting is about revenge. Maybe it's about the last slice of pizza.
Premeditated or impulsive, there seems no end to the brutal percussion in this city. Too many guns. Too many fools with guns, settling scores with bullets that a couple of generations ago they might have settled with fists.
So, in the midst of your normal life in the abnormally violent city of Baltimore, you shake your head and wonder when it will stop, or at least slow down. It seems hopeless.
After the burst of gunfire on Memorial Day that left five people wounded at a cookout on 43rd Street, I wondered why simple attrition had not done its part to reduce Baltimore's street violence by now. With all the shootings, and particularly this past year, you'd think that Baltimore's at-risk population (adults who, by life circumstance, are predictably at risk of becoming a shooter or a shooting victim) would have been greatly reduced by now.
Please pardon my calculus. But, after observing decades of gun violence here, the attrition question seems a reasonable one to ask. Why haven't shootings peaked by now?
"Gun violence feeds on itself," says Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. "Each shooting presents a challenge to prevent retaliations and other behaviors that perpetuate violence."
So mere attrition doesn't work. Violence begets violence.
Webster, one of the nation's leading gun-crime researchers, is part of a Hopkins team collaborating with the Baltimore Police Department to develop ways to curb violence. He would not undertake such work if he thought the situation was hopeless.
But getting to a better Baltimore — where violence is no longer a prominent part of the city's identity — is going to take time, and big change.
For one thing, Webster says, the penalties for carrying illegal guns need to be harsher.
For another, police need help in closing more cases.
"Closure rates for homicides and shootings have declined in Baltimore as in many other cities as too few are willing to cooperate with police to help them arrest and convict the perpetrators," Webster says. "While many cities have made major investments in their crime lab to aid efforts to bring criminals to justice — all the more important when fewer witnesses will testify — Baltimore's crime lab is seriously under-resourced and overworked."
Police are doing a good job of arresting people who carry firearms illegally, Webster says, but those efforts are undercut by the case-closure challenges and weak penalties.
I was glad that Webster mentioned Safe Streets, the intervention program that employs ex-offenders to head off trouble and reduce gun violence in a few selected neighborhoods.
"In terms of benefits versus costs, it is a bargain," Webster says. "But it needs to improve oversight and efforts to prevent workers' relapse. We've invested precious few resources in the program. It has mostly lived off grants from federal and state government and foundations."
Webster offered another calculus about gun violence, something I had not considered: the shootings that do not occur because of interventions like those Safe Streets carries out. Stop the contagion and we could see some surprisingly fast reductions in violence.
"When Safe Streets workers head off a dispute among gang members," Webster says, "and when police remove violent offenders and their guns from the streets, or a high-risk ex-offender gets a job, the shootings that those actions prevent also prevent the shootings that would have been propagated without those actions."
The program really needs to be expanded across the city. Last year, when Baltimore experienced a surge in violence, the four Safe Streets posts were remarkably peaceful. There were 32 shootings over the Memorial Day weekend in 2015. Not one occurred in a Safe Street post.
