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Chief Sanchez
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Dr. Samad
Dateline Pasadena – Not surprisingly, the police chief of Pasadena and a major community activist from South L.A., Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, clashed, congenially, last night in an ACLU-sponsored debate over how to temper if not lasso ubiquitous gun violence.
Is there a genuinely effective way to at least diminish the periodic outbursts?
You have to know who to go after. Mr. Sanchez and Dr. Samad identified opposing culprits.
Astride one of the most scenic church campuses in Southern California, amidst a veritable forest that resembled a summer camp, still-new Pasadena Chief Phil Sanchez argued that the only effective route for sincere activists is to start at the beginning of life, what he called the core.
“If we are going to really make an effort to curb gun violence, we need to look at the core issues that surround us,” Mr. Sanchez said at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church.
“We need to look at early intervention, early prevention, in the home, in schools, and in other social gatherings so that we hold people accountable for their behavior.”
To conquer the trend, communal creativity may be a panacea, he said. The old ways are not the answer.
“Traditional law enforcement mechanisms will not get at the core issues of gun violence,” Mr. Sanchez said. “By the time law enforcement becomes involved, we are ‘way behind the power curve. We have to look at frontloading resources and frontloading preventative and intervention-type efforts.”
No longer, Mr. Sanchez maintained, can a traditional, old-fashioned approach be relied upon, neighbor helping neighbor.
Selfishness or inward objections are the present trends of communal groups.
Two years into his term in Pasadena, he said that there are 1200 non-profits in the community, and “while they do good jobs for themselves, they are not interested in looking outside of themselves.”
We have to be smarter, said the chief, than relying on what has formerly worked.
“As comprehensive as some legislators try to be in crafting gun control laws, their efforts are anemic, in part because of political influence, in part because of the way weapons themselves work.
“Gun control has nothing to do with round capacity,” Mr. Sanchez said.
“The real issue is not gun violence, but core issues that surround it.”
Dr. Samad, a college professor and author of political tomes, contended that America has “become a society that wants to rationalize gun use and gun ownership on a whole different plane from before.
“We have a Sandy Hook every two years. That is the reality. We have a mass murderer somewhere in our nation where, not some street or gang child, but some middle class, well-adjusted young person somehow gains massive access to a stream of weaponry. He decides to engage in a fanatical act of mass murder.
“You can take it all the way back to Columbine and go forward,” Dr. Samad said. “We have had 31 mass murders since Columbine. We get upset for about 6 to 8 and then we go back to sleep.”
(To be continued)
