WE ARE ALL OMEGA MEN:

The bloody gun law of the ghetto - coming soon to a street near you (Theodore Dalrymple, January 03, 2003, Times of London)

The seemingly casual gunning down of two girls in one of Birmingham’s many urban wastelands will come as no surprise to observers of the British underclass. We should not delude ourselves: these deaths are the shape of things to come. In no time at all, we’ll out-Chicago Chicago.

Not long ago, a gun was fired from a car at someone who was leaving the prison in which I work. Not long before that a man was shot dead in the pub opposite the prison. And not long before that a man was shot and seriously wounded in the same pub.

With increasing frequency, prisoners tell me that they expect to be shot when they leave the prison — by rival criminals with whom they have fallen out. At least one such prisoner who told me this was shot dead within weeks of his release, just as he predicted.

Meanwhile, in the hospital in which I also work, surgeons grow experienced in the treatment of gunshot wounds, when a few years ago they had no experience at all. A month ago I was halted in the corridor of my own hospital as a man on a trolley, who had been seriously wounded in a gun battle, was hurried by, surrounded by about ten policemen in bullet-proof jackets, to protect him from further attack. And it is not unusual for our patients to need protection in the wards while they are recovering: one of the reasons our wards now have locked doors.

These are just everyday scenes from underclass life in Britain, a life to which our middle classes, intellectuals and politicians have remained impenetrably indifferent for many years. Never mind: before long, they will soon get a few lessons in underclass culture whether they like it or not. They won’t have to go to the slums: the slums will come to them.

I actually had never seen a gun--other than our Dad's never-used .22 rifle--until we moved from the ghetto (East Orange, NJ) to a white Jewish/Catholic suburb next door (West Orange). Then you'd be at some middle-class Jewish family's house and there'd be a shotgun in an easily accessible gun case. After noticing the phenomenon a few times I asked one of the fathers what was going on. He said they all bought them during the Newark riots, just in case the slums really did come to them. Western Europe seems almost entirely unprepared for the drastic changes in peoples' attitudes that accompany racial/ethnic tensions. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2003 11:44 AM