Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080528
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Teen-agers are drawn into this milieu by proximity and from admiration for the swaggering dealer with his fancy clothes and big car. Soon they're helping deal drugs and carrying "pieces" themselves.
It's a story familiar not only to big-city police but to those who watch TV crime dramas or follow the daily news. Unfortunately, recent events have made it plain that drug dealing has become big business in Roanoke. And teens who carry and use guns are no longer a rarity here.
Young toughs in Roanoke, as elsewhere, long have carried weapons such as switchblades or zip guns. Now they're graduating to something more lethal: not just Saturday night specials but also more expensive firearms, even semiautomatics. The escalation of this arms race is scary, and volatile. A high-power gun is a status symbol on the street corner, says George Clemons, a juvenile probation officer in Roanoke. It's also a means of quickly turning an ordinary argument into a killing.
There's no question that guns are more available nowadays. Every day that passes, there are more in circulation because more are manufactured and there are no effective curbs on availability. Police recently arrested a drug suspect at a Roanoke gun shop where he was test-firing a submachine gun.
Still, the hardware isn't the only problem. There's another, explosive ingredient: the youngsters' attitude.
Interviewing local court officials, staff writer Laurence Hammack found consensus that - compared with a few years ago - many juveniles have no respect for the law and no hint of conscience. The officials blame the change on a breakdown of home lives, gaps in the school system, TV shows that glamorize killing and violence, and crack cocaine.
These social phenomena are not limited to the ghetto. But inner-city kids are more vulnerable to such threats because for many of them, their lives lack values other than those of the street. Drug dealing is a way to make money. Society doesn't seem to offer them much else.
Carrying a gun is one way to show disdain for the world they see - and, they hope, to keep it from devouring them. A gun affords a sense of power, countering the powerlessness they feel or see around them.
Drugs and guns, especially in the hands of teen-agers, are ghastly things. But basically they're symptomatic. If guns and drugs could be eradicated tomorrow, left behind would still be the myriad things that have gone wrong at home, in the neighborhood, in school and in society.
It's fairly easy for most of us to ignore such problems: out of sight, out of mind. Hammack's account suggests that the time is coming when such denial will no longer be possible.
It was inevitable, with the introduction of crack-cocaine to Roanoke, that the big guns would follow. Now they're here and spreading, with a vengeance.
by CNB