The bodies in Friday's shooting were barely cool before a Kinston councilman went on TV to blame everyone except Bambi for the disaster.
The fault lies at the doors of the city, the family, the church and the community, says this councilman.
Oh, yeah?
How about this: The blame rests squarely with the people who pulled the trigger. Blaming anyone else is like blaming the rain for soaking the inside of your car after you left the top down.
Police believe Milton Jones and Derek Suggs are the shooters. These guys are not nice people. Both have convictions for drug possessions. Both served light sentences. Suggs was convicted of felony larceny in Pitt County in 2002 and received a suspended sentence for drug possession in March 2004. Jones has at least two drug convictions and a probation violation. His record dates back to 2001. Suggs' first conviction was in 2002.
Jones and Suggs are from Kinston. It isn't clear if they grew up here, and it's not known yet if they came from the city's ghetto. But if they did, that's not an excuse. Plenty of people grew up in the worst sections of their cities and turned out to be fine people.
Good people came from Kinston's east side and will continue to. The first example to come to mind is George Graham, chairman of the county's Board of Commissioners. So, it certainly isn't the city's fault that two evil men killed two people and wounded five others.
The family? The list of people who survived bad families to become successful, contributing human beings is too long to review. You know some of them, and so do I.
The community? That's an amorphous collection of such varied institutions and individuals that it's impossible to define.
Churches? Suggs and Jones took target practice in churches? They learned to deal drugs in the back pew while the preacher was extolling the virtues of a good life?
Or maybe the churches didn't have programs to entertain them. Could that be it? If so, who - or what - would have forced these guys to attend if they didn't want to?
That same councilman said our laws have to be tougher to prevent this type of violence. How? Which laws? The state and federal governments already have enough laws to choke a team of 20 horses. We need to enforce the laws we have. We need to get judges, juries and attorneys to understand that people who commit crimes are not victims. They're criminals, and we need to treat them that way.
We must stop mollycoddling lawbreakers. We must stop suspending sentences for all except the most minor infractions - like spitting on the street. We must stop plea-bargaining. Until we get serious about dealing with criminals, we'll just keep putting them back on the streets to ply their trade again.
And while we're at it, what about the five people who survived the shooting? They're not blameless either. They were at a house at 4 a.m. where criminal activity is known to occur. If they'd been home where most folks are at 4 a.m., they'd be OK today.
None of the nine people involved in the Friday morning affray is guiltless. But let's place the blame where it belongs - squarely on their shoulders. Not at the doorsteps of the city, the family, the community or the churches.
It's a rarely acknowledged trait called "personal responsibility."
Lee Raynor is editor of KinstonPress.com. She welcomes your comments at 361-7530, or at
leeraynor@kinstonpress.com.
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