Several years ago, on a summer workday, I got a call from the father of a student. He had recently gotten custody of his son, who I will call Deon, after Deon’s mother died from a bout with a particularly fast-acting cancer. 

He was asking if I could write a statement of character about Deon, who was soon to stand trial for shooting at a classmate of his.

I asked for more information, and learned that there was a pretty strong case. Dad had been at work, and insisted his son would never take the car without his permission, but the car used in the shooting matched his. Further, the description of the driver matched his son’s closest friend, another student at our school, who was also in custody. 

For two years we had struggled to help Deon succeed. We worked with him to do the best work he could do, which was at times very good. His teachers and other school staff created opportunities for him to develop valorization – helping him see the good things he had done at school and beyond, to feel a sense of accomplishment in who he was.

Yet from the beginning he was fragile, and seemed split between fitting in and acting out. He put on a tough persona, but teachers would observe him doing small acts of kindness for classmates. However, things at home, which had never been terrific, went downhill. As his mom’s illness grew worse, they suffered a break-in at the apartment, which seemed to completely shatter his sense of security. He became more erratic at school. He looked sleepier and thinner over time. As the son of a single mom myself, I recognized the look of a teenager who was trying to take responsibility for too much. His attention and behavior became less consistent and we faced an imbalance between schoolwork and the time he needed with a counselor.

At one point in his time with us, in a discussion with a teacher, he implied that he had a gun at home. Although he didn’t overtly threaten her with it, the context of the conversation made it impossible to take any other way. A suspension followed, a return-to-school conference with his mom, and assurances that he did not have access to a gun at home. Then followed more uneven instruction and behavior.

In short, I told the father I could write a statement for his son, but that it would reflect our disciplinary record and our personal experience with Deon. I told him it might not be all that helpful, especially because his son had been in an ongoing feud with the shooting victim. 

While I liked Deon and understood his personal struggles, I couldn’t be confident that he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, and I was not willing to say to the court something that wasn’t true.

I also didn’t tell Dad that the shooting had happened on my street. That I knew the man walking the dog who witnessed the shooting, and the woman whose leaded glass door and grandfather clock were shattered by one of the bullets. I didn’t tell him that my son, home alone, called me in a panic at the shooting and the squealing tires. That this shooting had traumatized a whole street, as shootings always do.

I knew that someone – probably Deon, with his friend driving his Dad’s car – had fired five shots that missed his classmate but pierced a sense of security in my neighborhood. The fact that he missed his target, from apparently fairly close range, at least gave me hope. His heart didn’t seem to be in it for murder. 

I couldn’t defend the action. But I could start to explain it.

A tapestry of causes

This shooting didn’t happen because of a gun.

Also, if there was not a gun present, there would have been no shooting.

So often the discussion of gun violence breaks down into these two facts. Defenders of gun rights often dismiss the second fact as irrelevant, as the pandora’s box has been opened, and guns are essentially everywhere in the United States.

There is merit to this argument. However quickly America’s police can confiscate the thousands of guns used by criminals each year, America’s gun manufacturers replace them. Gun sales have increased every year for many years. Gun proliferation is simply a fact of American life.

In reality, there are countries that have as many guns (by percentage) as the United States but do not have the high murder rate. Well, there is one. 

Finland has roughly 35% gun ownership, much like the United States. But there are two important differences between Finland and the US. First is the type of gun people own. The vast majority of American guns are handguns, whereas in Finland the vast preponderance of guns are rifles. Second is the economic differences between upper and lower class. In Finland, there are heavy economic regulations and there are even some industries run entirely by the government.

Finland has a child poverty rate of about 4%. In the U.S., in contrast, over 16% of children live in poverty.  

Poverty, and child poverty in particular, is the root of many of the preventable murders in the US each year.

This helps explain why, in conversations with hundreds of people in Cincinnati about reducing gun violence, no one proposed new legislation restricting gun ownership or gun accessories. Their responses, collected in the 2020 Neighborhoods United Cincinnati Gun Violence Prevention Plan, indicated that people believe gun violence comes largely from desperation and unequal access to opportunity. People living in communities beset by gun violence don’t think gun restrictions would change anything. But they know that equal opportunity would.

Missed chances to intervene

Deon arrived at my school with signs that were concerning. He was not especially interested in school, and was fascinated with looking like and dressing like and hanging around the toughest boys in school. His grades, his behavior, and even his life circumstances gave us many points at which we could have intervened. However, his parents’ resources and the supports available to him through the social safety net were not up to the task.

He challenged his teachers and misbehaved in class.

The best teachers know that acting out is a sign of poor skills, and a cover-up. The student who acts out most of the time often selectively responds to a question when he knows the answer. His teacher might inaccurately label him a “smart kid,” and reason that his misbehavior is causing his poor grades. In fact, this student acts out to hide his inadequacies. However, with this affirmation from the teacher, the student can then act out further and avoid the kind of academic intervention needed to allow him to accomplish educational growth and grade-level standards.

He threatened his teacher. 

A student who is worried about letting down his parent will say or do whatever he can in the moment to prevent a reckoning. This does not excuse those behaviors, and they deserve a consequence. But it is also a time when we should be able to intervene with student. We should be able to bring in leaders from the community with his parent(s) who can – among other things – help make sure he doesn’t have access to the gun he claimed to own. 

Suspension is a poor tool to use for any student who doesn’t feel connected to school and his teachers. Sending someone away doesn’t improve their connection. Returning from a suspension can be fraught with problems, and needs to be handled gently and intentionally. 

Prevention must come long before our young men and women commit unthinkable acts of violence against each other.

His mother was sick, and dying.

Certainly this fact alone merited intensive intervention from the school counseling staff. Ideally this could be paired with family counseling and grief counseling, given his mother’s diagnosis. In this and other cases, though, parents make the same fateful choice that Deon’s mom did: she hid the seriousness of her illness from him. Or, actually, she thought she did. After a couple of conferences and conversations, it was clear that Deon knew she was dying, and was grappling with this fact along with all the other troubles of adolescence. They were both grieving in their way, and needed mental health counseling to deal with the weight of their situation.

His household experienced a break-in.

Break-ins are traumatic. They undermine our sense of safety and security. Many Americans choose to move after a break-in, simply because their security in that place can never be restored. Continuing anger, fear, sleeplessness, and extreme vigilance are common after a home has been burglarized. 

It is also possible that Deon felt responsible for the break-in on several levels. First, as the adolescent oldest son of a single mom, he was told that he was the “man of the house” while lacking of the age, wisdom, authority, and decision-making capacity for really entering into that role. Second, if he was involved in illegal activities, he brought money, marijuana, drugs, weapons or other contraband into the house, making their house a target. His friends and enemies would have known about it. Deon might know what happened and be unable to tell his mom or the police because he feared a consequence himself. And now he felt responsible for violating his mother’s sense of security. 

He grew up in poverty

Deon’s mother expressed many of the same problems as other parents at our school. She often relied on a mix of public and private transportation, struggling to keep her car in good repair. As a caregiver, her work hours were inconsistent, entirely shifting every couple of weeks. 

Her economic struggles meant she had less access to resources like youth groups, sports, and enrichment activities. It is in these sorts of places that middle class children build trusted relationships, develop a sense of accomplishment and self-worth, and wonder about the world around them. 

Poverty in a society that promotes ownership and materialism, can create a desperation in an impressionable child. When you watch your parent struggle and not seem to get ahead, other alternatives look more attractive. These alternatives include crime.

We know that divorce makes poverty worse for women (and marriage, at least among many Black families, does not provide material tax benefits) and poverty likely contributed to the estrangement between his parents. This meant that Deon’s dad, employed, was not close with his son, and he was going to take custody of Deon at the most fraught and challenging point in Deon’s life – as he was struggling in school and dealing with his mother’s death.

All of these poverty-related issues came to bear on Deon’s situation.

The legal system is designed for punishment, not prevention

Instead of these interventions, however, Deon found himself tied up in the legal system. Through interminable jail time, inconsistent access to education while in the system, and other burdens, there was little opportunity for him to redirect himself.

Despite his father’s interventions on his behalf, and perhaps related to my own and others’ reluctance to defend him, he didn’t get the help he needed.

Even with the heroic efforts of defense attorneys and judges in every municipality to provide resources and diversion for young offenders, the court system arrives too ill-equipped and too late to offer meaningful intervention.

The legal system is built to offer consequences. To offer a final verdict and remedy.

As an intervention tool, it is desultory. There is no overarching plan or vision for using the legal system for this purpose. Those people who work in the system to create safety nets and diversions are heroic not merely for caring for the people who come through the courts, but for pushing against a machine that exists as the result of failed prevention.

Prevention must come long before our young men and women commit unthinkable acts of violence against each other.

Three years after this conversation, Deon was the driver in a car whose occupants sprayed bullets from multiple guns into a house, seriously injuring a pre-teen girl. He was indicted for multiple counts of felonious assault. 

The shooting certainly disrupted the sense of safety that the children and adults who were present should have felt in their home. We have no idea how their fear will shape their futures. How will this impact their schooling? Will they ever feel safe again? Will they turn to violence to gain a feeling of control over their situation?

It is fair to say that our interventions failed. We will continue to fail until we make a substantive change in the massive wealth gap in our society. We are past the time where any other single solution will solve this problem.