Three dead and nine wounded. That was the dramatic toll of the shooting that took place Sunday night in a Brooklyn nightclub. One person found dead there, two others died in the hospital, the victims are 19, 27 and 35 years old, basically all young men. Forty-two shell casings found, from various weapons, four possible perpetrators already identified. The news cannot be dismissed as generic violence in a big city like New York, cannot be dismissed with the usual slogan “gang war.” In fact, the city’s mayor, Adams, and the Big Apple’s police chief, Jessica Tisch, have already intervened. Every effort is now being made to avoid retaliation and revenge, resorting not only to classic repression, let’s say, but also to the mediation of friends, family and religious figures, so important in the social fabric of Brooklyn.
The last time I was in New York, on my way to the airport I calmly reviewed all the American movies of my life. Because there was traffic on the main artery, the cab driver took an alternative, long, slow ride through the narrow streets of a piece of the city’s history. Small, low, colorful houses, boys sitting on the stairs talking, in twos, fours, sixes, and every two hundred meters a church or religious building with various inscriptions and titles, but with Christ always the protagonist.
In sociological terms, there is concern on the part of the authorities, because other dramatic incidents of violence have already occurred in recent times. All different and all with different explanations: sometimes youth aggregations, sometimes individual craziness, people who went into an office and killed by shooting four people. I have analyzed many times in my crime programs the phenomenon of mass murderers, technically those who kill as many people as possible in the same space-time context. While in serial killers the motivations are often traceable to the affective and sexual sphere, in the above case the deprivation is social, often economic or labor, or loneliness from lack of social integration. A very American phenomenon, little European, very little Italian.
And even in the canonical set-up of youth gang violence, the difference is all there, beyond contextual differences. That is, the easy, too easy, use of guns. Over here, analysts are trying to figure out why there is no longer a group of, shall we say deviant, teenagers who leave the house without a knife, in New York they shoot each other. It is an old problem that we European journalists crystallized with the Columbine High School massacre. It was 1999 and little has changed, and time has been there for everyone, Republican and Democrat. Just as well, at least we avoid someone casting an unnecessary first stone.
The article Brooklyn, outside night comes from TheNewyorker.
