Our neighborhood, thankfully, is among the safest in the city. Charlestown is an example of a wonderful place to live, to shop, to own businesses or to tour. And best of all, our neighborhood is on top of issues like gunplay, violence, drug and alcohol addiction and the plethora of issues which good neighborhoods must make efforts to keep under control.
There have been several deadly incidents here in recent months that point to the excessive danger presented by the illegal possession of guns. It also points to the break down of societal niceties among those who feel violence is the only way out of situations they find themselves in.
This is a danger zone for Charlestown and for every decent neighborhood.
Last weekend, Boston Police reported ten people shot and three people killed as a result of shootings in Dorchester and in Hyde Park. Two of the dead were women.
This type of pervasive gun violence in other neighborhoods has the potential to change all of our lives as violence can be so swift and indifferent about who it touches or where people are burdened by its presence.
Bottom line, we all must be heard about our views regarding gun violence and whether or not something can be done to make the accessibility to weapons more difficult or even impossible.
This is not an effort to overturn the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms. Rather, it is a call to have a more sobering look at the laws to see if new tools can be given to law enforcement to take gun violence down, to trim it, to end it if possible.
Ten people shot in two neighborhoods of Boston over one weekend, and two women dead as a result, is intolerable. It also reminds us how dangerous gun play can become and often does.
We owe it to ourselves and to our well-being and most of all to our collective safety to meet the demand of the growing gun violence that is changing all the rules of social behavior in cities across the land.
Ten shot and two left dead over the weekend in Boston is intolerable.
We are safe in Charlestown, but when are the shootings, the gun violence and the deaths going to stop?
And more importantly, what can be done to stop the tidal wave of violence?