![]() Circling back recently for interviews, I see the road that each man traveled across the ensuing years as emblematic of the country’s fault lines over gun violence and religion. ![]() I kept in touch with them as years passed. Their children attended the same private school, a few years apart, while the fathers worked against Duke his star sank after a gripping 1991 gubernatorial campaign. I got to know them in 1989 when David Duke, a closet Nazi, won election to the state legislature from a white suburb of New Orleans. Curran was a New Orleans political consultant years ago. Neil Curran, 80, is white, a semi-retired Evangelical minister for the Bible Church in metro Dallas. Larry Preston Williams Sr., 73, is African American, a retired security consultant and long-ago New Orleans police detective. Seeking a reference-frame on gun violence I got in touch with two seasoned sources from past political reporting, men from different backgrounds, each with a certain moral code that made me curious to get their slant on how America went wrong, and what it might take to regain a stronger culture of safety, a center that will hold. Police seized six weapons and later arrested males aged 49, 48, 18, and 15 on various charges. Greenwood, standing in the sunlight with her family. A bullet fired a city block away killed Mrs. Minutes later a shoot-out erupted outside. Augustine Greenwood, 80, a grandmother of 15, saw her youngest grandson receive his high school diploma at an auditorium on the Xavier University campus. The crime story most sickening to me came on May 30. Homicides are up 150 percent, with 145 murders as of July 5-the nation's highest murder rate per capita. New Orleans, where about a third of the 391,000 population lives in poverty, is plagued with crime. ![]() What will it really take to regain normality? For now, entering my neighborhood supermarket, I nod appreciatively to the security person realizing that s/he would likely fall to an intruder with an AK 47. Congress’s recent gun control law is a starter step. Most of us in that 58 percent, I suspect, believe that schools, churches, synagogues, malls, stores, and post offices can somehow be restored as safer sites without fear of a psychopath wielding an assault rifle. Yet 58 percent of households have no gun-a data point of hope amid the bloody tide of gun violence. So has the criminal violence in cities exploding since the pandemic hibernation. The cult of mass murders has jolted our moorings as a country, if not the very idea of America. ![]()
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