A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count the number of times my family and I were on that train, at that station, during the forty years we lived in Brooklyn before Nina and I sold the house and moved out in 2021.)
This happened as the city moves gradually toward martial law, with National Guard troops deployed to the subways to search peoples’ bags. I noted a week ago that this was not likely to be effective:
Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person?
Forgive me if this seems radical, but I’m starting to think that it simply isn’t enough just to make violent crime illegal. I’m beginning to believe that to solve the problem, it needs to be frowned upon.
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The Kate Steinle case suggests that violent crime is not illegal, at least not always.