Reply #49: Ooh, you've found my current favorite rant button on the subject

[Posteritatis]

The usual response in your situation by people waving the fear signs around is to talk about those adults as though they're half their current age or less, because everyone always likes unreasonable attacks on kids who, as we all know, are More Evil Than Ever these days and a monolithic group of troublemakers who don't have any rights despite what law and the judiciary says at length.

For provoking me into giving forth on this subject, you shall receive an example:

There's this laughable parody of a gang war going on in my city, on and off for the last couple years.

Well, sort of in the city - so far out along one of the less populated edges that the neighborhoods in question might as well be rural half the time. I say 'laughable parody' because it's extraordinarily inept: there's more gunplay than I'm comfortable with, but it's all resulted in one guy, one of the gang leaders, getting lightly wounded several times, with most of the rest of the incidents missing the very planet the shooters stood on.

It's also a 'laughable parody' because one group of these wannabe gangster types call themselves the Mob despite the fact that they're wifebeater-wearing meth peddlers at worst most of the time. Oh yeah, and the youngest among them that I know of is in his mid-thirties, with the rest being closer to the guys' parents' ages.

Obviously something like that actually is a genuine problem. It's been absorbing a lot of the police attention for the last few years and utterly rightly so. But anyone with even a little bit of an attention span who's heard about it - and with the howling across the local news the only way one couldn't hear about the situation is if they're already dead - knows that it's largely being perpetrated by a bunch of middle-aged people swinging on each other in what's basically a family feud with a little meth and lot of really bad aim added in.

Fast-forward to our recent provincial election last summer, one of those really wonderful ones that makes the franchise feel actually worth it because all three major parties went in with a decent shot at winning. (I have political issues with my province, but looking at the returns in most elections you can see that everyone's vote counts, with ridings mostly being tightly contested and won by some pretty thin margins at times. It's great.) The Conservatives weren't in the best of shape during the campaign, because their being defeated on a budget bill is what brought about the election in the first place. Conservative party in politically shaky straits, so they do the same thing Republicans do in the US - start a campaign based mainly on fear and attack ads.

The attack ads were largely a joke, ineptly done, cases of pots calling kettles black at the best of times, and culminating in the Conservative leader accusing the NDP leader of being a car thief during a debate a couple of days before the final vote. The fear stuff, however, was a pretty constant barrage of scared-senior howling focusing on Kids These Days And Why They Must Be Stopped. They very heavily invoked the debacle going on in Spryfield, suggested it was a provincewide problem of terrible severity - it isn't - and, as one immediate solution, promised that if elected they would enact a curfew on all minors provincewide and fine their parents thousands of dollars if they were caught out after it. To stop the thirty-, forty- and fiftysomethings from shooting at each other, you see.

Unusually for that sort of thing, people actually saw through it and the election, uh, was not the Conservatives' best showing ever to say the least. The fact that they even tried, and that at least some people took it seriously, though? Ugh.