CARLTON FLETCHER: Violent tendencies learned … often at home

Children learn what they live. Children live what they learn.

— Les Crane

Another young Albany man was shot dead in the prime of his life Sunday, Anthony Wright becoming the eighth victim of lethal violence in the city this year.

Shortly after Wright was shot and his accused slayer, Darius Ricardo Williams, captured, I heard this lament from one of the folks around here who seems to lament everything that happens: When are our police going to get out of the doughnut shop and do something?

(Clever touch, by the way, throwing in that old cliche about cops and doughnut shops. I think you’re the first person to come up with that one. Congrats.)

I hate, foremost, that another young Albany man lost his life in what was apparently, according to Albany Police Department Chief Michael Persley, a domestic issue that got out of hand. I hate it for his family and friends, and I hate it that the place we call home is becoming more and more a place of violence.

But I don’t quite get how we as a community keep laying the blame on our law enforcement agencies. Their job description is to “serve and protect,” not to perform feats of magic. If even one of the men or women on the police force could know in advance when violence was apt to break out — a la Tom Cruise and the “precogs” in “Minority Report” — our murder rate would drop to around zero.

But real life ain’t the movies.

Some who seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure in demeaning the men and women in blue at any opportunity — except, of course, when they need them — have said, “Our city leaders need to quit wasting our tax dollars and get more police on the streets.”

Certainly we could always use more officers patrolling the streets of our community, but until we get to the point where we can afford to put three shifts of cops in every home, business and vacant lot — to serve, protect and babysit — there’s no humanly way to impact crimes of passion such as the ones that have cost Wright and seven others in the city their lives this year.

And, yes, it would be easy enough to lay the blame for this growing rash of gun violence in Albany, Chicago and other American cities on our apparently never-ending desire to see even the most lax gun control laws wiped off the books. Never mind that individuals are more likely to get shot in America than they are in some of the world’s hottest war zones, just leave our guns alone.

(I honestly heard a guy who is part of a militia group say in a documentary I watched Sunday night, “It is my constitutional right to own an automatic weapon with no restrictions on the (number of bullets in the) magazine.” With state and national politicians taking tens of millions of dollars from the NRA — including, reportedly, $30 million given to the current president’s campaign — there appears to be no massacre too great to suggest gun violence has gotten out of hand.)

Yes, it would be easy to lay the blame on America’s gun lust, but the real truth lies in American homes. Parents allow their children to buy into the violent culture of gangs, gangsters and vigilantism through a steady bombardment that glorifies that culture — in movies, TV shows, music, video games. Then, when junior and his friends attempt to re-enact the scenes he’s been inundated with since he was able to press a button on a TV screen or turn on a stereo, these same parents blame “society” for their offspring’s anti-social and even violent behavior.

As children age, they’re eventually going to make their own decisions in life. And no parent, no matter how well he or she has raised his or her children, can live their children’s lives for them once they’ve reach the age and maturity level to make their own decisions. But the majority of kids are going to live their lives as adults based on the things they learned growing up.

Sadly, a lot of the violence that has become an epidemic in our country is the direct results of that upbringing.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.