The blame game

"Department puts teens at risk on D.C. mean streets"

Uuuuhm, no. That is the subtitle to this article in the Washington Times on how screwed up teens and young adults buy/sell/do drugs and murder one another. I'm sorry, but you cannot blame government for the actions of crazy people.

That agency, despite all its problems, did all that it could to show this man - 19 year old individual: man - that there was life outside of DC ghettos, and sent him to a wonderful neighborhood out of state for two frickin' years to figure himself out. I don't see the connection here on how a DC government agency is destroying lives; if you are 19 years old, you are responsible for getting a hold of yourself and making your way through life without selling crack and ambushing armed drug dealers in seedy alleys.

Yeah, government agencies countrywide are not known as being bastions of efficiency or sensibility, but it seems that this particular agency did this scumbag a solid by sending him to a lovely academy so that he could play sports without being shot at. What the author, Mr. Anderson, is suggesting is that the agency condemned this man to die because they didn't finance his vacation permanently, and instead released him "arbitrar[ily]" on his own recognizance to make adult choices and do his own thing. That his own thing consisted of selling drugs and running from the cops is nobody's fault but his own.

Check this out:

Older teenagers pose the most significant challenges, he added, because group homes won't take them and they cannot be forced to go to school. "They age out," he said. "It's a programming failure. If we miss the opportunity to connect with them when they are 15 or younger, it's harder to get through to them later."

Get that? They "age out," which seems to me to be the point where they are supposed to transition from being a juvenile to an adult, but is suggested here as being the point where government doesn't grab ahold of both of their hands and make them not kill people. And that transition stage of adulthood is no longer a natural stage, it's a "programming failure." Someone needs to tell the Lord to stop screwing these kids up with all these awkward stages and stuff.

To recap, Chicquelo's mother, who allegedly gave birth to him before she reached the programming failure stage, has lived in a dangerous ghetto in DC for probably her whole life, and has no responsibility whatsoever from the author's perspective in her son growing up a violent, wannabe, drug dealing gangster, and a never heard of DC agency is to blame for not financing a fantasy life for an adult with a long criminal history. I'm starting to put it all together now.

See, DC should be like one great big-ass game of The Sims, with some responsible individual constantly overseeing someone of questionable scruples. Who cares how that's gonna be paid for; we're talking about making people make better choices, like choosing to go to Lowes and apply for a job instead of shooting heroin and smoking cigarettes on the porch all day. Common sense stuff.

Think about how 24/7 oversight could have prevented this scenario:

The police affidavit states the bullet that killed Chicquelo was fired in self-defense, and the youth who fired the shot, who had charges pending against him and was under a court warning against possessing a gun, was not charged.

Maybe if the scumbag who killed Chicquelo in unlawful self defense had simply been placed in a beautiful town in Wisconsin for his prior felonious acts, for several years, he would have a scholarship to Yale instead of a ticket to prison. Let's not worry our pretty little heads over the court putting a warning out against him for being an armed scumbag instead of locking him up for being a threat to society; all of these choir boys are victims, can't you see? We can't be locking up victims!

Yikes. It's apparent that Mr. Anderson believes in glad handing scumbags, instead of placing them behind bars. I say give them one chance and one chance only to not be a heathen, and then slam them in prison for the rest of their lives if they decide to keep hurting people.