The sources of Denver's tragedy

Too many define manhood through violence

Published January 4, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Editorials

What makes someone spray a limousine with bullets even though he has no idea who might die? A "gun culture," answers The Denver Post, under the headline "Williams' murder a cowardly gun crime."

Suffice it to say that the murder of Darrent Williams would not have occurred, at least in the fashion it did, without a gun. But that fact in itself explains little. What is most horrifying about this crime was the killer's casual targeting of people he hardly knew or didn't know at all over what perhaps was a disagreement or a perceived slight - an example of "disrespect" that had to be avenged.

It may be "culture" at the bottom of this tragedy, all right - gangster culture. Criminal culture. Culture in which lethal violence is considered the accepted if not the anticipated response to, for example, a heated argument.

To be sure, we may discover that the killer or killers had a very different, specific reason to target the occupants of Williams' limousine. Police believe they have identified the shooters' vehicle; if so, the mystery of motive may soon be solved.

Yet whatever we eventually learn in that regard, the fact remains that a gangster sensibility glorifying mayhem has infected too many young men, particularly from disadvantaged neighborhoods. For evidence, you have only to listen to gangsta rap (which, we hasten to add, is only a segment of the far wider world of hip-hop music). Lyrics objectify women, demean civil authority, claim honest work and educational achievement are the province of suckers, and treat human life as disposable. Thuggery becomes the measure of one's manhood.

Unfortunately, respectable commentators have only encouraged such nihilism by elevating gangsta rap to an art form. It's called the legitimate "language of the street," rather than a celebration of amorality.

The critic Stanley Crouch has, correctly in our view, deemed the rise of gangsta rap "the elevation of pimps to cultural heroes."

What's different about the murder of Darrent Williams is that he was not an anonymous victim. He was not a young girl struck by a stray round of gunfire as she slept inside her home, or an innocent elderly resident gunned down on the streets. Their names we hear, and then quite naturally forget.

Williams was a football hero whose death will be remembered even by those who never met him. And cataloguing it as a "gun crime" does not begin to confront the source of a cultural calamity in which some shrug whenever a seemingly random act of violence extinguishes another innocent life.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News