OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Two of the wisest sages of all time — Mark Twain and Jesus Christ himself — spoke memorably about the dangers of worrisome do-gooders run amok.
Indeed, it is the curse of do-gooders the world over to find fault in everyone except themselves. And they usually do great harm when they “fix” things that usually are not broken — all in the odious name of self-righteousness.
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits,” Twain observed.
And in the Sermon on the Mount, it was Jesus — a famous carpenter, among other things — who warned that do-gooders would be much more righteous and less of a nuisance if they would first remove the plank of lumber from their own eye before going about removing the speck of sawdust from another’s eye.
All of which brings us to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a heinous — but avoidable — crime in Brooklyn on Easter Sunday.
A man named Nakwon Foxworth, according to police, was returning to his apartment late Saturday night with his pregnant girlfriend and their small son, whom Mr. Foxworth, 33, was pushing in a baby stroller.
Upon encountering an obstacle that furniture movers had placed to hold the door open, Mr. Foxworth became enraged and, instead of going around the obstacle or removing it, began ramming the stroller carrying his precious future into the obstacle.
Then he produced a 9 mm handgun and began furiously waving it at the offending furniture movers. When one of them retreated to call police, Mr. Foxworth dumped the handgun into his son’s stroller, went inside and retired to his apartment.
When police arrived, Mr. Foxworth opened fire and hit four police officers before being shot in the abdomen.
In addition to the 9 mm, police recovered two other firearms.
The miscreant, according to reports, had been convicted previously of attempted murder and imprisoned for two years and later had pulled other stints behind bars for robbery and weapons possession. It is safe to say that nowhere in the civilized world would this hopeless goon be allowed to possess a firearm of any type.
Enter Mr. Bloomberg. Too many people on his streets have guns, he said. Check.
Sunday’s shootout was the second in 24 hours for New York City. Check.
But, ever the do-gooder, Mr. Bloomberg could not help himself and launched into his old saw about blaming the unacceptable violence in his city on the right to bear arms in the vast swaths of America that don’t have Mr. Bloomberg’s problems with mayhem.
“All the shootings have a common disgraceful fact in common,” he whined. “All were committed with illegal guns that came from out of state.”
North Carolina was pointed out by name as the state blamed for the illegal purchase of the 9 mm handgun. Of course, selling a weapon to a felon is illegal already, and if that happened in North Carolina, the state shares some portion of the blame.
But that is hardly the place to start if your city has just had two shootouts in 24 hours. Perhaps there should be less emphasis on laws prohibiting law-abiding citizens who live in fear of violence from obtaining guns and greater emphasis on rounding up illegal guns from felonious thugs who should not have them under any circumstances.
No, Mayor Bloomberg, you do not have a gun problem in North Carolina. You have a thug problem in Brooklyn. And, even more of a grave blight on your record, you have a problem enforcing your own existing laws.
Quite the plank of lumber to remove before worrying about specks of sawdust in North Carolina.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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