The mindless murder of a Brooklyn mother on a Brownsville street last Friday should teach a little humility to critics of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk effort to cleanse the city of illegal guns.
But it won’t — even though stop-and-frisk saves lives, and even though no other practical anti-gun policy exists.
The victim — Zurana Horton, 34, a mother of 12 — was shot down as she picked up her kids from school; another mother and a child were wounded.
Scores of people, mostly children, were in the line of fire when a gunman on a nearby roof opened fire. Horton “was seen moments before she was shot, hovering over several children to protect them,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
But horrifyingly tragic as Horton’s death was, in the end it represented just one more firearms fatality in a city that absorbs hundreds of them every year.
Shootings, sad to say, are up this year — from 1,451 to 1,484, through Oct. 16.
During a brutal eight-day stretch ending on Labor Day, a stunning 112 people were shot (67 over the three-day holiday weekend alone) — leaving 25 dead.
Since then, there have been 285 shootings, resulting in 48 deaths.
Brownsville in particular is a murder hot-spot; residents there live in daily fear of gang warfare: “I pray every day that bullets don’t fly through my window,” one resident told The Post.
That recalls the Dinkins-era crack wars, when mothers put their kids to bed in bathtubs for fear of bullets coming through walls in the dead of night.
Indeed, it’s enough to cause wonder whether those days are returning.
What’s to be done?
Not a lot can be done.
Calls for tougher national gun laws amount to hot air. Besides, the streets are already saturated with illegal handguns.
That leaves aggressive street-crime policing — by no means a perfect solution, but a proven tool for reducing gun violence.
Stop-and-frisk is an integral part of it. Some 8,085 weapons, including 814 firearms, were taken off the streets last year by stop-and-frisk cops.
Think of that, potentially, as 814 fewer murders — even if those whose lives the program saved will never know it, and thus never will be able to testify on behalf of the program.
But critics abound.
Because, overwhelmingly, those stopped were — and are — minorities, the usual suspects condemn the program as racist.
But so are the victims mostly minorities.
Firebrand City Councilman Charles Barron over the weekend demanded that guns be kept out of minority neighborhoods — but he repeatedly slams the only effective means of doing that: stop-and-frisk.
“The police need to get a brand-new assignment, rather than harassing young black and Latino males,” he said last month.
Meanwhile, on the very day Horton was shot, protesters, including leftist Professor Cornel West, were rallying in Harlem against stop-and-frisk. West railed against “arbitrary police power.”
No doubt, Zurana Horton and her now-motherless 12 kids would have wished for a bit more of that “arbitrary police power.”
Again, stop-and-frisk is no panacea.
Do such stops encroach on civil liberties?
Perhaps. But Horton lost the most important civil liberty of all — the right to life.
That should count for something, too.