Bridging the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’

Michael Clifford (Analysis, Feb 17) poses some salient questions in his sortie into serious gun and gangland crime.

He identifies elements of statutory avoidance, social duplicity and poverty gamesmanship perpetrated with relentless abandon by most of “us”, not “them”.

Clifford promotes the avoidance of such an “us and them” deepening divide. Fingering the paltry resort to new law-making as a totally inadequate response, he hammers home the point thus: “In a world of bling, where the individual was raised above any notion of the collective, it would have taken too much societal self-analysis to wonder why teenagers could transmogrify into depraved killers.”