Kill The Drug Dealers*

On the road between the main drag through the city (my the city) and one particular subdivision, there is an apartment complex. Driving down that road earlier today, I saw someone with a prison and rap video-inspired culturally significant wardrobe pacing the sidewalk in front of the complex. He was probably doing something perfectly innocuous, but I had still had one of those flash-thoughts that lasts a fraction of a second but conveys an impression of a complete concept.

Say this guy is a crack dealer. I mean, not "allegedly" a crack dealer, this dude IS a crack dealer. You have seen with your own eye, him exchange cash for stones, repeatedly. You have called the police repeatedly, and he always disappears when they come around.

There is a street full of houses with fenced back yards, beginning a couple hundred yards away from where this guy was walking. Whoever lives there, it's a guarantee that they are not home 100% of the time when your buddy the crack dealer is "working."

All it would take is 150 grain of copper-jacketed lead, and this cat is no longer a crack dealer. The police show up, and he is either holding a pocket-full each of crack and cash, or his pockets have been turned out. Drug related shooting. Unsolved murder. Everybody in the local 5-0 shrugs his shoulders and says "good riddance to bad rubbish." His momma and sisters wail about how he was "a good boy" and "my baby ain't no druuug diller!"

I know you don't have to pass an IQ test to sell drugs, but surely if a few low-level pushers shuffled off their mortal coils in the same spot, they would stop selling in that spot, no?

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*I do not condone, advocate, or recommend, the killing of anybody without due process of law. This was just a thought that flashed through my mind as I was driving down the road today. Also, a tree falling in the woods makes no noise if no one heard it.